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 themselves 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.

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 and 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 possibilities for recognition and redress, the process of making injury claims can generate new and cascading harms.

Recasting injury to include its social, moral and political aftereffects, Trundle exposes the everyday practices through which law can itself become 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.

Dr Catherine Trundle is a Senior Lecturer in Public Health at La Trobe University whose research explores health, inequality and environmental harm through medical anthropology and qualitative research.

Professor Nayanika Mathur is Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies at the University of Oxford and a Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College. Her research examines bureaucracy, law, the state, environmental governance and human-animal relations in South Asia.