Description
This article feeds into contemporary interdisciplinary debates about emotions, politics, and society and collective trauma and memory by investigating the politics of feeling/not feeling COVID-19 and what is at stake therein though the case of United Kingdom (UK) national (un)commemoration planning and delivery focusing on contests challenging and indeed working to (re)shape commemorative efforts through 2020-2021. Using mixed methods including digital and ‘real life’ observational and participatory ethnography combined with critical discourse analysis conducted 2020-2021 this article highlights the prevalence and height of ‘atmospheric walls’ working to segment British society along increasingly entrenched classed, gendered, and raced lines during and following the pandemic’s UK peak paying particular attention to particularities of the COVID-19 pandemic and unintended consequences of not only the ambiguous losses of the pandemic dead but the living population increasingly losing touch with one another during this period.
