Temporary Communities: The role of culture following social disaster

This project aims to investigate the role of culture in the mobilisation of community and resilience following social disaster. Taking the Manchester Arena attack on 22nd May 2017 as a case study, I intend to understand how cultural symbols, such as Mancunian music and the visual symbol of the worker bee, which thousands had tattooed on their bodies, demonstrate the importance of cultural practices for the Mancunian community at times of adversity.

Using Durkheim's (1912) influential work: "in elementary forms of religious life", I will suggest that the adoption of these cultural practices created a communal solidarity across the globe, whereby individuals feel connected to each other through shared feelings of resilience, despite being geographically dispersed.

In doing so, my project will develop a new definition of community, viewing community as dynamic and transcending place. The community response we saw to the Manchester Arena Attack highlighted how communities are both a site of commonness and of difference, for individuals came together globally, as a temporary community, using rituals and practices.

To explore this form of community, I will take the notion of temporary communities from Maffesoli's (1995) account of 'affectual tribes', which mobilise around an event, forming temporary yet strong emotional bonds, dissolving quickly after community and resilience is achieved. I argue that this, too was the case for the Manchester Arena Attack, for individuals across the world adopted symbols of the city, such as bee tattoos and murals, as a technique to strengthen the community at large. Inevitably, in the weeks following the attack, defining characteristics of this community rescinded. I believe that, given the under-researched nature of studies looking at community, resilience, disasters and culture, my thesis will provide a sound framework for understanding the community response of future social disasters.

The research questions I have constructed are as follows:
How was a sense of Manchester and Mancunian identity and community revivified in the wake of the terrorist attack?
Who belonged to this community?
What was the role of cultural objects in this process?
How were emotions mobilised in this process?
What was enduring and temporary in this process?

In order to complete my PhD thesis, I intend to spent my masters' year exploring methods, developing my expertise and fine tuning my methodology alongside my PhD supervisor, Professor Nick Crossley. At this current moment, I currently envisage a mixed method approach which will allow me to, not only provide a holistic account of the events surrounding the community response, but the various different motivations individuals had for participating in such cultural practices.
My current mixed method approach is as follows:

Archival analysis. This will be used to reconstruct the aftermath of the event, drawing upon a variety of archived media and social media sources.
Visual analysis. I will construct and analyse a visual archive of photographs of cultural objects that remain in Manchester's outdoor space.
Social network analysis. This may be a helpful tool for mapping and tracking the emergence of community during the period studied.
Semi-structured interviews. This will be helpful in examining how a sense of Mancunian identity was experienced by both ordinary Mancunians and more dispersed sympathisers, and the motivations which informed their participation.

My sampling strategy for the interviews will be devised in conjunction with my archival analysis. Throughout my postgraduate study, I intend to keep in close communication with the University's Mitchell Centre for Social Network Analysis. In the same way, I believe my work would benefit from the methodological work of the University department: The Morgan Centre for the Analysis of Everyday Life.