Catherine Trundle
La Trobe University
Atmospheres, Bodies, Suffering: A Conversation
Join CAMHRA for a conversation with Catherine Trundle, centred on her new book Injurious Law (CUP 2026), and exploring writing, bodies, atmospheres and suffering.
Location: MB RG01, Main Building, SOAS University of London
5pm till 7pm
How might we understand distress when it exceeds a single body, a single event, or a single cause? Medical anthropologists Catherine Trundle and Nikita Kaur Simpson come to this question from different ethnographic fieldsites but with overlapping anthropological concerns.
Catherine Trundle‘s book Injurious Law (CUP 2026) follows British and New Zealand nuclear test veterans across decades of injury claim-making, showing how radiation harm accumulates across time, families and institutions, and how the medico-legal systems that promise redress compound the very injuries they are meant to repair.
Catherine will be in conversation with CAMHRA Co-Director, Nikita Simpson‘s, whose book Tension (Duke 2026) examines the distress that Gaddi people in the Western Himalayas name as tension: a state that settles in bodies and families and works as an everyday diagnostic of dispossession and inequality.
Speaking in conversation, Catherine and Nikita will consider shared questions raised by their work:
- How does suffering move between bodies and along social inequalities, and who ends up carrying suffering?
- What analytic work does the notion of atmospheres do when harm is diffuse, slow, absorbed, and hard to see?
- What happens to distress when it meets legal, medical, economic, and development logics that require it take a recognisable form?
- What atmospheric modes of storytelling does ethnography offer in making sense of distress and suffering?
Panel Members
Nikita Simpson
SOAS, University of London
Registration
The event is free to attend, but external/non-SOAS visitor are required to sign up in order to support smooth and timely access to SOAS.