Memory Politics After Disaster: Recovery,Embodied Trauma and the Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

This article critically approaches disaster ‘recovery’ in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic through the notion of embodied trauma. We explore concepts of embodiment and trauma and ask how embodied traumatic memory differs, particularly in relation to a staggered global event such as the Covid-19 pandemic where trauma was embodied in raced, classed and gendered waves and experiences and outcomes were deeply unequal. In contrast to the mostly technocratic mainstream disaster recovery literature, we argue that different and often polarised embodiments of trauma within disaster survivor populations reveal the aim of ‘recovery’ in the form of going ‘back to normal’ to be questionable. In this article we therefore integrate and interrogate disaster recovery literature and alternatively suggest that disasters work to remind us that there is no fundamental coherence to what we call social reality. We argue that embodied traumatic events are political: they disrupt the dominant narrative and status quo it sustains. Given this, recovery in the form of healing – or forgetting – is not necessarily what we should be aiming for. Instead, we argue that disasters such as the Covid-19 pandemic can open up the possibility for political activism, radical systemic change and a new social-political order.

Introduction

Four years ago I awoke to learn my brother Umar did not. Covid got him. He died at home because the hospitals were full & Govt had stopped community testing as they didn’t have enough tests. We had to carry his body out of the house in a body bag while my mum watched. We won’t forget.

– Nazir Afzal, 8 April 2024 ¹

Many people in the United Kingdom had experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic that, like Nazir Afzal, a former Chief Crown Prosecutor, they will not forget. In Afzal’s tweet he recounts how he carried his brother Umar’s dead body downstairs under his mother’s gaze and in this article, we underline the importance of the deep embodiment of traumatic experiences such as these. Drawing on literature in trauma studies and embodiment, we apply the term ‘embodied trauma’. This term reflects the way social orders, bodies and persons are ‘inherently incomplete and insecure’ ² and ‘continually come to be’ through a ‘contested, intensely political process’. ³ Afzal’s tweet also points to the failure of the UK Government’s duty to provide sufficient tests and hospital beds, an example of how embodied trauma involves not only violence and death but also a betrayal by those we trust to protect us. ⁴ We trace examples of such betrayals and argue that embodied trauma leads to a profound unsettling of individuals and communities that contains the possibility for potentially radical social-political reconfiguration.

For the relatives of people who, unlike Umar, were taken to hospital but did not recover it was as if they had been disappeared: taken away in an ambulance never to be seen again. No visitors were allowed in hospital. And there was no viewing of the body afterwards. The funerals of those who died during the Covid years were bleak affairs: only a few mourners were allowed to attend, and those who did were not allowed to comfort each other but had to stand the regulation distance apart. Even for those not directly affected, the horror of what was happening became obvious. The pandemic was a disaster: one that was described as ‘unprecedented’, yet had been top of the UK’s ‘National Risk Register’ for years. The failure to prepare adequately, coupled with, and a consequence of, the long years of austerity, led to the betrayals by the NHS and the UK Government that Afzal speaks of in his tweet.

In this article, we examine what it means to analyse a disaster as an embodied trauma, and what this implies for memory and politics. We take the example of the Covid-19 pandemic in the early 2020s, focussing on the United Kingdom. As co-authors, we were all based in England or Wales during what was a global pandemic, and, given the importance we attach to the situated specifics of what happens and what people experience, our analysis springs from that location. Of course, with its imperial past, Britain is by no means homogeneous. We draw on previous work with different UK communities; emphasising the uneven and deeply unequal impact of the pandemic is central to our approach. ⁵

Unlike wars, genocides and famines, pandemics had not been widely examined as traumatic events in global politics before the arrival of Covid-19. ⁶ Since then International Relations (IR) scholars have analysed traumatic aspects of what happened, some drawing on a Lacanian approach as we do here. Catarina Kinnvall and Ted Svensson’s analysis of the increase in exclusionary practices shows that the pandemic has ‘interacted with existing social cleavages to further disadvantage the marginalized’, echoing our focus on inequality. ⁷ However, the insecurities and anxieties of Covid-19 also led to positive social change: Andreja Zevnik argues that the Black Lives Matter protests were an example of how a global pandemic can constitute ‘a mobilising force in political space’. ⁸ Henrique Tavares Furtado and Jessica Auchter also examine Covid-19 through a Lacanian perspective, strongly contesting the ideas within IR trauma literature that trauma arises as the result of a single, incomprehensible event, and propose we attend to ‘an understanding of (colonial/racial) trauma as it appears in the writings of those who never felt protected or at peace in the white colonial order’. They argue that viewing pandemic trauma as ‘a fracturing event, an external, incomprehensible rupturing of. . .the normal state of things’ produces ‘an elision of the persistent, “normal” violence of systems such as neoliberalism, colonialism, structural racism, and labor exploitation’. ⁹

Focussing as we do here on the details in a specific but heterogeneous location allows us to ask how traumatic memory might differ after a staggered global event where trauma is embodied in raced, classed and gendered waves, ¹⁰ that reverberate along the ‘endoskeleton of the world’, ¹¹ play out over an extended period in space and time, ¹² and where ‘we are all disaster survivors now’. ¹³ Crucially, throughout this article we refer to the pandemic as a ‘disaster’ rather than a ‘crisis’. ¹⁴ Victoria Canning’s critique of the term ‘refugee crisis’ argues that ‘a crisis is unforeseeable or unpredictable’ and migration flows met neither of these criteria. ¹⁵ The pandemic was foreseen, predicted and planned for and therefore we resist the use of the term. We follow activist usage of the term ‘disaster’ as a means to express specifically the scale and human toll of the pandemic and as an active rebellion to the act of forgetting it. ¹⁶

Many disasters are localised, with an identifiable community of survivors. They are often sudden and quickly over, though the aftermath can take months or years to play out. The pandemic was different. Temporally, the pandemic was a staggered disaster. We didn’t all get Covid at the same time. There was a series of waves, pre- and post-vaccination, and this drawn-out timeframe has implications for recovery and memory. We may all be survivors now, but what each person and community survived, and continues to live with, is very specific. ¹⁷ As Dionne Brand reminds us, there is also a calculus at play. ¹⁸ Through this article we therefore build on recent work within international studies exposing inequalities exacerbated through the pandemic in the United Kingdom by asking what the implications are for stages of recovery as conceived in disaster response and emergency planning literature. We consider what differentiated social-political-embodied legacies might come to light, while recognising that ‘it may only be generations later when a disaster reaches its grim potential’. ¹⁹

We argue that embodied traumatic events, where the impact is not just on some assumed ‘separate’ psyche but plays out on and through the embodied subject, remind us that there is no ultimate security of being and no fundamental coherence to what we call social reality. We suggest that such events are political because they disrupt the dominant narrative and the status quo it sustains and, given this, that recovery in the form of healing – or forgetting – may not be what we should be aiming for after the Covid-19 pandemic. We counter that disasters such as Covid-19 create space for political activism, radical systemic change and a new social-political order.

At the time of writing, Covid-19 is no longer considered a global pandemic, but it also isn’t over. The disease and its consequences have become embedded in societies around the world. However, this embedding is profoundly uneven. Some people are still dying with Covid-19 and experiencing its consequences while there are strong forces pursuing a return to ‘normal’. Many people cannot forget the embodied traumatic impact of the pandemic, and some are tapping into its transformative potential, seeking social and political change.

We now know that experiences and impacts of the pandemic were radically unequal. In the case of the United Kingdom, Huw McCartney, Johnna Montgomerie and Daniela Tepe have detailed how the pandemic and UK Government’s economic response policy package ‘fractured’ pre-existing socio-economic ‘fault-lines’, ²⁰ while Asha Herten-Crabb and Clare Wenham have exposed significant gendered impacts in terms of unequal paid and unpaid labour burdens, adverse mental health outcomes, restricted access to healthcare services, and inadequate government representation and consideration of women. ²¹ The intersectionality of formal and informal care burdens exacerbated through the pandemic and experienced by racially minoritised communities, older people and carers have also been detailed through a series of studies, ²² which reveal a ‘twin crisis of care and covid’. ²³ As we explain in our methodology section, these crucial studies corroborate testimonies provided in our co-edited volume When This Is Over: Reflections on an Unequal Pandemic. ²⁴ The findings of that volume motivated us to write this article. In light of the embodied inequalities uncovered through such work we conclude that to recognise and pursue the possible political legacies of disaster, it is important to listen to those who cannot forget.

Gerard Delanty argues that ‘Perhaps the significance of the pandemic ultimately resides in the chance of a new model of society emerging from the debris of the present. But it is also possible that the pandemic simply entrenches changes that have already occurred’. ²⁵ Media coverage at the time of the fifth anniversary of the UK lockdown argued for the second position. ²⁶ This article draws attention back to the possibility of the emergence of ‘a new model of society’.

In unfolding our arguments, we first engage with the existing literature in disaster recovery studies, showing how the technological focus in this body of work leaves space for a human element to which our conceptual framework offers an original contribution. We then outline the theoretical concepts of embodiment and trauma to develop our application of these concepts as embodied trauma. Our analysis focuses on the application of embodied trauma to disaster recovery and memory, applying the framework to the context of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom, and the specific inequalities exacerbated through it. We argue that disaster recovery does not require a return to the status quo but that it can be a catalyst for social-political change.

Disaster and Recovery

Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.

– Jacques Rancière ²⁷

The dominant approach to disasters, and recovery after disaster, is primarily a technological one that speaks in terms of policy prescriptions, beginnings and ends, and ‘stages of recovery’. But the nature and impact of a disaster – as an embodied traumatic event – cannot be articulated within such terms. The standard ‘disaster management’ literature diminishes disaster, normalising and depoliticising it, concealing or medicalising trauma, and rendering those who experienced it unable to speak, or if they do, are unheard.

Policies implemented after disaster, issued by governments, focus almost exclusively on the fixing of technical problems with little consideration of the human. ²⁸ Even if the human element is considered, inappropriate interventions are imposed: Vanessa Pupavac argues that the ‘international therapeutic model’ and resulting psychosocial ‘humanitarian’ interventions ignore the needs of recipients and are a form of imperialism. ²⁹ One strand of the critical disaster response literature instead sees disaster as a deeply political moment, where the authorities with political power are revealed to be unfounded and open to challenge, and where those closest to what happened are listened to. ³⁰ It is this literature to which this article makes its contribution.

In a study of several communities that have experienced disasters of different types, Kai Erikson remarks that for those touched by it, trauma ‘can mean not only a loss of confidence in the self but a loss of confidence in the scaffolding of family and community, in the structures of human government, in the larger logics by which humankind lives, and in the ways of nature itself’. ³¹ Ian Convery, Maggie Mort, Josephine Baxter and Cathy Bailey draw on Erikson’s work as they advocate an alternative approach, one that ‘offers ways of thinking about disasters in non-linear, non-prescriptive and humanistic ways’. As they say:

Many disasters are approached as if they have a clear beginning, middle and end, an approach often found, for example, in disaster management. But the experience of being in a disaster often isn’t like this – it is messy, it may resonate strangely with previous events and experiences which don’t ‘count’ as disastrous, and it may only be generations later when a disaster reaches its grim potential. ³²

Quoting Erikson, they note that he draws an analogy with the body by suggesting that ‘when the community is devastated. . .one can speak of a damaged social organism in almost the same way that one would speak of a damaged body’. ³³

Lucy Easthope and Maggie Mort term the tools that underpin standard approaches to disaster management and feed into emergency planning ‘technologies of recovery’. They include ‘a plethora of instruments: templates, checklists and guidance documents’. ³⁴ Easthope argues that these technologies omit the messy reality of life after disaster, or in other words, the temporality and the situatedness of what happened is rendered invisible. The myth of recovery lies in the assumption that one set of prescriptions can be applicable to all cases of disaster:

The forms and checklists. . .are designed to effect any ‘recovery’ after any emergency: The wounds of the emergency will heal if certain balms (in the form of actions) are applied to those wounds. Within these, the erasure of place and people and things and all that goes with these marginalises both the temporality and the situation of the emergency: [disasters] are not a one off event but part of a way of life. They are part of what it means to live in that place. The idea of one consistent trajectory is a recovery myth. ³⁵

That disasters have beginnings and endings, that there is a time to move from ‘emergency’ to ‘recovery’, that there are ‘stages of recovery’ that can be seen in every case, and that one set of carefully crafted policy prescriptions can be universally applied is part of the fantasy. ³⁶

One aspect the technologies of recovery erase, as Easthope and Mort point out, is the recovery of ‘things’. In our focus on the recovery of people, the places and the material objects that people rely on and that support them are neglected. Easthope has long had a particular concern with the return of personal effects to the relatives of those killed in disaster, ³⁷ while Convery, Mort, Baxter and Bailey point out that ‘in accounts of disasters it is often the case that everyday objects, materials, tools and spaces take on heightened significance, become transformed or enlarged into resonant materials which carry traumatic associations’. ³⁸

In this article we add a significant contribution to these critical approaches to disaster recovery by examining the politics of disaster, which is elided in technological, management-style approaches to disaster and recovery. The technological approach erases any political potential and means we cannot hear those who wish to make a political challenge and resist recovery in terms of a return to the status quo. In the next section, we explore notions of embodiment and trauma, developing a conceptual framework to analyse disasters and their radical political potential.

Embodied Trauma

Try as we might to rid ourselves of it, in the end everything brings us back to the body. We tried to graft it onto other media, to turn it into an object body, a machine body, a digital body, an ontophanic body. It returns to us now as a horrifying, giant mandible, a vehicle for contamination, a vector for pollen, spores, and mold.

– Achille Mbembe ³⁹

The pandemic was a profoundly embodied disaster played out on and through our fleshy, vulnerable bodies, its toll calculated by the number of dead bodies produced as a result of ‘dying with Covid-19’. Although technologies of recovery after disaster talk in largely psychological terms about the impact of what we call traumatic events or disasters, literature on embodiment provides an approach that explicitly breaks down the mind/body dichotomy and critiques Cartesian dualist thought for how it produces ‘mindless bodies on the one hand and disembodied minds on the other’. ⁴⁰ Here, we explore embodiment further.

The concept of embodiment stems from a rejection of the idea that bodies are inert, pre and outside of the social-political realm. Emerging from sociology within the ‘corporeal turn’ of the 1990s, embodiment theory illustrates how bodies are materially shaped and sculpted by social and political forces. The extreme context of war reveals the politics of embodiment most explicitly and accordingly contemporary IR is increasingly embracing processes of embodiment. ⁴¹ Within this literature, Lauren Wilcox’s Bodies of Violence notably interrogates contemporary practices of violent warfare and security as a means to finally and explicitly theorise the subject of violence as embodied, arguing that ‘the bodies that practices of violence take as their object are deeply political bodies, constituted in reference to historical political conditions while at the same time acting upon our world’. ⁴² Indeed, taking the notion of embodiment seriously means recognising that local, national and global politics gets literally under our skin and fleshes us out in our ever-shifting bodily forms. Taking this approach means recognising how what we call disaster or trauma does not just produce effects on the ‘mind’ as a separate entity but is also deeply embodied. Thinking about psychological impacts may be important, but the psyche is part of and cannot be separated from the body.

What we call traumatic events or disasters are deeply embodied, and re-embodying. During the pandemic this happened most explicitly as some bodies caught Covid repeatedly, while others avoided it for longer or entirely. Trauma can be seen as a close encounter with violence – often violence inflicted on the body or on the bodies of others. And indeed etymologically ‘trauma’ is a bodily term, borrowed from the Greek ‘trauma’, which means to wound or pierce. In general medicine ‘trauma is defined as a tissue injury that occurs more or less suddenly due to violence or accident’. ⁴³ This usage of the word is often forgotten, and in general parlance ‘trauma’ is primarily associated with psychological implications. Stefanie Fishel expresses our willingness to forget our embodiment well when she says, ‘We are all bodies, but we are often not aware of how corporeality matters’. ⁴⁴ Indeed, it often takes a physical injury or ailment to remind us, and through the pandemic the body certainly ‘returned’ to some of us in more horrifying ways than it did for others. Throughout this article we underline and emphasise different (unequal) embodiments of Covid-19 pandemic trauma and follow Emma Hutchison to consider the political implications of the paradox wherein ‘trauma isolates individuals, yet it can also seep out, affecting those who bear witness, and in doing so, shape political communities’. ⁴⁵

In Rethinking the Body in Global Politics, Kandida Purnell shows us that ‘bodies are not outside of politics but rather always and already contested sites of global politics’. In her rethinking of embodiment, she suggests an understanding of bodies as ‘performative, lively, and ontologically insecure; always a process and always in process; and excessive and affective – feeling their way through life and the world’. ⁴⁶

Purnell provides the definition of the concept of embodiment that we use in this article, understanding it as: ‘the contested, intensely political process through which bodies continually come to be’. ⁴⁷ Importantly, embodiment incorporates ongoing social, political, material and discursive processes. ⁴⁸ As Ben Rosher reminds us, it is these processes that enable us to keep calm and carry on:

We perform our selves in the world through embedded routines and discourses which serve to ‘bracket out’ the underlying fact that life is contingent and largely beyond our control in order that we are able to ‘go on’ with the everydayness of life. ⁴⁹

From our perspective, what is called a traumatic event prompts some embodied subjects to perform increased routines as they seek security and desperately try to return to the narrative and forget the trauma. However, the pandemic’s unevenly embodied nature means that some (bodies) will be able to re-secure themselves with greater degrees of success than others in the wake of the pandemic. And, as we will argue, some will in any case wish to accept what trauma has revealed (or what they have already known): that the notion of a stable self and an established and secure social order is a fantasy. ⁵⁰

We further articulate our notion of embodied trauma drawing on the Lacanian account of the formation of ‘the subject’, its relation to what is called ‘the symbolic order’, and how there is an original trauma at the root of subjectivity. In this account, as elaborated by Slavoj Žižek, what we call ‘social reality’ is a fantasy. The social or symbolic order, centred around a ‘master signifier’ that holds the whole edifice together, protects subjects from an encounter with ‘the Real’. It provides answers to all the unanswerable questions people face about the meaning of their existence. But both the subject and the symbolic order are structured around a lack or an excess, or in other words, around the unsymbolisable Real. They are both inherently incomplete and cannot be otherwise. The answers do not hold. ⁵¹

In Lacanian thinking, the concept of trauma is not primarily related to a single, shocking external event or disruption, or even a series of external events that build on each other, but, rather, is related to an inherent result of the process of the formation of the subject and the social order. This original trauma is inevitably embodied and social or collective. ⁵² What is called ‘the mirror stage’ is fundamental to this embodied understanding ⁵³ :

This is the point at which the very young child first sees its own image in a mirror. At this point in its life the infant has little co-ordination and no sense of itself as a separate being. The mirror presents an image of wholeness and completeness: the child gleefully sees itself as separate and experiences a sense of control and mastery as it sees the image move in response to its own movements. It recognises itself, but this is a misrecognition. The child is not more capable than it was before of controlling its world. It is no more whole. Although it is an impossible fantasy, in the west we continue to strive for this imaginary wholeness and sovereignty throughout life. ⁵⁴

Infants do not experience this re-embodiment alone: they are held or supported by a caregiver. The process is a necessarily social one. As Furtado and Auchter put it ‘in hearing the parental voice “do you know who that is? it is you!,” the child becomes invested in an image, a fantasy of control [which] severs the ties between the subject and their lived, embodied incoherence’. ⁵⁵

An external embodied traumatic encounter reveals the fallibility of the social or symbolic order, and, alongside that, the split nature of the subject and the way it is structured round a lack or original trauma. Such a revelation is an encounter with ‘the Real’, that which cannot be incorporated into the symbolic order. As Furtado and Auchter remind us, ‘the Lacanian subject is split not because of an external traumatic event, but due to an original troumatisme, Lacan’s neologism – from the French trou, meaning hole’. This original trauma is fundamental to both the subject and the social order and cannot be overcome. There is no recovery or healing, only forgetting.

External events we call traumatic are often overwhelming, shocking, unexpected. They generally involve an encounter with some form of violence. Sometimes an embodied traumatic event involves feeling helpless when facing such a situation oneself, but it can also involve, and often does, witnessing the horror inflicted on others. But an external embodied traumatic encounter seems to involve more than just this feeling of powerlessness in the face of the horrific, as Jenny Edkins proposes:

It has to involve a betrayal of trust as well. . .What we call trauma takes place when the very powers that we are convinced will protect us and give us security become our tormentors: when the community of which we considered ourselves members turns against us or when our family is no longer a source of refuge but a site of danger. ⁵⁶

Such a betrayal by the social order threatens our very source of selfhood, which simultaneously emerges with the social or symbolic order itself. As the discussion of the ‘mirror stage’ shows, who we think we are depends on how we see ourselves in relation to others around us, and it is through our relations in community that we have a sense of survival and continuance, dignity and purpose.

After an external embodied traumatic event, we can say, for simplicity, that there are two possibilities. The first is a ‘healing’: a return to the existing symbolic order (and the domination, inequality and injustice it enables) alongside ‘forgetting’ or hiding the original trauma. This is a depoliticising move, a return to the technologies of disaster recovery. The second is an insistence on encircling or marking the embodied trauma: refusing to condone the existing narrative, the existing symbolic order, and acknowledging its contingency and incompleteness. In contrast to the first possibility, this is a politicisation, a demand for a new socio-political order. It leads to an embodied response in the form of activism and protest, and to memorials such as the Vietnam Wall, the London Cenotaph and the National Covid Memorial Wall that mark or encircle the trauma. ⁵⁷

It is vital to note that, given that the social or symbolic order that makes sense of our lives can be different for each person, what we find traumatic will also vary: what one person finds to be an embodied traumatic event may not be so for another. For example, Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor argues that for white people and for people who experience racism the pandemic feels very different. As she describes it, ‘Racism interrupts. . .It gate crashes your day, stops you in your steps, makes you enter a world you would not choose to go to’. ⁵⁸ It is important to emphasise here what has been implied already: when we speak of an external embodied traumatic ‘event’ we are not necessarily thinking of a single, one-off occurrence. Embodied trauma often extends beyond that and can include an ongoing series of ‘events’ that build upon one another. What could be thought of as ‘everyday’ events can combine to produce a traumatic effect. The ‘microaggressions’ experienced by marginalised people, or the continual pressures of poverty and/or care work, for example, may not be as striking but still produce a result that is no less traumatic. ⁵⁹

Survivors and witnesses often feel compelled to attempt to convey to us what their experience has taught them about the uncertainty and contingency of both self and social or symbolic order, the gap at the centre of both, and the impossibility of imaginary wholeness. They want to open our eyes to what they have learned, but the rest of us, comfortable in our fantasy of security, would rather not listen. Their testimony challenges authority and power – and the challenge can translate across boundaries of histories, culture and social group. ⁶⁰ Those in authority would also rather we didn’t listen. Their power depends on forgetting the trauma, tidying up, ‘healing’ and memorialising. Feminist trauma studies have long emphasised the political opportunity trauma presents, as we do here. ⁶¹ Edkins’ Lacanian approach in her Trauma and the Memory of Politics builds on Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery, one of the earliest and most important contributions to the feminist trauma literature. ⁶²

In sum, as Žižek says, embodied trauma is ‘too horrible to be remembered, to be integrated into our symbolic universe’. ⁶³ To integrate it into our symbolic universe would be to gentrify it, to take the sting out of it, or, more precisely, to depoliticise it. That is not what many survivors want. The alternative is what could be called an encircling of the trauma: acknowledging it, finding other ways of expressing it, but preventing it from being incorporated into the linear narrative that sustains the status quo. ⁶⁴ Embodied trauma shows us the lack at the centre of our social being – the original trauma that is always there but that we prefer to forget. After a disaster there are those who cannot forget, who appreciate the profound impossibility of making sense of the world in the way they thought they could and instead see the opportunity to politicise presented by the embodied trauma.

Motivations and Method

The Covid-19 pandemic had widespread effects in the United Kingdom, impacting public health, the economy and daily life. By March 2025 effects included over 232,000 deaths. ⁶⁵ At the pandemic’s peak in 2021 there were a total of 586,334 deaths registered in England and Wales and of these 77,727 involved Covid-19 (13.3% of all deaths) while 67,350 were due to Covid-19 (11.5% of all deaths). ⁶⁶ The UK Government’s response included public health measures such as lockdowns, social distancing and mask mandates, alongside economic initiatives exceeding £120 billion to support health services, businesses and individuals. However, as detailed in our introduction, in the wake of the pandemic, critiques have emerged regarding the adequacy of the UK Government’s response and the effectiveness of interventions that worked to exacerbate existing inequalities within society. ⁶⁷ Indeed, in July 2024 the UK’s Covid-19 Inquiry led by Baroness Heather Hallet reported that ‘emergency planning failed to put enough consideration into existing health and social inequalities’ whilst it was also conceded that ‘there was a failure to fully learn from past civil emergency exercises and outbreaks of disease’. ⁶⁸

Within this context, our article arises from a collaborative research project that began with the four of us coming together through exchanges on social media at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. We each came from different disciplines and had research interests ranging from refugees to the military, from disaster planning to the politics of memory. The interdisciplinarity of our team created a diversity of perspectives and expertise, and meant that we experienced, observed and interpreted different inequalities in society through our varied physical and disciplinary worlds throughout the pandemic. This collaboration first resulted in the edited volume, When This Is Over: Reflections on an Unequal Pandemic – a public facing book presenting a collaboration between academics, policy makers, practitioners, activists, poets and community groups. ⁶⁹ This article is the result of our ongoing transdisciplinary conversation about UK pandemic politics and inequalities including those brought to light in When This Is Over and developments in ‘post’-pandemic UK politics. We have written about such developments as individuals but this article provides a new critical theorisation and is informed by ongoing conversations within international studies about knowledge production beyond disciplinary boundaries. ⁷⁰ Coming (back) together to write this article and present our appraisal of embodied trauma, memory and disaster in the context of the pandemic, we have taken a transdisciplinary approach ‘in favour of the practice of crossing between disciplinary barriers as the primary source of knowledge creation and improved understanding’. ⁷¹ Our diverse areas of expertise were drawn together by a united motivation to expose inequalities and seek social justice during the pandemic. We were concerned, enraged even, by what was remembered and forgotten, who was included and excluded, who benefitted and who suffered during the pandemic.

As for our methods (in both the process of researching the book and the ongoing process which led to this article), what has ensued is a long-term, ongoing archival activist project that first resulted in our edited volume. ⁷² Towards this we curated essays, research and artwork, exposing some of the raced, classed and gendered inequalities exacerbated and produced during the peaks of the pandemic. However, the pandemic is not over, and nor is our project, and so the process continued and informed this article.

Archival research is traditionally presented as neutral, but this neutrality enables the maintenance of the status quo. Radical historian Howard Zinn called for a more human and rebellious approach to archival research, a call that sparked an ongoing debate regarding positionality within the field. ⁷³ Our research responds to Zinn’s call and is more activist in nature. From the outset of our collaboration, we intended to disrupt the status quo, to challenge the political landscape and to imagine and promote social change. Our approach further draws on Jacques Derrida’s notion of ‘mal d’archive’, the paradoxical urge to both document and erase. ⁷⁴ We seek to challenge dominant narratives of recovery that obscure unequal experiences of memory and embodied trauma.

Our approach to data collection is organic and inductive, aligned with the scope and aims of the broader research project. Our activist approach resists dominant narratives and challenges the political will to forget. More precisely, we have utilised a model of rapid research that has proliferated in disaster research methodology. This had been modelled for decades in disaster response research, often supported by urgency grants as a way of protecting fragile artefacts and resisting the emergence and smoothing of a singular narrative. ⁷⁵ Drawing on Robert Stallings’ approach that ‘What makes disaster research unique is the circumstances in which otherwise conventional methods are employed’, ⁷⁶ we collected what we could, prioritising the easily lost – Twitter threads, broadcast news items, pamphlets, emerging poetry and tentative scripts. By doing so we also built on Easthope’s previous research in disaster that directly challenges the hierarchy placed on disaster artefacts prioritising only ‘official publications’ and the gatekeeping of knowledge by academia, ⁷⁷ therefore applying activist methodology by promoting epistemic justice. While engaged in this process and simultaneously drawing from our respective fields, over the last 5 years we have curated an archive of sources from social and mainstream media, academic research, political discourse, community organisations and activists to name a few. This article presents our transdisciplinary analysis of a selection of these sources, which interrogate memory and embodied trauma in disaster recovery.

All four of us lived and observed the context we write about. As Easthope states, ‘we are all disaster survivors now’. ⁷⁸ We are therefore participants in this project as we were inside this disaster too. Our lens was not only an academic one but a participatory and intimate one. We write about memory and embodied trauma but have experienced these things too. We remember, process trauma and our bodies remember too. Although we are all white women living in the United Kingdom and do not represent racialised diversity, our lived experiences throughout the pandemic varied across class, caring responsibilities, (dis)abilities and other intersectional oppressions and privileges. Both our work and our personal experiences inevitably shaped our activist approach.

The Covid-19 Pandemic

If someone feels pressured to move on, could that also be a trickle-down effect from a government that has a vested interest in us forgetting about its abject blundering in a deadly pandemic?

– Eleanor Morgan ⁷⁹

We are now more than 5 years on from the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. The UK Covid-19 Inquiry has published its first report, with damning conclusions about government failings and the reasons for the lack of preparedness. ⁸⁰ But ‘there is intense ambiguity over when the pandemic can and should be declared “over” and of course the contest around the “end” of Covid-19 is highly political’. ⁸¹ It is clear that the impacts of the pandemic are far from over. In an article published in Elle magazine, journalist Eva Wiseman talks to Lucy Easthope and others. She asks, ‘Are we OK?’ Wiseman concludes, ‘the consensus seems to be, well, no, we’re not’, perhaps because ‘remembering pandemic trauma is tricky, because the deaths simply aren’t as “tellable” as deaths from war. The smaller impacts, such as loneliness, or heartbreak in a time of lockdown, are even less so’. ⁸² There is a profound sense of guilt that we obeyed the rules when we perhaps should not have.

Betrayal

At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic we expected that our governments would protect us, yet they betrayed us. In the UK austerity measures had eroded plans to protect citizens in the event of a pandemic, and the government acted late in implementing effective protective measures. Moreover, there were several instances in the United Kingdom where notable figures in government broke lockdown rules and further betrayed public trust. Take, for example the mid-lockdown ‘parties’ in Whitehall, unauthorised travel by a senior advisor, and former health secretary Matt Hancock’s affair, which breached social distancing. These contraventions were initially vehemently denied, but then video, photographic and other evidence emerged. ⁸³

Betrayal also occurred on a personal level. Lockdown measures limited caregivers’ ability to provide care, and support from friends and family became a threat to our health. Patients in care settings faced distancing from staff, impacting patient-physician relationships. ⁸⁴ Our entire sense of being was betrayed.

The pandemic has generated multiple forms of embodied trauma. ⁸⁵ People have lost relatives, friends and colleagues in horrific ways and for periods of time sacrificed their whole way of being, caring professionals have faced death and suffering like never before and as a society we have been impacted by the numbers of the dead, the manner of their deaths and by enforced and policed social isolation. ⁸⁶

Some of this could be labelled ‘everyday trauma’. ⁸⁷ In a long-duration catastrophe like Covid, external traumatic events are cumulative, building on each other. At the start of the pandemic, although what was happening was shocking it was not understood how long it might last or how serious it was. Then came images of overcrowded hospital wards with people on ventilators and distraught medical staff. The numbers of the dead rose beyond all imagining. We saw pictures of funerals with the few mourners standing apart from each other, isolated. Infections came in waves and restrictions were imposed, lifted and re-imposed. Then, in what was perhaps the ultimate betrayal, we realised that while we had been making unpalatable sacrifices to follow the rules, those in charge had not.

These dimensions of embodied trauma, and the distortion of time produced by the enduring disaster, have impacted our memory of the Covid-19 pandemic, even for those of us who were not bereaved. We remember daily announcements of the dead, weekly clapping for the NHS, online social events, the feelings associated with isolation, whether that be loneliness, the lack of quality time with relatives and friends, or various challenges of being confined in the home in dangerous or challenging situations, particularly for those experiencing abuse. The days would often blur into one another. ⁸⁸ Yet the period in our memories is also timeless. Events happened in a vacuum of the ‘Covid years’. What took place in 2020 feels like last year or a decade ago. Some events are hazy, others are crystal clear, as the impacts of embodied trauma build over an extended period.

Long-Term Impacts of Disaster

In other long-duration catastrophes, memory has been difficult if not impossible. It has taken years and reverberated down the generations. The 1918 pandemic was barely remembered until another global pandemic emerged. ⁸⁹ Laura Spinney argues that despite the way that memory of the 1918 pandemic took time to emerge, it ‘helped shape our modern world’ in a range of ways. ⁹⁰ Though the story was told by ‘those who got off more lightly: the white and well-off’, ‘the ones who bore the brunt of it. . .did find a way to express themselves after all – in strikes, protest and revolution’. ⁹¹

There is a growing recognition of intergenerational trauma and the way in which the embodied memory of what has gone before is passed down to future generations. Intergenerational trauma is a complex mix of biological, psychological and socio-political elements. Yael Danieli and Brian Engdahl’s work shows that it has been most explored with the holocaust, but it has also now been extensively examined in relation to the slave trade. ⁹² The cultural trauma of 300 years of enslavement has been passed down to current generations of African Americans and needs to be addressed in conjunction with current questions of poverty and prejudice. ⁹³ The intergenerational trauma of indigenous people who were colonised and oppressed has been linked to disproportionate mental health and substance misuse issues amongst these communities today. ⁹⁴

Disasters have a particular impact on those who were children at the time, which they carry with them into the future. Media and longitudinal studies allow us to understand cohorts of children of disaster. ⁹⁵ Children of parents killed on 9/11, or who survived, recount the impact on their lives 20 years on – and some were not even born before the events. ⁹⁶ It may be hard to disaggregate what has affected the child’s development and what is a form of intergenerational trauma. Epigenetics shows that ‘adverse fetal and early childhood experiences can – and do – lead to physical and chemical changes in the brain that can last a lifetime’. ⁹⁷

The social and educational consequences of Covid for children and young people meet the criteria for impacting on development. But those in the cohort termed ‘Generation Covid’ are also likely to be impacted by the embodied and cultural trauma of what happened, and to carry this forward. Even the unborn – children in utero at the time – may experience this. ⁹⁸ Lori Peek and Alice Fothergill have written about the toll on Gen C, its interplay with other social and economic factors – and the long legacy disaster leaves. They show that children are active contributors, helped in many ways during Covid, and should be listened to when developing policy and practice. ⁹⁹

The Covid-19 pandemic differs from previous ones as much is documented, recorded, photographed and filmed, providing access to a vast amount of information. Will this information change the way we remember pandemics or what we do as a result? The UK Covid-19 Inquiry provides even more material. If nothing else, it serves to keep the traumatic memory alive.

Accountability and the Politics of Disaster

The first report of the Inquiry was published on 18 July 2024. ¹⁰⁰ Conclusions were forthright and damning. ¹⁰¹ Alongside the report, a collection of personal accounts was published under the title Every Story Matters. The Inquiry Chair said she ‘wanted to hear from as many people as possible, particularly those who had suffered hardship and loss’ and a public open call ensued to gather accounts. They noted that:

For many people the impacts. . .were far reaching. In some cases they were and are extremely painful, and for some almost too painful to talk about. . .We also heard that some people want to move on and not talk about the pandemic anymore. ¹⁰²

Included were heart-breaking accounts of the trauma experienced by bereaved family members, which they attributed to inadequate end-of-life care, and the agony of not being able to be with relatives as they were dying. Both patients and their families found this distressing. One family member said, ‘I cannot move beyond my trauma, I cannot move through this grief. . .my father died from the effects of isolation, from the heartbreak of not being able to see his wife and family, from the lack of care and love he should have so rightfully received’. There are stories of relatives getting ‘lost’ once admitted to the hospital: in some cases, it seemed impossible to find out where in the hospital they were or how they were. A bereaved relative said, ‘We lost my dad for 36 hours [in the hospital]; he was taken here and there and left for hours alone parked in an ambulance with no food or water’. Some felt the lack of adequate care and the separation from their family had killed the ones they loved: ‘they killed her. . .I know Covid-19 was bad, but they put Covid-19 down as her death and her death wasn’t Covid-19. Her death was the hospital that killed her’. ¹⁰³

It is not only the reports of inquiries that survive. Like those of previous inquiries, the documents, evidence and testimony collected by the Covid Inquiry write memory into the public record: a written or electronic archive often more durable than built memorials, and much more informative.

Embodied Memory

Embodied memory is tenacious, too: the body cannot forget. Long Covid is an obvious reminder of how the body remembers, with some affected still suffering very serious effects years on. Significantly, ‘the pandemic has not only brought our own bodies back to us but also made us hyperaware of the bodies of others’. ¹⁰⁴ ‘Persistent’ mask wearers and those with the lingering hacking cough are bodies that remind us of the pandemic. But we remember that the bodies of other people were dangerous and how contact was to be avoided. We remember avoiding enclosed spaces and crowds. Pandemic wounds to the body are largely invisible: embodied trauma cannot be seen by the casual observer.

Society is scarred by the pandemic and bodies remain materially changed by Covid-19 too. The virus stays with us and has irrevocably altered our bodily composition as we carry antibodies permanently. Moreover, in some people the virus itself remains present in the body for many months even though they have no symptoms and test negative for the virus. ¹⁰⁵ Indeed, given this viral longevity, the scientific community has come to describe Covid-19’s ‘cellular debris’ as ‘viral ghosts’ found lingering in the brain and gut of Long Covid sufferers, and such traces of the virus are now thought to be responsible for their ongoing afflictions. ¹⁰⁶ Meanwhile, those suffering from Long Covid experience brain fog and memory problems including poor verbal learning and short- and long-term verbal memory deficits. ¹⁰⁷

Despite our societal and personal scars, the pandemic dead have disappeared into their graves, with only the National Covid Memorial Wall remaining in the United Kingdom. In March 2021 150,000 red hearts were painted to represent those dying from Covid-19 in the United Kingdom by that time. In contrast to the decreasing visibility of national data showing ongoing deaths from Covid, the wall’s decorations have continued to spread as the numbers grow. Some hearts are named, but no faces appear alongside them. ¹⁰⁸ It has not yet been made a permanent memorial, but its organisers, the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK, are active in ensuring the dead are not forgotten. They do not forget the trauma. In a sense the wall could be seen as an encircling of the trauma: it marks the trauma and thus disrupts the narrative of the state and the return to ‘normal’ and forgetting. In the words of Fran Hall – a member of Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice and part of the ‘Friends of the Wall’ group who maintain and add to the Wall as the death toll climbs ever higher – the Wall is ‘a powerful, visual response to a deep, unarticulated need for something – anything – to mark the horror of what we all knew had happened, the sheer awfulness of so many devastating deaths’. ¹⁰⁹ Indeed, the image of the wall and its multitude of red hearts provides an evocative background to their activism. Its position, in front of St. Thomas’ hospital and opposite parliament, provides a reminder that while we commemorate the dead, we also remember the political decisions which contributed to their deaths and the betrayals of those in power. In this way the Wall as a manifestation of the encirclement of pandemic trauma now confronts our parliament through its continual visual interruption into the Palace of Westminster.

The wall gives each death its heart, and each one was tragic for the bereaved. It was so even for those whose friends or relatives did not die of Covid-19 but, because their deaths took place during the pandemic, were subject to the same restrictions: no visitors, no proper funerals. But it is important to note once again that the pandemic was unequal. Some bodies, whether individual or community, can recover and forget and others can’t. ¹¹⁰ Race, class and gender were significant in who was most at risk and who felt the most severe impact. ¹¹¹ The elderly and the disabled were particularly exposed. ¹¹² Lockdown affected people in different ways. ¹¹³ Changes in burial and funeral practices affected some groups more than others. ¹¹⁴ However, it is unclear that this will be recognised and lead to change; the voices of those who suffered most may well not be sufficiently amplified. As Brand explains in relation to racialised communities:

The X-ray that is the novel coronavirus exposes once again the bare bones of the social structure in which for Black and Indigenous people governance equals policing. Governance as violence. This we fear – this we know – that all of our thoughts will be rushed into editorial pages, used up in committee meetings; all the rich imaginings of activists and thinkers who urge us to live otherwise may be disappeared, modified into reform and inclusion, equity, diversity and palliation. ¹¹⁵

Dealing With Deaths

One element crucial to minimising harms in disaster is the proper handling of deaths. This failed in the Covid-19 pandemic due to the absence of sufficient personal protective equipment, following government budget cuts. Had there been enough, as there should have been, it would not have been necessary to place such severe restrictions on visiting those in hospital or in care homes. People need not have died alone. And it would have been possible for the bereaved to view their relatives’ body. ¹¹⁶ Without this we were faced with what Pauline Boss calls ‘ambiguous loss’: the dead have essentially disappeared, and the bereaved are left not knowing what happened at the end of their relative’s life. ¹¹⁷ Unresolved grief like this lingers.

The burden carried by nurses was extreme. As well as accompanying dying patients when family members could not, nursing staff were responsible for transferring bodies to the mortuary staff and returning the deceased’s personal effects to their families. Personal effects were placed into plastic bags to await collection. The handover was distressing for both staff and recipients. As one nurse recounted:

To avoid contagion, we closed them in sacks and we handed them to relatives at the unit door. And as soon as they received these sacks, they got down on their knees and cried. That was it, we felt helpless, but in the end, the only thing to do was remain silent, because there was nothing to say. ¹¹⁸

Some relatives were too afraid to collect personal possessions, and for those who died in care homes this meant that nurses ‘see the objects of a person’s life that go away with the person. . .a lot of their photos. . .all their things were thrown away, and nothing remained to the family’. For nurses, the pandemic meant ‘profound suffering over the disruption or disorganization of rituals associated with death, moral distress caused by difficult choices and lack of time to mourn for the loss of patients left an indelible mark’. ¹¹⁹

How can the pandemic be over when traumatic memory such as this remains? Michael Shapiro has analysed what he calls prolonged grief; what we see here is analogous: prolonged trauma. ¹²⁰ The embodied traumatic impacts of the pandemic continue. They have a political impact that endures. Traumatic memory does not submit to the narrative of the powerful. It is political; it disrupts.

Conclusion

Moving & passionate statement from @TanDhesi reminding the PM that 10,000s of us haven’t even begun to mourn the loss of loved ones to Covid . . . while members of his Govt drove a coach & horses thro the ‘no contact’ regulations One Law for Them, One For Us

– Nazir Afzal, 7 July 2021. ¹²¹

Through a discussion of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom, this article has examined what the implications of embodied trauma and traumatic memory might be for stages of recovery as conceived in disaster response and emergency planning literature and what the embodied legacies might be. We argued that following a period of embodied trauma there are two possibilities: recovery and healing, on the one hand, and actively marking the trauma on the other. The first, and often the only possibility considered in much of the technocratic disaster recovery literature, we view as a depoliticizing move, one that seeks to return to the safety of the status quo. The second, often insisted on by those who have experienced the embodied trauma and cannot forget, is politicising: recognising the political potential of a crisis that has demonstrated the unfounded nature of the fantasy that holds existing social power structures – and the inequalities they enable – together. The first leads to a medicalising of the trauma and a silencing of those who have suffered; the second opens the possibility of political activism and societal change.

We showed examples of how this social and political potential emerged in the case of the Covid-19 pandemic, while recognising that this pandemic is still playing out at the time of writing. We detailed the many ways in which people experienced the traumatic impact of the pandemic. We noted the traumatic betrayal experienced when it became clear that their government had not been obeying its own rules, and the political consequences that, along with the general incompetence and apparent corruption of those with a duty to protect us, contributed to the eventual fall of the government. We elaborated how the pandemic affects those who are children at the time, how its long-term impact will be passed down the generations like that of other disasters, and how Laura Spinney shows that, despite the absence of memorials, the 1918 pandemic influenced and indeed produced wide socio-political change. We showed how the voices of those who refuse to forget the embodied trauma are recorded in detail in the documents and hearings of the Covid-19 Inquiry and represented forcefully in the National Covid Memorial Wall – a product of continuing and overtly political activism by the Covid bereaved.

In contrast, there is much pressure to move on, and there seems to be more forgetting than ever as time passes. Do we need to forget to recover? Do we have to put memory to one side? We may attempt to do that, and it may seem that we succeed, but we would argue that traumatic memory is stored in the body and has a habit of returning later. It is not easy to speak about trauma, since the traumatic is precisely what cannot be encompassed in language. ¹²² It is not easy to stop and acknowledge trauma in a world that moves so quickly onto the next crisis, and the next. Yet, as we have seen, many people insist on encircling the trauma. They refuse any form of recovery that entails forgetting and, instead, turn to forms of political activism and demands for memory, accountability and justice.

An example of someone who turned to political activism is Nazir Afzal, a former Crown Prosecutor, who lost his brother to coronavirus on 8 April 2020. As one of the bereaved he has campaigned persistently for accountability and justice. ¹²³ As a result of his activism, the police re-opened their investigation into then-Chief Adviser to the UK Prime Minister Dominic Cummings’ alleged breaches of the lockdown rules. In 2021, Afzal campaigned for an urgent inquiry and stressed the importance of putting bereaved families first. ¹²⁴ He is motivated by the embodied traumatic memory of what he went through:

Throughout these campaigns, he is sustained by the grim memory of dealing with the body of his brother, a former Home Office interpreter, after he died from the Coronavirus in April. It was a harrowing period for Afzal, which involved carrying his brother’s corpse downstairs with his siblings, waiting weeks for the death certificate because of a backlog, and then being denied the opportunity to attend the funeral because of COVID-related restrictions. ¹²⁵

Another of those who cannot forget is Kevin Fong, a consultant anaesthetist seconded during the pandemic to NHS England as National Clinical Adviser in Emergency Preparedness Resilience and Response. He gave evidence on 26 September 2024 at the start of Module 3 of the Covid-19 Inquiry. ¹²⁶ His evidence was blunt and uncompromising. It was widely reported and created quite an impact in the media. ¹²⁷ It highlights the contrast between what was actually happening in hospitals and the data that was being used centrally for planning and public communication and chimes with the evidence of bereaved families that we have seen recounted in Every Story Matters. During the pandemic, Fong decided to visit hospitals to see for himself and to support staff. He told the Inquiry:

I was greeted at the entrance by one of the intensive care registrars. I asked him immediately what things had been like. He replied – I will never forget, he replied ‘It’s been like a terrorist attack every day since this started and we don’t know when the attacks are going to stop. . .We went to another unit where things got so bad, they were so short of resources, they ran out of body bags and they were instead issued with 9-foot clear plastic sacks and cable ties, and those nurses talk about being really traumatised by that because they had recurring nightmares about feeling like they were just throwing bodies away. These people are used to seeing death but not on that scale and not like that. And whatever the figures show you, the experience for them was indescribable’. ¹²⁸

It is clear that for him, nursing staff, the bereaved and many others, the memories and embodied trauma will continue to reverberate across time and space. With what political implications, if any, remains to be seen.

The Covid-19 pandemic is an unusual disaster. It was (and is) a disaster sustained over a prolonged period, with infections arriving in waves across the globe. There were significant inequalities within and between the Global North and South, with unequal distribution of vulnerabilities, medical equipment and vaccines. Despite variations and inequalities in different locations, there are strong commonalities. Though the details may not be the same, the fact of trauma as an encounter with the Real traverses histories. Those who have experienced trauma share a connection. In the case of a global pandemic millions are affected, and millions embody the potential bond. Some choose to move on; others refuse.

Despite the near impossibility of speaking, many want to mark the trauma, encircling it. And, recognising the political moment it offers, choose to be active. It is vital, then, we have argued, for disaster planners and others to listen to the people and communities who decide to remember what happened, or, perhaps more accurately, cannot and will not forget. They are the ones who hold on to the political potential, to the possibility of a different social-political order: a new order, perhaps, that does not conceal its own incompleteness but acknowledges contingency. For these often marginalised or racialised communities, there is inevitably a fear, as we have seen, that, despite everything ‘all the rich imaginings of activists and thinkers who urge us to live otherwise may be disappeared, modified into reform and inclusion, equity, diversity and palliation’ by those who benefit from the status quo. ¹²⁹

Many of those involved in disaster recovery, not only in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic but more widely, tend to disregard the possibility that people who have experienced disaster may not wish to be medicalised and offered treatments that purport to ‘heal’ the trauma. In disaster recovery it is important to recognise that people may not want to return to ‘normal’. Instead, they may reject the technocratic solutions offered in traditional approaches and seek to express their desire for change through political activism. In our account of embodied trauma, elaborated through discussions of the Covid-19 pandemic, we have revealed some of the ways in which disaster might have the potential to lead to social and political change.