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. 

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*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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Katherine O'Donnell

Katherine O’Donnell is Associate Professor in the History of Ideas in UCD School of Philosophy, where she lectures on feminist philosophy. She has published widely on gender studies and the history of ideas in Ireland. She is a member of Justice for Magdalenes Research, which seeks to further develop investigation into and educational materials on all matters relating to the Magdalene institutions in Ireland, particularly the fate of children born out of wedlock and their mothers.

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Maeve O'Rourke

Maeve O’Rourke is Lecturer in Human Rights at the Irish Centre for Human Rights and School of Law, NUI Galway. She is a practising barrister and worked as Senior Research and Policy Officer for the Irish Council for Civil Liberties prior to joining NUIG. For the past 10 years Maeve has provided pro bono human rights research and advocacy assistance to Justice for Magdalenes / JFM Research and Adoption Rights Alliance. In this capacity she has coordinated several evidence-gathering initiatives and advocated internationally and domestically for reparation and transitional justice measures concerning Ireland’s history of institutional abuse.

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Claire McGettrick

Claire McGettrick is an Irish Research Council postgraduate scholar at the School of Sociology in University College Dublin. Her PhD research is investigating the bodies of expert knowledge on adoption, how adopted adults and children have been classified and defined in the discourses of expert knowledge, and how they have been managed in adoption policy and practice. She is co-founder of Justice for Magdalenes (now JFM Research) and Adoption Rights Alliance. She coordinates the Magdalene Names Project, and jointly coordinates the Clann Project with Dr Maeve O’Rourke.

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