Grenfell, Race, Remembrance

Launchbury, Claire

doi:10.1080/02690055.2021.1838789

Cited by 8 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Narrative therapy does not change reality but rather modifies people’s relationships to what is problematic, through exploring alternative, new meanings. As Launchbury (2021) explains, participatory storytelling reveals the hidden agency of storytellers in accounting for shared experience and harnesses dissent where it challenges power and authority to offer radical therapeutic potential. Reflecting on COVID-19, it is not hard to find such narrative therapy projects as UK’s “Write where we are now” and Australia’s “Bridging the distance,” which encourage people to make sense of the non-routine, novel situations by sharing stories for mutual reassurance.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Sharing Is Caring”: Participatory Storytelling and Community Building on Social Media Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic

Hou

2023

American Behavioral Scientist

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While most health communication studies tend to adopt an information-based approach to unpacking the communication issues around COVID-19, scant attention has been paid to the emerging narratives from local communities as a way of sensemaking, self-representation, and creative responses to the pandemic. Especially locally driven narratives that convey positive emotions and exhibit remarkable resilience of the great majority are underexamined. To narrow this gap, this study analyzed a Facebook-based, participatory storytelling program to reveal how local communities (co-)construct humanized narrative accounts of lived experiences and context-specific knowledge about pandemic responses. Data collection involved qualitative content analysis of 245 user-generated stories, associated with comments and engagement from the group members, for a 6-month period. Results show that open and participatory storytelling on social media affords a pathway of performing togetherness even though individuals narrate their lived pandemic experiences differently. Such performing togetherness somewhat facilitated virtual community building. This study contributes to the health communication literature with a refreshing perspective of understanding the grounded, participatory storytelling as a vehicle of collective sensemaking and community spirit-lifting.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Sharing Is Caring”: Participatory Storytelling and Community Building on Social Media Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic

Hou

2023

American Behavioral Scientist

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“…Whatever the source and motivation, silence articulates the voice and feelings of the community. Far from passive or inarticulate or muted, the silent walk is active, articulate and impassioned (see Launchbury, 2021; Tekin and Drury, 2021). Silent does not mean it did not have things to say.…”

Section: Responding To Grenfell: Openness and The Politics Of Alteritymentioning

confidence: 99%

Politicization, postpolitics and the open city: Openness, closedness and the spatialisation of the political

Pile,

Keith,

Murji

et al. 2023

Environ Plan D

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The idea of the open city has been used both conceptually and analytically to understand the politics of the city. The contrast between the open city and the closed city relies, in part, upon an understanding of the global systems that enfold cities and, consequently, the politics that are – and are not – afforded cities. Notions such as the postpolitical city depend not on temporality where the city has ceased to be political, but a spatialisation of politics where the (properly) political has become excluded by the closed systems that envelope cities. In this paper, we explore analytical and theoretical responses to the horror of the Grenfell Tower fire to disclose the ways that different critiques of neoliberalism and racial capitalism deploy and rely upon different conceptions of the open and closed systems of the city. Rather than settle for the open/closed binary, we seek to understand how different forms of openness and closedness afford/constrain the politicisation (and depoliticization) of city life – and its catastrophes.

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“…As Claire Launchbury has written of this work, at Grenfell, "the structural and bureaucratic disempowerment of residents [has been] resisted by the interventions of a number of representatives, especially writers and musicians, who have fought to overcome the community's silencing." 25 By representing and recognizing the Grenfell community, poetic responses to the fire aim to bring about a different reality, one that is rooted in the social fact of the community's humanity. Or to put this another way, by writing against the social murder that took place at Grenfell, this body of poetry provides a form of social life.…”

Section: You Saw It You Heard Itmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In Okri's poem, writes Launchbury, the cladding becomes "a metaphor for the vacuous and the empty, a list of different claddings." 29 But it also operates as a metaphor for the thickness of racial capitalism's hungry optics, its determination to represent land as ripe for regeneration and to dehumanize those who stand in its way. In this context, Okri's repeated use of the second person, "you," takes on an understandably accusatory tone, interpolating the poem's readers and listeners as witnesses to-or perhaps even as culprits of-a crime.…”

Section: You Saw It You Heard Itmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The City of the Missing: Poetic Responses to the Grenfell Fire

Davies

2022

Journal of Urban History

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This essay is about the representation and recognition of the victims and survivors of the Grenfell fire disaster in poetry written since June 14, 2017. It begins by arguing that the fire was caused not by a lack of knowledge, but by a refusal to acknowledge the voices of the community. It shows how this refusal of recognition was both direct and systemic, slow and immediate, situating the fire in the recent and long-term contexts of austerity and the hostile environment, the demonization of social housing, urbanization and the rise of slums, and the logics of colonialism and racial capitalism. The essay then turns a series of poetic responses to the fire, read and discussed mostly in the order of their publication. These include poems by Ben Okri, Roger Robinson, and Jay Bernard; spoken word performances by Potent Whisper; and two tracks by Lowkey. Through close and careful readings of this work, the essay identifies a hauntological politics of acknowledgment and memorialization that refuses social death and galvanizes social life.

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Grenfell, Race, Remembrance

Cited by 8 publications

References 9 publications

“Sharing Is Caring”: Participatory Storytelling and Community Building on Social Media Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic

“Sharing Is Caring”: Participatory Storytelling and Community Building on Social Media Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic

Politicization, postpolitics and the open city: Openness, closedness and the spatialisation of the political

The City of the Missing: Poetic Responses to the Grenfell Fire

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