Although there is a quickly growing body of research on the cultural and political impact of urban terrorism in Europe, there is still no major comparative study on this subject. UrbTerr makes an important step towards filling this research gap by offering the first in-depth comparative analysis of memory discourses and responses to recent acts of urban terrorism in Spain, the UK, France, and Germany. In the first 30 months of the project, the UrbTerr team carried out field work in these four countries. To document and analyse collective practices of remembering and forgetting, we conducted ethnographic research at ‘grassroots memorials’ (spontaneous memorial assemblages at attack sites), trials, museums, official memorials, as well as in busy town centres and other urban spaces. Our methodology is best described as “sensory ethnography”, i.e. “a process of learning through the ethnographer’s own multisensory, emplaced experiences” (Pink, 2015, p. 96). Our findings so far show that such public spaces are used to express grief over past violence, but that they can also be foci of protest and catalysts for campaigns for less violent futures.
One of UrbTerr’s key aims is to develop a new materialist approach to urban terrorism, and to use this theoretical framework to offer a critical analysis of the role of material objects and infrastructures in terrorist attacks and counter-terrorism strategies. To work towards this objective, we have organised workshops and conferences with leading experts in new (feminist) materialism. While our theoretical framework draws on ideas from a range of thinkers, the work of feminist physicist and philosopher Karen Barad is of particular importance to UrbTerr. A Baradian approach enables us to analyse urban terrorism as a ‘material-discursive’ phenomenon and to explore how terrorist weapons have evolved with and against weapon laws, counter-terrorism architectures, and a range of other material and immaterial structures and processes. We are currently working on a number of co-authored and individual publications outlining and further developing this new materialist approach to terrorism. Of particular importance in this context is the PI’s monograph 'The Terror of Things: Rethinking security through the agency of everyday objects' (Bloomsbury, 2023).
Art plays a vital part in UrbTerr because it can be used to honour the memory of victims and to expand the field of imagination in ways that go beyond the forms of narrating, planning, and playing that characterise many counter-terrorism measures. In 2020, the PI and the Birmingham based arts organisation Eastside Projects (EP) released the call for submissions (In)security – critical explorations and alternative visions resulting in a fruitful collaboration with five artists. The collaboration culminated in the art exhibition ‘It might be nothing but it could be something’ (
https://eastsideprojects.org/projects/insecurity2020/(opens in new window)). The PI has initiated a number of other art collaborations, including a photography project with a survivor of the London Bridge attack in 2019, and is working towards a major international art event in 2023.
