ABSTRACT
As I write, the new inquests into the 96 soccer fans crushed to death in the Hillsborough stadium disaster of 1989 are currently ongoing, not likely to conclude until early 2016.1 Like much, if not all, social scientic research, this chapter stems from some personal exigency on the part of the researcher (Taylor et al., 1996, p. 3; Walter, 1996). This “biographical injunction” to explore the deep connections between sudden and traumatic death, complicated grief and the stadium disaster at Hillsborough are rooted not just in my own academic interest in the public mourning which followed the disaster (Brennan, 2008a, 2008b, 2008c), but can be traced to my own personal “investments” in the stadium as evoking a sense of “placeness”/ “homeness”2 (Relph, 1976; Tuan, 1974) and identication with “the event” and those killed in it (as people I perceived to be “like me”). Such identication stems from a shared identity – and imagined kinship (Foster and Woodthorpe, 2012) – with fellow soccer fans (many of those killed at Hillsborough were, like me at the time, teenagers) and the shared occupancy of public space (for I too had regularly stood on the same terraces at the Hillsborough stadium in Shef-eld where fans died). “Collective identities,” as Rustin (1987, p. 34) suggests, are in this way forged “through the common occupancy of space.” More pressingly, the city in which I now live and work, Liverpool, is home to the vast majority of those killed and bereaved by the Hillsborough disaster. And,
while the new inquests, which opened in March 2014, continue to receive national and international coverage, they are reported most keenly, and on a daily basis, in local media, in the city that experienced the Hillsborough disaster – and subsequent media (mis)representation of it – as collective cultural trauma (Hughson and Spaaij, 2011).
