Contesting public forgetting: Memory and policy learning in the era of Covid-19

Abstract

This article examines scholarship on public forgetting and its implications for post-disaster recovery and policy learning to theorize how tendencies toward structural amnesia risk limit policy learning as the Covid-19 pandemic continues to unfold and as the climate crisis exacerbates the risk of new global health crises. This article will contribute to memory studies by advancing a theory of how public forgetting leads to a cascade of impacts on policy and social well-being. Building on Beiner’s work on social memory, scholarship on the politics of memory, and research on post-disaster policy learning, I show that institutional forgetting implicitly places individual and collective memories outside the public sphere in which policymaking occurs. This discourages commemorative practices that constitute the traumatic past and present of the pandemic as creating responsibilities on the part of policymakers and governments for increased protections in the present and policy learning in the future. Constituting the Covid-19 pandemic as a necessary subject of public memory, in contrast, allows individuals and communities to assert rights to restitution and accountability for the policy failures that led to profound racial and socioeconomic disparities in risks of infection, severe illness, and death. Through engaging with the memory advocacy by the nonprofit groups the We Must Count Coalition, Marked by Covid, and the Covid-19 Longhauler Advocacy Project, I illustrate how commemorative practices by social movements illuminate the policy implications of contesting how collective traumas will be remembered.