IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/envirc/v43y2025i2p307-325.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Politicising Space, (In)visibilising Grief: Pandemic commemoration and the UK’s “National COVID Memorial Wallâ€

Author

Listed:
  • Kandida Purnell

Abstract

This article contributes to knowledge on 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’ in its material and digital manifestations. Questioning how the Wall functions socially and politically as a site of ‘national’ COVID-19 commemoration and using a combination of participatory in person and digital ethnographies, this article demonstrates how the Wall at once politicises public space while simultaneously serving to reinforce existing inequalities and patterns of (in)visibility while inadvertently overing the pandemic through its timing. While appraising the politics and space of the Wall in London and its digital version, this article highlights how inequalities exacerbated through the pandemic have (mis)informed and are reflected in the physical and virtual construction of the self-proclaimed ‘national’ COVID-19 memorial. 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 article argues that the Wall politicises and opens up space within which previously contained grief becomes visible and felt while being limited in its capacity to make particular victims of the pandemic visible and thus to amplify marginalised and contained voices and grief.

Suggested Citation

  • Kandida Purnell, 2025. "Politicising Space, (In)visibilising Grief: Pandemic commemoration and the UK’s “National COVID Memorial Wallâ€," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 43(2), pages 307-325, March.
  • Handle: RePEc:sae:envirc:v:43:y:2025:i:2:p:307-325
    DOI: 10.1177/23996544241269226
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23996544241269226
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/23996544241269226?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:envirc:v:43:y:2025:i:2:p:307-325. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.