CLP - Family Memory and the Official History Machine

This lecture will be delivered by Professor Máiréad Enright, as part of the Current Legal Problems Lecture Series 2025-26

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CLP - Family Memory and the Official History Machine

29 Jan 2026, 13:00 – 14:00

UCL Faculty of Laws
4-8 Endsleigh Gardens
London
WC1H 0EG
United Kingdom

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.

Máiréad Enright is a feminist legal scholar working on issues including reproductive justice, law reform and grassroots organising, illegality in social movements, responses to historical injustice and the law on obstetric violence. Máiréad often works with and advises groups campaigning around reproductive rights and historical gender-based violence, especially in Ireland and Northern Ireland, and occasionally collaborates with artists interested in these issues. Previous work in this area was funded by a Leverhulme Fellowship.

From May 2025, she will be part of the team behind the Wellcome Discovery Award “Between Deception and Dissent: Regulating Unproven, Disproven and Misleading Health-Related Claims”. This collaborative project will explore how contested health-related claims are regulated in contemporary states; examine the socio-political implications of current strategies; and imagine and propose alternative legal models.

Before coming to Loughborough, Máiréad worked at the University of Birmingham and the University of Kent. She is a graduate of University College Cork, King’s College London and the King’s Inns, Dublin.

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.

You can attend this event in-person at UCL Faculty of Laws (Bentham House, 4-8 Endsleigh Gardens, London WC1H 0EG) or alternatively you can join via a live stream.

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