The memorial garden at the Tuam children's burial ground, referencing 796 deceased resident children with missing burial records.
Prizes and Awards

A Complex Legacy of Remembrance and Relations

On October 21, 2024 by

Phoebe Whiteside, 2024 SAE-CES fellowship winner, reflects on her research with advocacy groups and forensic professionals dealing with the issue of infant and child burials at Ireland’s former Mother and Baby Homes

My ongoing research project examines the role of humanitarian forensic action and related practices in current attempts to address the legacy of Ireland’s state-funded, religious-run Mother and Baby Homes, twentieth-century institutions for unmarried mothers and their children. During the past decade, revelations of the scale of infant and child mortality and inappropriate unmarked burials, including the hypothesis that the remains of some 800 infants and children might lie in or around a decommissioned sewage tank in Tuam, Co. Galway, have sparked public outcry and demands for forensic investigation via protocols developed in cases of genocide, forced disappearance, and transitional justice. Excavation is now imminent. Through ethnography of scientists, families, and other stakeholders with ties to the Mother and Baby Institutions investigations and their material and moral engagements with human remains, I will trace the possibilities and limits of the international discourse of humanitarian forensic action to transform or enact bonds of kinship, care, and obligation among families, the Catholic church, and the Irish state and across boundaries of time and life/death. My research thus asks not only what is known or remembered through forensic science, but what relations are acted upon or made in its practice.

This summer, the SAE-CES Pre-Dissertation Fellowship allowed me to undertake two months of preliminary fieldwork based in Galway, Ireland. I was able to meet and interview representatives of four different support and advocacy groups for survivors and/or family members of former residents of Mother and Baby Institutions, who told me about their hopes and expectations for what excavation and identification attempts may achieve – especially given legislative and technical limitations – and/or alternative truth-seeking and memorialization initiatives taking place in the absence of state-sanctioned intervention. These conversations, in combination with feedback on my project conceptualization, helped me to develop new subsidiary research questions. I also spoke with a range of professionals working adjacent to the investigation of Mother and Baby Institutions, in journalism, genealogy, archaeology, human rights law, history/activism, technology, and advisory services to the new government agency implementing excavation; attended community events such as an annual commemoration for the mothers and children of one former institution in Cork; and made initial visits to relevant archives. Improved understanding of the questions that matter to those most affected by the Mother and Baby Institutions is deepening my own: for example, analysis of the politics of kinship in this context would be incomplete without considering recent histories of coerced adoption. Mapping the landscape of stakeholders in both the imminent forensic intervention in Tuam and the wider public response to the Mother and Baby Institutions in activism, government, academia, scientific practice, and religious orders has broadened my sense of the “field” and facilitated invaluable connections.

I am grateful to the SAE for making this initial fieldwork period possible, and by extension supporting the rest of my dissertation work to come!

Poetry by P.J. Haverty posted at the Tuam children’s burial ground. 
An art project titled “Sacred Bones” is displayed at a commemoration event at the former Bessborough Mother and Baby Institution. 

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The 2024 SAE-CES Pre-Dissertation Research Fellowship, jointly sponsored by the Society for the Anthropology of Europe and the Council for European Studies, was awarded to Phoebe Grace Whiteside (Columbia University) for her dissertation project, “Humanitarian Forensics and the Politics of Kinship at Ireland’s Former Mother and Baby Homes”.  The call for applications for the 2025 fellowship will open in early 2025.

PREVIOUS AWARDEES

2023

Giorgia Mirto (Columbia University): “The Political Life of Border Death in South Italy.” Learn more about Mirto’s project by following this link: https://sae.americananthro.org/2024/11/giorgia-mirto-2023-sae-ces-fellowship-winner-reflects-on-her-research-on-mourning-practices-towards-border-death-in-south-italy/

2022

Ariana Gunderson (Indiana University, Bloomington): “Selling Food as Text in the German Recipe Industry.” Learn more about Ariana’s project by following this link: https://sae.americananthro.org/2023/03/creating-feasts-for-the-eyes/