‘Your School Needs You to Buy a Poppy’: Dominance and fragility in school remembrance practices

Abstract

Generated by the centenary of the First World War, there has been an increased interest in how war is commemorated in English schools. Whilst other authors have argued that the way in which remembrance is marked in schools is militarised and nationalistic, this article reports on a single school case study to provide a deeper discussion of how this is reproduced in everyday practices and a consideration of how alternative forms of remembrance are resisted. Butler’s concept of ‘grievability’ is deployed to interpret the practices where some lives are privileged above others in commemoration creating a militarised ‘red poppy remembrance discourse’. I go on to argue that this discourse, although dominant, is also fragile in nature and attempts to counter this are treated with suspicion to maintain nationalistic and war-normalising messages for the next generation.