Description
This article contributes to knowledge on the contemporary politics of national commemoration – especially within the ongoing pandemic - by exploring the case of the United Kingdom (UK) and the ‘National COVID Memorial Wall.’ Using a combination of participatory in person and digital ethnographies, this article demonstrates how inequalities exacerbated through the pandemic have (mis)informed and are reflected in the physical and virtual construction of the self-proclaimed ‘National’ memorial appearing in London and online in spring 2021 within a context defined by competitive narratives of victimhood and commemorative crowding which come to define pandemic and ‘post’-pandemic society and make for anxious commemorative processes that ought to be approached by Governments’ with specific sensitivity. Crucially, as a warning to other communities and nations embarking on COVID-19 commemoration, this article argues that rather than opening up space within which to make victims of the pandemic visible and amplify marginalised voices and grief, the Wall is exclusive, exploitative, and effacing - maintaining normalised raced, classed, and gendered patterns of (in)visibility and inequality by fore-fronting the vision and aspirations of a privileged few - reflecting rather than disrupting contemporary UK politics and pandemic (mis)management by pushing towards the close of an ongoing disaster.
