Death and denial in the City: Making sense of London Bridge and Grenfell

Abstract

In the wake of violent events comes a rush to make sense of what happened. Sensemaking matters because it bounds political possibilities, producing knowledge about what caused the violence, who is accountable, and whether society should change to prevent a recurrence. This paper explores sensemaking through an intertextual discourse analysis of elite, print, and social media responses to two violent events in the global city of London in June 2017: the London Bridge terrorist attack and the Grenfell Tower fire. For some, global cities like London are imagined as inclusive and post-imperial: a place of safety and security. Others regard global cities like London as sites of intensive racialisation, inequality, and hierarchy: a political order that produces insecurity. Scholarly debates suggest that public sensemaking could generate alternative political registers to contest the established narratives that sustain violent orders. Yet, our analysis reveals that, in this instance, intertextual sense-making in a social media age overwhelmingly reflected and reproduced existing socio-political order. Through discourses of denial, the prosperous global city of London emerged as a place where violence might occur but not a violent place. We analyse three discourses of denial: (1) that the events failed to reflect ‘who we are’, (2) that ‘others’ were to blame, and (3) a fatalistic acceptance that some violence ‘is what it is’. Despite academic optimism about public sensemaking, we show denial functions to externalise the causes of violence from socio-political and spatial orders, limiting the scope for change.