Understanding Spaces and Practices for Collective Mourning: The Importance of Peace Research
Lucy E. Bailey1 & Amanda Kingston2
Scholars have raised questions about the absence of a curriculum of grief and spaces for collective mourning practices in formal educational spaces (e.g. Otto, 2014). More commonly, spaces of mourning emerge in, for example, anti-war museums, rituals of commemoration at sites of violence and loss, such as the site of the 1911 Triangle ShirtWaist Factory Fire in New York (Otto, 2014) or grounds of the Oklahoma City Bombing Memorial (Bailey & Kingston, 2020). Yet violence, loss, tragedy, are central to human experience and, whether children or adults, we need varied spaces to affirm grief collectively in diverse ways. We also recognize the importance of fueling research that contributes to understanding the relationships between mourning and peace. At this writing, COVID-19 cases continue to increase, political tensions about slips of cloth rage on, and stories fill the news and community’s hearts about lives lost, whether a young child, an unvaccinated adult, a beloved teacher. Peace researchers have an important role to play in understanding forms and spaces of grieving.
In Earthquake Children (2020), Janet Borland, a historian of Japan, examines a unique body of writing and drawings produced by children who lived through the 1923 Great Kantö earthquake. This valuable book details children’s experiences during a massive natural disaster that catapulted changes in designing buildings and preparing for future earthquakes in Japan. Yet it also offers insights into children’s eye-witness accounts of tragedy and loss, as are widespread globally today, and their recovery and resilience in the wake of the earthquake’s destruction. Rather than adults’ retrospective accounts of tragedy, the documents Borland studied reflected children’s experiences at the time of the earthquake. Many were in school when the earthquake occurred, and in the weeks following the destruction, many were hungry to return to the comforting rituals of schooling--even amid loss, ruined buildings, dirty clothing, and few supplies. In the wake of collective trauma, witnessing death and suffering, teachers fostered children’s well-being, curriculum changed to prepare children for natural disasters, and school cultivated hope and resilience. Although Borland did not design her work as peace research, its insights offer examples of sites of collective grief, mourning, and recovery vital to peace studies. In our current historical moment, peace researchers can ask: What are the spaces and practices people are cultivating to honor collective grief? Which of these focus on children? How are communities acknowledging and holding space for grief, and mourning and for what and whom do they grieve? Whose lives are grievable? (Butler, 2004) What is the role of grief and mourning in peace research today? These are some of the questions that we face as peace researchers in precarious times.
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Bailey, L. E., & Kingston, A. M. (2020). Pilgrimage as a mode of inquiry: the Oklahoma City bombing memorial as entangled place of education. Journal of Peace Education, 17(3), 283–307. https://doi.org/10.1080/17400201.2020.1808778
Borland, J. (2020). Earthquake children: Building resilience from the ruins of Tokyo. Harvard University Asian Center.
Butler, J. (2004). Precarious Life: The powers of mourning and violence. Verso.
Otto, S. (2014). A Garden from Ashes: The Post-9/11 Manhattan City-Shrine, the Triangle Fire Memorial March, and the Educative Value of Mourning. Journal of Social History Vol. 47, No. 3, 573-592. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43305950
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1Associate professor, Social Foundations of Education & Qualitative Inquiry and Director of Gender, Women's & Sexuality Studies, Oklahoma State University, USA.
2Master's candidate, Social Foundations of Education & Qualitative Inquiry, Oklahoma State University, USA.