“Restorative Justice in Magdalene Cultural Production from Western Europe, North America, and Oceania (1836-2023)”

The project assesses the intertwinement between Magdalene cultural production and restorative justice in transnational contexts. By analysing a corpus produced in three distinct geographical, historical, linguistic, and cultural areas, the research interrogates the cultural specificities of Magdalenism across space and time, beyond the frame of Irish studies. The project explores the spectrum in which genres convey and publicise traumatic experiences, from empowering survivors, to sometimes financially exploiting their tragic narratives. Culturally sensitive trauma-reading methodologies will be used to read texts from Ireland, the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand. The process of restorative justice will also be analysed with regards to the decolonisation of Magdalene trauma studies, as Indigenous womens experiences will be examined with care, and not retraumatise nor recolonise their communities. Narratives testifying to systemic racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and homophobia will be excavated to question the treatment Magdalene women and their children endured in modern nations and in settler colonies. Ireland, Northern Ireland, Australia, Canada, and Aotearoa have set up Truth and Reconciliation Commissions covering the issue of Magdalenism in addition to wider institutional histories. Magdalene fiction and non-fiction contribute to restoring survivors credibility in patriarchal structures, by contesting official and hegemonic writings of history which erased or minimised them from national narratives. They are also valuable documents in the way they highlight how the Magdalenist heritage continues to fashion femininity, single motherhood, and female sexuality in the twenty-first century, as Magdalene cultural production resonates with contemporary public debates on womens rights, sexual education, abortion, Indigenous peoples civil rights, and the legal apparatus surrounding the protection of children.