Workshop 3

​

The Work of the Dead: Remains, Rights and Emotions

​

Location: Creative Zone, Boole Library, University College Cork

Date and time: 23rd January, 1pm - 5:30pm

​

​

​

Speakers

​

Vittorio Bufacchi, Department of Philosophy, UCC & Mary Donnelly, School of Law, UCC

Human Remains and Human Rights

​

Imogen Jones, School of Law, University of Leeds

Objects of Crime: Bodies, Bits and the Pathologist's Knife

​

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. 

​

Imogen Jones

​

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

​

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. 

​

​

​

​