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Faculty Member, College of Social Sciences
University of Leicester, School of Management
Research assistant
University of Glasgow
Thesis Title: Commemoration, organization and the 2005 London bombings
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Professor Steve Brown
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About
I'm interested in memory-in-organization. My recent research on memory and the 2005 London bombings investigates the organization of commemorative events and explores the relationship between care and labour.
My work identifies a professionalization of commemoration, and commemorative work, that is co-present, and in certain ways supersedes, the pervasive tradition of imitating ritual and symbolic practices such as holding mass silences.
Drawing on data collected during interviews with commemoration organizers and participants, this research details a series of emergent commemorative activities that followed the bombings, such as the participation of profoundly disabled survivors in walks for peace, the constitution of a memorial eye clinic in India, memorial websites, Nitin Sawhney’s album London Undersound and the July 7th memorial in Hyde Park. The data illustrates how these remembrance occasions depart from more traditional methods for memorialisation by emphasising the participants embodied and affective relation to the unfolding commemorative events.
An important common point of departure for these remembrance occasions was the mediatisation of participant/organizer’s bodies, e.g. the wounded survivor body, that is juxtaposed to the specific remembrance context, e.g. a peace walk, which consequently infuses the event with moral and affective content indexed at the level of the bodies that enact the commemoration rather than the signs and symbols that have traditionally coded them. Organizing commemoration around bodies marks a significant shift in remembrance practices that have traditionally centred around materially composed effigies or symbols – as Patricia Clough suggests ‘it is the body that becomes the memorial’.
Moreover, the work involved in establishing and supporting these organized remembrances also marks them apart from traditional forms of commemoration. The practices described above require a great deal of precarious, often voluntary, immaterial, affective and expert labour. Research participants described how their involvement in organizing 7/7 commemoration “took over their lives” and how they quickly needed to learn new expertise, such as managing media relations and appearances, producing digital media, and negotiating financial and legal frameworks.
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