Thinking with Materiality. The Rattle in the Graves of Francoism

Lucía Expósito-Cívico & Rosa Medina Doménech (University of Granada)

This seminar presents the research project “Things that Matter in Illness: Objects, Emotions, and Gender in the Experience of Illness and Medical Practices for Relief” (funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/50110001103). Inspired by a cultural understanding of disease and by theoretical tools provided by Science and Technology Studies (STS) and new materialist epistemologies, the project examines the historical experience of illness across different Spanish contexts. It focuses on emotional–material interactions with objects and seeks to move beyond conventional histories of technology and artefacts by foregrounding the affective, embodied, and gendered dimensions of material culture, as well as its agentic capacities. As part of this broader framework, the seminar introduces the virtual MICE Museum of the Things That Matter in Illness, currently under development.

The seminar centres on the case of a child’s rattle exhumed from the mass grave of La Carcavilla in Palencia (Spain), analysing its representation in the national and international press between 2009 and 2023. It asks what effects the exhumation of an object from a grave of Francoist repression, more than seventy years after the execution, produces in public discourse. It also explores which cultural imaginaries are reactivated when material legacies of political violence resurface, and how these meanings shape contemporary understandings of historical memory and the embodied experiences of individual and collective loss, care, and vulnerability. Finally, the seminar examines what can be learned from this public discourse when approached through a gender perspective, particularly in relation to how material remains evoke gendered narratives of grief, caregiving, and political agency.

Please note: the link for this online session will be shared shortly.