Phoebe Grace Whiteside

This research examines the role of scientific and legal intervention at burial grounds in addressing the legacy of Ireland’s state-funded, religious-run Mother and Baby Homes, institutions for unmarried mothers and their children that operated from 1922-1998. Over the past decade, revelations of the scale of historical infant and child mortality and unmarked burials at these institutions have sparked public outcry and demands for forensic investigation via protocols developed in cases of genocide and forced disappearance. Through 15 months of ethnographic research, I will explore material and moral engagements with human remains, historic graves, genetic kinship analysis, and institutional archives among deceased children, their families, survivors, scientists, and activists, as these practices are applied to institutional abuse and neglect. What relational and political investments do people make in forensic science, even when expectations for criminal legal recourse or technical success may be limited? What are the possibilities and limits of forensic intervention to transform or enact bonds of kinship, care, and obligation among families, the Catholic church, and the Irish state, and across boundaries of time, life, and death? This research asks not only what is known or remembered through forensic science, but what relations are made in its practice.