Description
Three years into the pandemic and over 5 million deaths later, the COVID19 pandemic has, arguably, passed from a stage of uncertainty and emergency response to recovery. As part of this recovery, we are also moving into the active collective memory formation phase of the pandemic. Past pandemics have either faded from collective memory or been commemorated in overtly apolitical, predominantly “private” ways. This paper interrogates the forming collective memories and commemorative practices in response to the COVID19 pandemic. In doing so, we advance a theoretical framework drawn from literature on transitional justice and politics of memory which examines the linkages between the conceptualisation of the event's nature (e.g. its causes and harms), the politics of accountability (the question of who is responsible), and the practices of collective commemoration. We suggest that the past elision of pandemic deaths – and challenges to commemorating COVID19 in the present – is not solely attributable to the diffuse temporality and seeming “naturalness” of global public health challenges. Using the illustrative example of the UK's commemorative practices on the COVID19 pandemic, rather, we argue that the transnational nature of pandemics, and COVID19 in particular,
poses obstacles to the formation of collective memory. We therefore suggest that nationalised struggles for commemoration and recognition are about making a transnational phenomenon sensible, and manageable which provides a constitutive groundwork for leveraging political claims of accountability within the existing statist political order.
