Living Well with the Dead in Contemporary Ireland
Human hip bone structure - Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Research Team
Órla O’Donovan, School of Applied Social Studies, University College Cork
Órla O’Donovan is a lecturer in the School of Applied Social Studies in University College Cork. She is interested in the search for radically alternative ways of living (and dying), beyond the trappings and alienations of patriarchy and consumer capitalism. In recent years this has led her to explore the promises of ‘the commons’ as a route away from the pervasive (yet impossible) individualism of our times. Recognising that the commons can be dangerous ground, she has been exploring how conventional regimes of truth about the dead body and water might be productively disrupted through the imaginary and practice of the commons.
​Together with Rosie Meade and Fiona Dukelow, she is a co-editor of the unapologetically utopian Cork University Press series Síreacht. Longings for another Ireland.
Róisín O’Gorman, Department of Drama and Theatre Studies, University College Cork
Róisín O’Gorman is a lecturer in Drama & Theatre Studies in University College Cork. She has published on contemporary Irish performance and also on critical pedagogy in Text & Performance Quarterly and Transformations. She has co-edited a special edition of Performance Research ‘On Failure’ (with Margaret Werry). Róisín completed her Somatic Movement Educator certification in Body Mind Centering with Embody-Move Association in the UK.
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Dr. O’Gorman will be a member of the three-person Project Advisory Group that will offer guidance on all aspects of the project for its entire duration. Additionally, she will assist with the organisation of the speak about Drama and Theatre Studies perspectives at the workshop ‘Living well in the arts: the performing dead’. Also, she will contribute to the Thinkery.
Joan McCarthy, School of Nursing and Midwifery, University College Cork
Joan McCarthy is a lecturer in Healthcare Ethics in the School of Nursing and Midwifer, University College Cork. Her research interests include ethical issues that arise in relation to death and dying, feminist approaches to ethical decision making, and health professionals’ experiences of moral distress. She has collaborated on a number of national and international research projects in healthcare ethics and was the principal investigator of a national multi-disciplinary project that led to the development of the Ethical Framework for End-of-Life Care.
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Dr. McCarthy will be a member of the three-person Project Advisory Group that will offer guidance on all aspects of the project for its entire duration. She will also assist with the organisation of and speak about bioethical perspectives at the workshop ‘Living wll with the dead in Irish law and literature’. Additionally, she will contribute to the concluding Thinkery.
Robert Bolton, School of Applied Social Studies, University College Cork
Robert Bolton is a postdoctoral research on the Living Well with the Dead in Contemporary Ireland project. He completed his PhD in 2018 and his thesis explored the performance of young masculinities within youth cafe spaces.
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Robert will conduct with archival and ethnographic work as part of the project activities.
Project Collaborators
Margrit Shildrick, Department of Ethnology, History of Religions and Gender Studies, Stockholm University
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.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Anthropology Department, University of California, Berkeley
Nancy Scheper-Hughes is Chancellor Professor (Emerita) at UC Berkeley where she taught since 1982, co-directing the doctoral program in Critical Medical Anthropology. Her research, writings, and teaching focus on violence, suffering, and premature death as these are experienced on the margins and peripheries of the late modern world. For the last decade she has been involved in a multi-sited, ethnographic, and medical human rights oriented study of the global traffic in humans (living and dead) for their organs to serve the needs and desires of international transplant patients. Her books include Commodifying Bodies, Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, and Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland.
In 1999 she co-founded Organs Watch, to map and study in the field the spread of global criminal networks involving human organ trafficking and has been a consultant with the WHO, the UN, and a co-signer of the Istanbul Declaration on Organ Trafficking.
Deirdre Madden, School of Law, University College Cork
Deirdre Madden is Professor of Law at University College Cork with research interests and publications in the area of medical law and ethics. She is the author of the 2005 Madden Report on Post Mortem Practice and Procedures, the recommendations of which are due to be implemented in the long-awaited human tissue legislation the Irish government has committed to introduce in the near future. She has worked extensively in health policy and reform throughout her career and is a member of a number of national expert groups related to medical law, ethics, governance and patient safety.
Mary Donnelly, School of Law, University College Cork
Mary Donnelly is a Professor of Law at University College Cork. She is the author of Healthcare Decision-making and the Law: Autonomy, Capacity and the Limits of Liberalism and co-author of End-of-Life Decisions: Ethics and Law and co-editor of Legal and Ethical Debate in Irish Heallthcare: Confronting Complexity.
Vittorio Bufacchi, Department of Philosophy, University College Cork
Vittorio Bufacchi is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at University College Cork. He is the author of Social Injustice: Essays in Political Philosophy and Violence and Social Justice, and editor of Violence: A Philosophical Anthology. He is the editor of the Palgrave Philosophy Today book series, and his main areas of research are social injustice, human rights, and social violence.
Siobhain O’Mahony, Department of Anatomy and Neuroscience, University College Cork
Siobhain O’Mahony is a Lecturer in Anatomy and Neuroscience in University College Cork. Her main research area is the assessment of outcomes of adverse events during the first 1000 days of life. She is also interested in gender-related differences in pain perception.
Barra Ó Donnabháin, Department of Archaeology, University College Cork
Barra Ó Donnabháin is a Lecturer in Archaeology in University College Cork. He has been conducting archaeological research in Ireland and other parts of the world for over 25 years. Recent publications address the political use of the ritualized violence of executions, and challenges to the traditional narrative of 'Celtic Ireland'. He has directed and collaborated in archaeological projects in a number of world areas. His recent focus has been on the bioarchaeology of institutional confinement and in 2012 he began excavations at the19th century prison at Spike Island, near Cork.
Oonagh Kearney, Independent Film-maker
Oonagh Kearney is an award-winning film writer and director based between London and Cork. She has written and directed one full-length documentary and nine short films with the support of the Irish Arts Council, Irish Film Board, RTE, TG4, BRITDOC and The Wellcome Trust. Her work has screened at film festivals around the world.
