Family Memory and the Official History Machine: A Feminist Critique of the British Public Inquiry
Speaker: Professor Máiréad Enright (Loughborough University)
Chair: TBC
About the lecture
Looking for a feminist ‘way in’ to a critique of British public inquiries, I want to discuss families. British public inquiries rarely focus on reproductive injustice. However, social reproduction - family mourning and family care - are always persistent themes. In this lecture, I am interested in the political role of family memory activism; in how those seeking justice may publicly narrate their relationship to a dead or injured relative in the aftermath of state violence. Family members may join or lead campaigns for public inquiries, hoping that their family memory will be taken seriously. They may expect that family memory will influence the inquiry’s official history, and lead, by degrees to some measure of accountability. Often, of course, they are disappointed; as one contributor to Inquest’s recent All or Nothing report remarked; “The justice system is concerned with appearance, propriety and when families come in with their broken bodies, we are pushed aside.” Drawing on feminist work on memory studies, epistemic justice, and theories of inheritance, this lecture offers an account of the British public inquiry. Focusing on those which have reported in the last 25 years, it analyses how public inquiries have imagined the family, and how (if at all) they have engaged with the state’s responsibility to family memory. It shows that family members, as memory activists, have sometimes been able to resist public inquiries’ efforts at narrative control. The lecture asks whether family memory activism can be meaningfully accommodated with the structure of the public inquiry, or whether transformative approaches are needed.
About Current Legal Problems
The Current Legal Problems (CLP) lecture series and annual volume was established over fifty five years ago at the Faculty of Laws, University College London and is recognised as a major reference point for legal scholarship. Sign up for the mailing list to receive emails about Current Legal Problems lectures
Image by Dilan arezzome from Pixabay
