School of Nursing & Midwifery Annual Report 2018

Catherine McAuley School of Nursing and Midwifery, UCC

Living Well with the Dead in Contemporary Ireland

The Story: Dr. Joan McCarthy is a collaborator and an active member of the research team on a university wide project which aims to develop a medical humanities network to research changing Irish social imaginaries of living well with the dead. Rooted in a recognition of the inadequacies of biomedical imaginaries of the dead, transdisciplinary dialogue and synthesis of theory and methods are crucial to our search for a new vocabulary, questions and ways of researching social imaginaries of living well with the dead. The project which was funded by Wellcome Small Grant in Humanities and Social Science from June 2018-2019 consists of five workshops and a concluding ‘thinkery’, in addition to some exploratory archival and ethnographic work. We are using University College Cork as an initial study site.. Our aim is to find new ways of thinking about, researching and responding to contemporary public disquiet in Ireland about uncared-for dead bodies. We have decided to focus on two particular populations of the dead. The first of these are the confined dead, which includes those in the poor houses and asylums of old, but also in more recent times, the dead babies and children of women confined in so-called mother and baby homes. The Team: Dr. Orla O’Donovan, Dept. Applied Social Studies (PI); Dr. Joan McCarthy, School of Nursing and Midwifery (CB); Dr. Roisin O’Gorman, Dept. Theatre (CB); Dr. Robert Bolton, Dept. Applied Social Studies (Researcher); Dr. Vittorio Bufacchi, Dept. Philosophy (CB); Professor Mary Donnelly, School of Law (CB); Prof. Deirdre Madden, School of Law (CB); Dr. Barra Ó Donnabháin, Department of Archaeology

(CB); Professor Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Anthropology Department, University of California, Berkeley (CB); Professor Margrit Shildrick, Linköping University (CB); Ms. Oonagh Kearney, Independent Film-maker (Cork); Dr. Siobhain O’Mahony, Department of Anatomy and Neuroscience (CB).

Relevant Links (Study website): https://livingwithdead.wixsite. com/website

Pictured above: Members of the Research Team with presenters for Workshop 1 in UCC.L-R Dr. Joan McCarthy, Dr. Barra Ó Donnabháin, Dr. Richard Bolton, Prof. Thomas Laquer, Dr. Órla O’Donovan, Dr. Róisín O’Gorman, Prof. Nancy Scheper-Hughles, Dr. Niamh McCullagh, Prof. Margrit Shildrick.

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