CJS Seminar: Louise Brangan
Location:
Moot Court Room,
Old College
Date/time
Wed 29 January 2025
16:00 - 17:30
The Crime, Justice & Society Seminar Series presents
Purging the Crisis
Louise Brangan
About this event
Across the 20th century, Ireland incarcerated over 11,000 women and girls in Magdalene laundries that were run by religious orders of nuns. These were harrowing places that did incalculable harm to those sent there. Understandably, the focus of scholarship and activism concerning the laundries is now largely contemporaneous, interested in how to achieve justice for this past and how to hold wrongdoers accountable.
In this paper, I wish to explore a potentially overlooked and taken for granted aspect of this history: how did this system come to be? Laundries had been in operation since the 19th century. Yet, is it widely accepted that they took a punitive turn in the 1920s, expanding in both scale and hardening in purpose. How this happened, and why, remains surprisingly opaque.
Rather than focus on the laundries internal world, this presentation will excavate the other side of the wall, looking at the rhythms of Irish life that made the laundries not only plausible and possible, but necessary. Following Stuart Hall, I delve back into this early period of Irish history, and using archives and newspapers, I share his hope that I can “catch public opinion, unawares, in the very moment of its formation”.
In discussing this fraught moment in 1920/30s Ireland, I want to explore the ethical dilemmas and analytical tensions posed by doing historical sociology, when the topics of punishment are also emotionally and politically charged today.
About the speaker
Louise Brangan is a Senior Lecturer and Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Strathclyde. She had written on the contemporary penal politics of Ireland and Scotland, and is currently completing an ESRC funded study on the rise and fall of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries. She is currently a Nominated Fellow as IASH at the University of Edinburgh.
This is a hybrid event.