Paper short abstract:

A dead woman plays a significant role in my research: in her continued role in her family's life and our relationships. Her father has resisted state control and seized 'care' of his dead daughter: her body, spirit and memory. I explore the power of death to both unearth and generate.

Paper long abstract:

A key person in my PhD research in Victoria, is an Aboriginal woman who has 'passed away': a mother, sister, daughter and niece. She died just before I met her family, who became my key research respondents and friends. In this paper I explore how my relationships with her family are mediated by the dead and the central role she has continued to play in their lives and our conversations. My relationship to this dead woman has caused me to interrogate my own beliefs around death and my relationship to my own family, dead and living. It has provided insight into the complexities of the themes I explore in my thesis around loss, continuity and possibility. This woman's story, and that of her children, illustrates the continued force of the state in her family's life. This is often under the guise of 'care'. Her father, in particular, carries a history of constant intervention into his intimate family life by the state. His negotiation of his daughter's death, her body, spirit and memory, demonstrates a resistance to state control and the taking back of care. Being part of this negotiation reveals a disturbing difference between my family and hers- that of premature death. This has flung me head first into addressing my positionality as a middle class white woman, a beneficiary of colonisation. Beyond a reflexive exercise, it reveals the dangerous and powerful nature of death to lay things bare and to generate opportunities to renegotiate relationships and challenge authority.