Public grief and the politics of memorial Contesting the memory of ‘the shooters’ at Columbine High School

Pictures That Save, Pictures That Soothe: Photographs at the Grassroots Memorials to the Victims of theMarch 11, 2004MadridBombings

“…Spontaneous shrines and memorials of this type, displaying popular reactions to traumatic deaths, whether at the collective or the individual scale, have become widespread in recent decades (Margry and Sánchez‐Carretero ; Santino ). A well‐known case occurred after Princess Diana's death (Kear and Steinberg ; Walter ), but improvised memorials also appeared after other, quite different situations: the Oklahoma bombing (Grider ), the Columbine High School massacre (Grider ), the death of Pope John Paul II (Klekot ), and the shooting at Virginia Tech University (Grider ; Margry and Sánchez‐Carretero ). Roadside memorials to victims of car accidents are another variety of this phenomenon, with the same strong component of grassroots community activism (Clark ).…”

Imagining globalised fears: school shooting videos and circulation of violence on YouTube

“…Here, grief and compassion were circulated from one video to the other containing and following logic consistent with all the four school shootings (cf. Grider 2007).…”

Memory of places and places of memory: for a Halbwachsian socio‐ethnography of collective memory

“…The transfiguration of a place through what we have called “memorialisation” usually corresponds to the accumulation on that site of bouquets of flowers, candles, written messages, and other objects, forming what some call an “altar” or a “spontaneous shrine” (Grider ; Santino ), an “improvised”, “ephemeral”, or “popular memorial” (in contrast to the places of institutional, permanent, and often monumental memory) (Margry and Sánchez Carretero , ). This phenomenon of the “spontaneous memorialisation” of a place was studied following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales (Kear and Steinberg ; Walter ) – which probably represents the first occurrence of a media event at the global level – and also in cases as varied as the attacks of 11 September (Fraenkel ) and 11 March (Sánchez Carretero ), the school massacres at Columbine High School and Virginia Tech (Grider ), the murder of Pim Fortuyn (Margry ), and the death of John Paul II (Klekot ), to mention only a few. We should stress that, in accordance with Halbwachs' theories, materiality is a fundamental characteristic of this memorial marking of space through public mourning rituals (Doss ): the place is linked both to memories, the mental representation of a past event, and also to “souvenirs”, objects that help to recall and evoke that representation.…”