Description
This article contributes to knowledge on emotional politics and the politics of national commemoration in the context of the COVID-19 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 and heightening 'atmospheric walls' within British society have (mis)informed and are reflected in the physical and virtual construction of the self-proclaimed ‘National’ memorial wall appearing in London and online in spring 2021. Within a context defined by competitive victimhood and commemorative crowding which come to define ‘post’-pandemic society and make for fraught commemorative processes that ought to be approached by Governments’ with specific sensitivity, this paper argues that rather than opening up space within which to make victims of the pandemic visible and amplify marginalised voices and grief, the Wall maintains 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 emotional politics and pandemic (mis)management.
