Living Well with the Dead in Contemporary Ireland
Amelia Stein, Laundry, 2018*
Thinkery
Living Well with the Confined Dead
Date: Friday 10th May
Time: 9:15-5pm
Location: River Room, The Glucksman Gallery
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Contributors include
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Claire McGettrick, Katherine O'Donnell & Maeve O'Rourke, Justice for Magdalenes
Sarah-Anne Buckley, Tuam Mother and Baby Home Oral History Project
Maureen Considine, Survivors Community Garden Project
Niamh McCullagh, Independent Forensic Archaeologist
Margrit Shildrick, Professor of Gender and Knowledge Production, Stockholm University
This Thinkery will provide a forum for the exploration of new ways of thinking and asking new questions, rather than refining existing answers, about living well with the dead. Our use of the phrase ‘living well with the dead’ alludes to Jacques Derrida’s (1994, xix) ethical challenge to ‘learn to live with ghosts’, where justice extends beyond responsibility to the living present, to those who are not yet born or who are already dead. Focusing on the ‘confined dead’, the now biologically but previously socially dead, it will feature contributions from members of Justice for Magdalenes and the Tuam Mother and Baby Home Oral History Project, together with members of the research collective involved in the UCC-based project Living Well with the Dead in Contemporary Ireland.
With the further postponement until 2020 of the final report of the government-appointed Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes, largely because investigation of the burial arrangements for those who died there has proven to be considerably more difficult than anticipated, we will consider what is to be done? Although the dead from these institutions are amongst Ireland’s ‘disappeared’, they have reappeared in Irish public life, and their disturbing specter now haunts us.
Recognizing the inadequacies of biomedical imaginaries of the dead, but also of the imaginaries underpinning many juridico-political responses to atrocities of the past, we aim to contribute to the collective imagination of what Derrida (2001) refers to as the ‘democracy to come’. We turn to feminist theorizing as a wellspring of ideas, to commemorate, understand and oppose modalities of violence in everyday small wars that result in social deaths and lives that do not matter. This will include consideration of our radical and inevitable interdependency on others, including anonymous others, and things, and the implications of recognizing this interdependency for our political and ethical responsibilities.
The Thinkery is the culmination of a series of transdisciplinary workshops, together with exploratory ethnographic and archival research using University College Cork as our study site. Amongst the issues explored in that research are the historical enlisting of the confined dead in the teaching of anatomy and the production of various bodies of knowledge, ethical issues in contemporary anatomy and archaeological practices, students’ pedagogical encounters with the dead, and the quandaries surrounding what should be done with historical anatomical collections.
Due to place restrictions, booking for this event is essential. If you are interested in participating, please book a place by contacting Robert Bolton (robert.bolton@ucc.ie).
*From the exhibition The Parted Veil: Commemoration in Photographic Practices
in the Glucksman Gallery until 30 June 2019 http://www.glucksman.org/exhibitions/the-parted-veil
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Workshop 5
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Technology of Death and Dying at the Beginning of Life
- Thinking with Posthumanist Feminist Theories
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Date: Monday, 25th March
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3-4.45pm - CACSSS Seminar Room O'Rahilly Building G27
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Stine Willum Adrian, Department of Learning and Philosophy, Aalborg University, Copenhagen
Technology of Death and Dying at the Beginning of Life - Thinking with Posthumanist Feminist Theories
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5-6.30pm - 'Film and Screen Media Centre' (Kane B10, Basement - end of corridor)
Screening of Donna Haraway - Story telling for earthly survival
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Speaker: Stine Adrian, Department of Learning and Philosophy, Aalborg University Copenhagen
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Technology of Death and Dying at the Beginning of Life
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In this presentation I will introduce the project “Technologies of Death and Dying at The Beginning of Life”. Technologies used during pregnancies, births and at NICUs influence how the death of fetuses and infants take place, and how they are managed. Prenatal screening that has been offered to all Danish pregnant women since 2004 has changed which lives are ended, while a cooling cot, a cot with cooling elements introduced at birthing wards, has enabled families that have lost an infant to spent more time with the infant before the funeral. In this project the cases of late-term abortion and the deaths of infants suffering from severe malformations will be our focus as we ask: How does technology remake death and dying at the beginning of life? Combining ethnographic and legal methods we will inquire into how deaths at the beginning of life emerge and are managed through technologies, and how these deaths are lived with. In this presentation I will particularly focus on how we conceptualize and understand technology as part of remaking death, through drawing on posthuman feminist theory, taking a point of departure in agential realism (Barad, 2007) and Haraway's reconfiguration of technologies (1991).
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Biography
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Since her PhD in Feminist STS and cultural analysis at Linköping University, Adrian has been working on the use of assisted reproductive technologies and how creations, materializations or emergence takes place as reproductive technologies are at use. Adrian’s work has made several contributions. Ethnographically, she has added depth in the field of assisted reproductive technologies in Denmark and Sweden. Methodologically, she has developed new humanist technoanthropological ways informed by posthumanist feminist theory to study and analyze how the emergence of change takes place as technologies are used in reproduction. By studying the case of the sperm industry, Adrian has shown how ethics is negotiated and regulated in clinics and sperm banks. Additionally, Adrian has always been outspoken in the media, contributing with empirically-based reflections in debates on the uses of reproductive technologies.
Image: From Donna Haraway - Story telling for earthly survival
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Image: The Medical Museum, Queen’s College Cork at the beginning of the 20th century (O’Rahilly, 1949).
Using UCC as our study site, the Living Well with the Dead project includes archival and ethnographic research on the display and
enlisting of the dead since the foundation of the university to produce bodies of knowledge and the ‘order of things’.
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Workshop 4
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Theatres of the Dead: Performance, Anatomy and Archaeology
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Location: CACSSS Seminar Room ORB G27 and Screen Media Centre in Kane Building B10 (Basement)
Date and time: 19th March, 11am-5.30pm (4-5:15pm in Screen Media Centre, Kane B10)
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Speakers:
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Margaret Werry, Theatre Arts and Dance, University of Minnesota
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Anna Furse, Department of Theatre and Performance, Goldsmiths University of London
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Joanna Sofaer, Department of Archarology, University of Southampton
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Oonagh Kearney, Independent film-maker
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This transdisciplinary workshop, which will include a screening of Oonagh Kearney’s award winning film Five Letters to the Stranger who will Dissect my Brain, is the fourth in the series of workshops in the project Living Well with the Dead in Contemporary Ireland. This project aims to find new ways of thinking about, researching and responding to contemporary public disquiet in Ireland about uncared-for dead bodies.
Through creative and critical approaches from theatre and performance studies, digital media and film, museology and archaeology, this workshop offers provocations and insights into the ways bodies become theatres, performances or sites, and where questions of who and what are displayed and for what audience, what is onstage and what is ‘obscene’ (off-stage), will continue to develop the on-going debates of the Living Well with the Dead project.
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Margaret Werry
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Margaret Werry is an Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, in the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance. Her first book, The Tourist State: Performing Leisure, Liberalism, and Race in New Zealand (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) examined the role of tourism in ethnic politics and liberal state-making. She is currently working on a short book entitled Theatre & Tourism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), examining the historical and contemporary entanglement of these two industries. Another major project (The Performing Dead: Public Culture at the Borders of the Human) concerns the way we treat, trade, and display human remains in museums and popular culture, and what this can tell us about contested and politicized understandings of human life, death, and rights. Her other scholarly interests include critical and experimental pedagogy, multimedia and immersive performance, indigenous and intercultural theatre, and indigenous performance activism against climate change in the island Pacific. Werry has published on these topics in a range of international journals, including Public Culture, Cultural Studies, Theatre Journal, Performance Research, TPQ, Review of Cultural Studies, Education and Pedagogy, TDR, and Essays in Theatre. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Wenner Gren Anthropological Foundation, Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, American Association of University Women, and the Interweaving Performance Cultures project at the International Research Centre at Freie Universitat Berlin.
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Anna Furse
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Anna Furse is a professional theatre artist, academic researcher, creative and critical writer. She Directs the MA in Performance Making at Goldsmiths - an international laboratory programme in performer-driven theatre/dance/live art making. She designed and convenes the BA in DTA Comedy and Satire and supervises undergraduate Dissertations and Practice Research PhD students. She curates the Performance Research Forum (PRF) - currently entering its 28th programme - for which she received a Peake Teaching Award in 2005. She is currently the Department’s Co-Director of Research. She is co-director, with medical historian Dr Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim, of the interdisciplinary Centre of the Body. As Head of Department of Theatre and Performance 2011 - 2015, one of her key projects was the refurbishment of the George Wood Theatre and Studios that opened in 2018.
As one of the handful of first-generation of women directors in the UK, she uniquely blended feminist issues with Laboratory Theatre research in the early 1980s, earning her innovative international-touring feminist project Bloodgroup 1979 – 1986 critical acclaim and a London home at the ICA. Together with Suzy Gilmour, Kate Owen, Sylvia Hallet, Rick Fisher and other collaborators, she co-created 6 devised works that toured Europe, and directed Deborah Levy’s CLAM in 1985.
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An award-winning theatre director-writer, staging modern and new plays, classics and a range of devised works as well as her own commissioned creations, she has collaborated closely with some distinguished theatre artists including Peter Brook’s pioneering scenographer Sally Jacobs, lighting designer Rick Fisher, composers Stephen Warbeck and Graeme Miller, and musicians David Coulter and Henry Dagg. She has produced her work in a range of contexts, from repertory to applied theatres, ‘sci-art’ to experimental laboratory environments. In the 1980s she worked as movement director at the RSC and directed for numerous UK companies including Graeae, Scarlet Harlets and Womens Theatre Group (Sphynx). She has received many ACE Awards, Bursaries and Grants over the years as well as funding from the AHRC, the British Academy, Impact and People Awards and Small Grants from the Wellcome Trust.
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Selected publications include: editing a new experimental anthology for Theatre in Pieces: Politics, Poetics and Interdisciplinary Collaboration (Methuen, 2011); guest editing an issue on Gender and Performance for GenderForum, University of Köln; ‘Being Touched’ for A Life of Ethics and Performance (ed. John Matthews), Cambridge Scholars Press; ‘In Every Litre of Sea Water There Are Two Tablespoons of Salt… On Making SEA/WOMAN’ in Women: A Cultural Review. 22.4 (ed. Helen Carr) 2011.
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Joanna Sofaer
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Professor Joanna Sofaer (FSA) is a Professor of Archaeology within Archaeology at the University of Southampton.
I am Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) Knowledge Exchange and Impact Fellow (2017-2020), Director of Archaeology for the Creative Industries, and Co-Director of the research at the important Bronze Age tell settlement at Százhalombatta, Hungary. I am PI for the Marie Sklodowska-Curie (MSCA) project Women at the Edge of Empire and am a partner in the Culture Europe project Journey to the Beginnings. I previously led the HERA-Funded Project Creativity and Craft Production in Middle and Late Bronze Age Europe (CinBA) (09-HERA-JRP-CI-FP-020) and was a partner in the Marie SkÅ‚odowska-Curie Innovative Training Networks Forging Identities: Mobility of Culture in Bronze Age Europe (ITN 212402) and Emergence of European Communities (RTN2-2001-00366). I was a partner in the AHRC-funded interdisciplinary PARNASSUS project.
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I am internationally known for my innovative research focusing on the European Bronze Age; creativity, craft and innovation in material culture; the past as inspiration for contemporary creative practice; archaeologies of social identity including archaeologies of the body, age, gender and bioarchaeology; archaeology for social benefit. I have published widely on these topics and have engaged in collaborative work with diverse partners in the UK and across Europe including universities, museums, cultural heritage organisations, businesses, arts organisations, the Crafts Council, schools, and major infrastructure projects. National and international research and industry collaborations range from architecture and engineering to contemporary craft, performance art, and dance. I have developed highly successful, novel archaeology-based Continuing Professional Development (CPD) for the creative and cultural sectors.
I have given invited lectures and keynote presentations in many countries including Argentina, Canada, Croatia, Germany, Hungary, Norway, Sweden and the USA, as well as in the UK. I sit on the International Scientific Advisory Board for the Institute of Archaeology, Zagreb, Croatia, steering committees for a range of international projects and research groups, and regularly review for a number of European research councils. I am on the editorial board of the Springer series Bridging Bioarchaeology and Social Theory and a member of Advisory Boards for Bioarchaeology International, Norwegian Archaeological Review and Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. I engage in advocacy for the Arts and Humanities at the highest levels and am a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.
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Science Museum, London. Specimen jar containing piece of body snatcher William Burke's brain
Workshop 3
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The Work of the Dead: Remains, Rights and Emotions
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Location: Creative Zone, Boole Library, University College Cork
Date and time: 23rd January, 1pm - 5:30pm
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Speakers
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Vittorio Bufacchi, Department of Philosophy, UCC & Mary Donnelly, School of Law, UCC
Human Remains and Human Rights
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Imogen Jones, School of Law, University of Leeds
Objects of Crime: Bodies, Bits and the Pathologist's Knife
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Barry Lyons, Consultant Anaesthetist, OLHSC and School of Medicine, TCD
Developing a Code of Ethics for an Anatomy Museum
This transdisciplinary workshop is the third in the series of workshops in the project Living Well with the Dead in Contemporary Ireland (see https://livingwithdead.wixsite.com/website). The overall aim of the project is to develop a medical humanities network equipped with a new and shared vocabulary that goes beyond existing intellectual frameworks to research the cultural ‘work of the dead’ (Laqueur, 2015) and changing Irish social imaginaries of ‘living well with the dead’. We aim to find new ways of thinking about, researching and responding to contemporary public disquiet in Ireland about uncared-for dead bodies.
Beginning with a discussion of the limitations of human rights and legal imaginaries and approaches to human remains, this workshop will explore how dead bodies and human remains have been variously conceptualised and researched in philosophy, law, medicine, and forensic pathology. Specific issues that will be explored in the transdisciplinary dialogue will include the limitations and need to go beyond overarching disciplinary orthodoxies about affect, and how emotional responses to human remains are understood and researched. Following on from the contribution of Nancy Scheper-Hughes (University of California, Berkeley) at the first workshop, which addressed the demands of indigenous Americans for the repatriation of ancestral body parts that had become museum specimens, we will also explore the ethical challenge to ‘learn to live with ghosts’ (Derrida 1994) in the context of university anatomy museums.
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Imogen Jones
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Imogen Jones is an Associate Professor at the School of Law, University of Leeds. Her current research concentrates on deceased bodies as triggers to, and objects of, the criminal and medico-legal processes. She is interested in developing the links between socio-legal and feminist understandings of bodies with more traditional legal and bioethical debates. Most recently she has conducted empirical research with Home Office Registered Forensic Pathologists in England and Wales, the first article coming out of this study can be found in the Journal of Law and Society.
Barry Lyons
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Barry Lyons graduated in medicine from University College Dublin, has a BA in philosophy & history, and a PhD in medical jurisprudence (University of Manchester). He practices medicine in the Dept. of Anaesthesia and Critical Care Medicine at Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital, Dublin, and lectures in Bioethics at Trinity College Dublin. His office in TCD is attached to the Old Anatomy Museum, and he shares it with an anatomist and a museum curator. He has an abiding interest in death, and the remains of the dead.
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Workshop 2
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Remnants, Revenants, and Remembrances - A Workshop with Margrit Shildrick and Richard Gough
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Location: CACSSS Seminar Room ORB (O'Rahilly Building), room G27
Date and time: 31st October - 9am - 10:30am - A workshop with Professor Margrit Shildrick
11am - 1pm - A workshop with Professor Richard Gough
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This second workshop in the series Living Well with the Dead in Contemporary Ireland will begin by returning to some of the themes explored in the September workshop, Social Imaginaries of the Dead, and especially the paper presented by Margrit Shildrick (University of Stockholm). In this paper, (available at https://livingwithdead.wixsite.com/website/events), Margrit proposes a response informed by Derridean hauntological ethics to the current public disquiet in Ireland about the dead from so-called Mother and Baby Homes, who are not resting in peace.
This will be followed by a highly illustrated presentation by Richard Gough (University of South Wales) that will seek to tease some skeletons out of the closet with regard to performance and death; refocusing a late 20thcentury obsession with ‘live performance’ to a reconsideration of ‘dead performance’ and the performances of the dead. Emerging from the Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo (site of his first encounter with skeletons), haunting crypts and graveyards, this talk will evoke a Commedia dell’morte, processional celebrations in Days of the Dead, the short life of a production he directed titled The Funeral (Death of a Fishmonger), and his installation work on Still Lives (Nature Morte,) and performative banquets in a series of Last Suppers.
He will then consider the memorialization of life in granite, metal and marble, and the rise and fall of statues. First the permanent residents in some of the great cemeteries of Europe, the game of statues (with and without music) and then the decline and fall of civic statues, (effigies, figures, icons). The revisioning of history, the regime changes, revolution and repudiation, that bring about the dismantling and destruction of monuments that embody the dead, that have out-lived their moment. He will attempt to breathe life into Holbein’s etchings and once again dance with The Dance of Death.
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Richard Gough Biography
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Richard Gough is Artistic Director of the Centre for Performance Research (CPR) and Professor of Music & Performance in the Faculty of Creative Industries at the University of South Wales, Cardiff, Wales, UK. He has dedicated the last forty years to developing and exploring interdisciplinary, experimental performance work.
As Artistic Director of CPR and its predecessor Cardiff Laboratory Theatre, he has curated and organized numerous international theatre projects including conferences, summer schools and workshop festivals, and he has produced nationwide tours of experimental theatre and traditional dance/theatre ensembles from around the world. He has directed over seventy productions, many of which have toured Europe, and he has lectured and led workshops throughout Europe and in China, Japan, USA, Colombia and
Brazil. He was founding President (1997-2001) of Performance Studies international (PSi) and directed the 5th PS Conference in 1999. He is the General Editor and co-founder of Performance Research (The Journal of Performance Arts published eight issues annually by Routledge, Taylor & Francis), and is publisher and series editor of Black Mountain Press and Performance Research Books. He has written several chapters in recent publications and co-edited A Performance Cosmology – the 30th year anniversary book of CPR published by Routledge (2006).
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Margrit Shildrick
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Margrit Shildrick is currently Guest Professor of Gender and Knowledge Production at the Department of Ethnology, History of Religions and Gender Studies at Stockholm University, and Adjunct Professor of Critical Disability Studies at York University, Toronto. Her research covers postmodern feminist and cultural theory, bioethics, critical disability studies and body theory. Her books include Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, (Bio)ethics and Postmodernism, Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self and Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Sexuality and Subjectivity, as well as edited collections and many journal articles.
Tuam - Credit: Erin Darcy
Workshop 1
Social imaginaries of the dead
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PROGRAMME
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Location: CACSSS Seminar Room ORB G27, O'Rahilly Building
Date and Time: 19th September, 9:00am - 5:30pm
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Speakers:
Margrit Shildrick, Department of Ethnology, History of Religions and Gender Studies, Stockholm University
Thomas W. Laqueur, Department of History, University of California Berkeley
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Department of Anthropology, University of California Berkeley
Niamh McCullagh, Independent Consultant Forensic Archaeologist
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This day-long workshop will explore how un/cared-for dead bodies have been variously conceptualised and researched in the medical humanities and social sciences, focusing on forensic archaeology, cultural history, militant anthropology and feminist and post-humanist social theory. Particular emphasis will be placed on explanation and discussion of Laqueur’s (2015) concept of ‘the work of the dead’ and Derrida’s (1993) ‘hauntology’ and ethical project of ‘learning to live with ghosts’.
Presentations will be made by Margrit Shildrick, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Thomas Laqueur and Niamh McCullagh on social imaginaries of the dead, followed by lots and lots of exploratory discussion. As workshop participants may not be familiar with the work of these scholars, readings will be circulated in advance. The presenters have been invited to focus primarily on conceptual and methodological tools they think may be of use to the project. We aim to develop a new research vocabulary, and recognise that this requires firstly becoming literate to some extent in each other’s disciplines.
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Readings
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Niamh McCullagh
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- Technical Report on the Tuam Site
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- Forensic archaeology and the independent commission for the location of victims’ remains
Margrit Shildrick
- Derrida, Jacques (1999) 'Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida' in Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (eds) Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy. London: Routledge.
- Wilmer, Stephen (2015) 'Biopolitics in the Laundry: Ireland’s Unwed Mothers' in Resisting Biopolitics: Philosophical, Political, and Performative Strategies (eds) S.E. Wilmer and AudronÄ— ŽukauskaitÄ—, London: Routledge.
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- Matters of the heart: temporality and microchimeric entanglements
Forthcoming in Tammer El Sheikh (ed.) Hybrid Bodies: Entanglements of Different Orders, Vernon Press. (due 2019)
Thomas Laqueur
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- Introduction and Chapter 1: Do the Dead Matter? from The Work of the Dead by Thomas Laqueur
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Nancy Scheper-Hughes
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- http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/features/282558/no-more-angel-babies-on-the-alto-do-cruzeiro
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- 'Small Wars and Invisible Genocides'
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- The Body of the Terrorist: Blood Libels, Bio-Piracy, and the Spoils of War at the Israeli Forensic Institute
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