Event Details

Join us for this free public lecture featuring talks from two Lancaster academics...

Join us for this free public lecture featuring talks from two Lancaster academics. Please register your place at the bottom of this page.

LOCATION INFORMATION:

Lancaster Central Library, Market Square, Lancaster, Lancashire, LA1 1HY

Dr Michael Lambert, Research Fellow

Why access to records matters to seeking justice over historic forced adoption in Britain

Michael served as an expert witness for the UK Parliamentary inquiry into the historic forced adoption of children of unmarried mothers in Britain from the 1940s to the 1970s. The inquiry focused on the lived experiences of birth mothers and their children, and the lasting harm caused by separation. In this talk Michael looks at the archival records of historic forced adoption, the ethical and research problems in accessing closed and confidential data from the recent past, and why they reveal a historic injustice requiring an apology from the UK Government.

Dr Zoe Alker, Lecturer in Historical Social Data Science

Can digitisation provide ways of accessing historic injustice?

Historical records are now increasingly available in digital form. From the census, birth, marriage and death registers, and criminal and legal records, we are now able to weave together threads of our past at the touch of a button. Yet despite the apparent 'age of abundance', this talk asks how open is open access when it relates to histories of crime, justice and punishment? Reflecting on previous and current work that includes studies of abuse in juvenile institutions to histories of custodial death in the Hanoverian and Victorian period, this talk exposes the barriers to studying histories of crime and punishment and reflects upon how we can use technology to unlock histories of injustice.

Zoe Alker is a Lecturer in Historical Social Data Science in the Department of History at Lancaster University where she researches and teaches on the digital history of crime, justice and punishment from the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. Zoe co-creates a number of large-scale, free and open access digital archives, including the recent publication of over 70,000 convict tattoos on Digital Panopticon. These records make accessible an unrivalled record of past lives lived, and not simply information about crime and punishment, but about the experiences of large swathes of the population who did not leave extensive written records.