Book Talk - Injurious Law: Nuclear Exposure and the Harms of Redress

The Law in Societies Research Cluster is delighted to welcome Dr Catherine Trundle, Senior Lecturer in Public Health at La Trobe University, for a discussion of her new book, Injurious Law: Nuclear Exposure and the Harms of Redress. The book explores the experiences of nuclear test veterans seeking compensation and healthcare, asking how processes designed to deliver recognition and redress can produce new harms.

The discussion will be moderated by Professor Nayanika Mathur, Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies at the University of Oxford and a Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College.

Tea, Coffee, and Pastries will be served starting at 4:00pm. Book Talk will take place from 5:00-6:30pm. No registration required. If you have questions about the event please email lauren.gowler@wolfson.ox.ac.uk

The Law in Societies Research Cluster is convened by Professor Linda Mulcahy, Statutory Chair of Socio-Legal Studies and Fellow of the College Governing Body. Linda is assisted by Lauren Gowler in organising events. Lauren is a DPhil student at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies.

Book Description (Full): In the 1950s, Britain joined the nuclear age, detonating twenty-one nuclear bomb experiments in Australia and the Pacific. In Injurious Law, Catherine Trundle crosses countries and traverses decades to explore the lingering, transforming impacts of radiation exposure and militarism. Through a compelling portrait of the lives of test veterans seeking compensation and healthcare, Trundle reveals how injury law, and the political and medical processes upon which it depends, generates a troubling paradox for claimants. While offering the possibilities for recognition and redress, the very process of making injury claims generates new and cascading harms. Recasting injury to include its social, moral and political aftereffects, Trundle exposes the quotidian and often banal practices that make the law injurious. Moving between archives, living rooms, laboratories, courts, parliament, and veteran social gatherings, Injurious Law offers a justice-centred lens for understanding legal contestations in the aftermath of radiation exposure and other invisible environmental harms.