Editorial: Remembering the 2005 London bombings: Media, memory, commemoration

Abstract

began like any other day in London, with millions of people making their routine commute into the English capital. Many of them would have read newspapers en route, perhaps learning about the city's success in its bid for the 2012 Olympics, announced the previous evening, or absorbing details of the G8 summit in Scotland. But these events would soon be displaced from the news agenda, for among the hoards of commuters travelling across London were four suicide bombers. At 8:50 am, a series of three coordinated explosions devastated the city's transport network. Fifty-seven minutes later, with considerable confusion still surrounding the three bombs, a fourth detonation was triggered on a bus, the impact of the blast blowing the roof off the vehicle. The fourth explosion confirmed the worst fears: this was not an electrical failure or gas explosion but a coordinated terror attack. Fifty-six lives were lost, including those of the four perpetrators, more than seven hundred people were injured, and the wider intimate reverberations are beyond quantification. As such, the devastation of the attacks -later dubbed '7/7' -was unprecedented. Not only was it the deadliest act of terrorism the UK has suffered since the Lockerbie attack in 1988, it was also the first suicide bombing to occur in western Europe in the wake of the so-called 'War on Terror'.Six years on from the attacks, the legacy of the bombings continues to loom large. As we write, the coroner's inquests into the blasts, overseen by Lady Justice Hallett, are in progress. Numerous facets of the political context in which the atrocity took place remain highly topical, including the war in Afghanistan, the British coalition with the USA, foreign policy, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, neo-imperialism, Islam, secularism, extremism and conservativism, and capitalist exchange relations. In such circumstances, how do we go about remembering 7/7? Which aspects of the tragedy -at once an attack on a capital city, on the UK, on 'the West'-are remembered, and why? What practices and forms are employed as means of commemorating the bombings? And what can all this tell us about the nature of contemporary remembrance?Memory Studies 4(3) 263-268

Collective memory and social imaginaries of the epidemic situation in COVID-19—based on the qualitative research of college students in Wuhan, China

“…Public disasters seem to play an important role in collective memory research, which is no surprise given that they affect many people and are typically commemorated through remembrance services. For instance, "memorial mania" (Doss, 2012) is a feature of memory research, which is related to wars, conflicts, and disasters, such as the genocide in Rwanda (Ibreck, 2010), Hurricane Katrina (Robinson, 2009) and the London bombings (Allen and Bryan, 2011).…”

Undecided life: Standards, subjects, and sovereignty in compensating victims of the war on terror

“…Strand 2, which supplied the data presented here, concentrated on gathering ethnographic material to illustrate how remembering the bombings collected social relations. In December, 2010, the project conclusions were presented at a one-day symposium in Nottingham 4 , in 2011 a special issue of Memory Studies delivered the project findings (see, Allen and Bryan 2011). It was intended that both strands of data gathering would be mutually supportive.…”