Urban Terrorism in Contemporary Europe

This open access book sheds light on collective practices of remembering, imagining and anticipating in relation to recent acts of urban terrorism in Europe. Analysing a range of personal and collective responses to urban terrorism in contemporary Europe, this book shows that current debates on this issue are shaped by multiple co-existing and intersecting memories of political violence in the past. Moreover, despite public declarations of unity and solidarity, collective memories of urban terror in contemporary Europe are far from consensual - memory can be both a catalyst for and an impediment to social and political change. Drawing on case studies from a range of European countries and creative responses by survivors, artists, and poets, this interdisciplinary volume introduces readers to key methods (e.g. discourse analysis and (auto-)ethnography) and concepts (e.g. Lieux de Mémoire and ‘grassroots memorials’) for the study of the memoralization of terror attacks. Katharina Karcher is Associate Professor in German at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her research focuses on protest movements and political violence in the 20th and 21st centuries. She is particularly interested in questions of gender, race, class, dis/ability, and political ideology. Yordanka Dimcheva is a doctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her research focuses on the experiences of terrorist violence in France since 2015 and the complex way trauma, grief, and affect shape how the attacks are remembered. Mireya Toribio Medina is a lawyer specialising in criminal law and a doctoral researcher at the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham. Her research project analyses the construction of the narratives surrounding terrorist violence in Spain’s contemporary legal system. Mia Parkes is a doctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her research focusses on women’s political imprisonment in the 20th and 21st centuries, including immigration detention, and is centred largely upon testimony, memory, and the prison texts of incarcerated women.