Glasgow Theatre Seminar - Emma Cox
Theatre Studies at UoG is delighted to welcome Dr Emma Cox (RHUL) to the latest installment of the Glasgow Theatre Seminar series with the talk "Forensic Responsivity: Performance, Publicity, and Rights After Migration Fatalities".
School of Culture and Creative Arts
Date: Thursday 05 March 2026
Time: 17:30 - 19:00
Venue: Room 123A, Gilmorehill Centre
Category: Public lectures, Academic events
Speaker: Emma Cox
Emma Cox – Forensic Responsivity: Performance, Publicity, and Rights After Migration Fatalities
This talk will be livestreamed – to access the event online, register at https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/0aaad690-a3f2-4645-9a8b-8c91e255de3a@6e725c29-763a-4f50-81f2-2e254f0133c8
With the regularised catastrophe of sinkings and migrant fatalities in the Mediterranean Sea not normally treated as disaster victim identification (DVI) events that would trigger INTERPOL infrastructural support, the view that coordinated postmortem identification attempts are a jurisdictional obligation has become a political (and indeed at times activist) proposition. After a decade of progressive withdrawal of European and UK responsibility for migration fatalities, the paradigm of state responsibility has transmuted into dispersed configurations of responsivity. Along with border militarisation, this shift has led inexorably to the politicisation of knowledges, experiences, and professional expertise amongst forensic pathologists, humanitarian NGOS, artists, and coastal communities.
This paper identifies and investigates specific forms of forensic responsivity as performative, public-facing components of a polyvocal ecology of identification, representation, and remembering across the Mediterranean. Inspired by Amade M’charek’s radical broadening of forensics as ‘not simply a scientific (objectifying) method of ordering and connecting traces to events’ (2018, 95) but an ‘art of paying attention’,[1] I attempt to think contextually about arts of forensic attention across diverse examples of found installation and curation, commemorative practice, and the public components of forensic pathology and humanitarianism as they appear in documentary film and theatre. Postmortem identification and the verification of death are protocols in the systematisation of life and death in modernity. When categories of people are cast outside this system, the exclusion enacts a disappearance from political community. The public, political work of pushing migration fatalities out of a discourse of accidental tragedy and into a domain of rights has implications not only in terms of human dignity, but also for exposing entire legal and administrative infrastructures in which rights-endowed life begins and ends.
[1] M’charek, Amade. 2018. ‘“Dead-Bodies-at-the-Border”: Distributed Evidence and Emerging Forensic Infrastructure for Identification’, Ed. Zurawski, Nils, et al. Bodies as Evidence: Security, Knowledge, and Power. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018, 96, italics in original.
Emma Cox’s transdisciplinary research examines public cultures associated with forced migration across the performing and visual arts, as well as in humanitarianism and forensic practice. Cox’s work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Medical Humanities (British Medical Journal), Theatre Journal, and Theatre Research International, and her books include Performing Noncitizenship (Anthem 2015), Theatre & Migration (Palgrave 2014), and the play collection Staging Asylum (Currency 2013). She is co-editor with Sam Durrant, David Farrier, Lyndsey Stonebridge and Agnes Woolley of the major interdisciplinary volume, Refugee Imaginaries: Research Across the Humanities (Edinburgh 2020), and contributing editor of Performance and Migration (2021), a video and publishing collaboration between Routledge and Digital Theatre+. Cox’s new book Affiliate Bodies: Procession, Migration, Land, Sanctuary, is forthcoming with Palgrave in 2027, and her multidisciplinary edited book Migrations, Populations and Technologies (Routledge 2027) will appear as part of a multi volume series led by Ganesh Devy. Cox is Associate Professor in Drama at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she was the Head of Department of Drama and Theatre from 2021-2024. She is currently co-Chair (with Lennox Goddard and Georgina Guy) of the Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA).