Manchester stands united: place-based identity facilitates resilience in the aftermath of a mass emergency

Hart, H, Stevenson, C ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2438-6425 and Kellezi, B ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4825-3624, 2026. Manchester stands united: place-based identity facilitates resilience in the aftermath of a mass emergency. British Journal of Social Psychology, 65 (2): e70056. ISSN 0144-6665

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Abstract

Understanding community resilience to disasters is fundamentally important in a world characterized by increasing political and environmental instability. The Social Identity Model of Collective Resilience has examined how the shared identity that emerges among neighbourhood residents affected by disasters can facilitate and coordinate effective collective responses, but has yet to examine impacts on community members beyond those directly affected. This is particularly important given the role of social identities in creating shared vulnerability and resilience to collective trauma among those indirectly affected, as well as evidence that neighbourhood identification can provide residents with collective resilience to a range of shared socio-economic and environmental stressors. The present study addresses this gap through an exploration of residents' accounts of the occurrence and aftermath of a terrorist attack on Manchester, England in 2017. The thematic analysis of retrospective interviews with 18 city residents indirectly affected by the bomb revealed that two key aspects of Mancunian identity – diversity and endurance of the city – were used to interpret the event and reported to facilitate coordinated coping and collective recovery. The implications are that identifying and enhancing local norms of cohesion and endurance can play a part in providing communities with resilience to future disasters.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	British Journal of Social Psychology
Creators:	Hart, H., Stevenson, C. and Kellezi, B.
Publisher:	Wiley
Date:	April 2026
Volume:	65
Number:	2
ISSN:	0144-6665
Identifiers:	Number Type 2571816 Other 10.1111/bjso.70056 DOI
Rights:	This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Hart, H, Stevenson, C and Kellezi, B, 2026. Manchester stands united: place-based identity facilitates resilience in the aftermath of a mass emergency. British Journal of Social Psychology, 65 (2): e70056, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.70056. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions. This article may not be enhanced, enriched or otherwise transformed into a derivative work, without express permission from Wiley or by statutory rights under applicable legislation. Copyright notices must not be removed, obscured or modified. The article must be linked to Wiley’s version of record on Wiley Online Library and any embedding, framing or otherwise making available the article or pages thereof by third parties from platforms, services and websites other than Wiley Online Library must be prohibited. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Jonathan Gallacher
Date Added:	12 Feb 2026 16:33
Last Modified:	01 Apr 2026 09:08
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/55260

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