Recovery, Renewal, Resilience

COVID-19’s prolonged nature, and the intensity of measures taken to respond to it, have brought major disruptions with lasting consequences. Our relationship to mortality and death has been redefined, not least by disruption to traditional rituals that enable societies to cope with and overcome major trauma. A recent webinar, organised as part of the Manchester Webinar Series, considered how we might collectively remember the COVID-19 pandemic. Our speakers reviewed lessons from the past on building resilience through coproduced commemoration and discussed key considerations for policy makers and communities in planning to recognise and remember the huge losses caused by COVID-19. Consider the key lessons offered by our speakers:

• There is no one way to remember. Unlike most disasters, each individual’s experience of COVID-19 is a personal one and commemoration activities will require careful consideration around ways to bring people together to collectively to remember while also recognising the uniqueness of everyone’s experience
• The co-production of activities can provide a way to ensure commemoration is inclusive of all of those who would like to be involved, to create a collaborative and bottom-up as well as top-down delivery of remembrance, and enable communities to take ownership of their remembrance
• Consideration for who will lead and be involved in these conversation will be really important, to mediate, and to support communities to find ways to compromise on differing views and perspectives on commemoration
• The timing of commemoration is a challenge, considering that COVID-19 is now a long-term chronic problem and we are not at the end of the disaster. The pandemic has seen commemoration since the beginning, demonstrating how communities can begin to create spaces of remembrance even while the crisis persists. Some examples of these commemoration activities can be found in TMB Issue 34 and Issue 29
• Memorials can be political, and grand gestures such as monuments can fade, or be contested. This reinforces the need for co-produced commemoration, enabling the voices of those who will benefit most from commemoration activities to be heard and actively participate
• Education is a good form of remembering, through storytellers or creating spaces (online or in local newspapers) where people can share their individual experiences of the pandemic. Recording those memories now will enable authentic materials to support education in years to come
• Think about how those who have lower agency in communities will remember (e.g. children who have lost grandparents). Commemoration could be done by creating spaces in schools/community youth groups for teachers/youth volunteers to support children