"Paralysis and Response" with Dr Catherine Trundle

Please join us for a seminar by Dr Catherine Trundle (La Trobe University). Associate Professor Tarryn Phillips (La Trobe University) will act as discussant.

Paralysis and Response: An Anthropology of Ethics, Complicity, and the Question of Answerability

Assertions of complicity commonly denote a moral double bind. They call for response: by being implicated we are pressed towards action and answerability. Yet such calls can simultaneously produce a recursive paralysis in which every available response appears itself entangled. In this talk I will engage with the philosopher Lewis Gordon's distinction between guilt and political responsibility. Using complicity as a lens, I will contrast two modes of ethical action: one that attempts to trace causal links for wrongdoing before acting, and one that attempts to proceed towards a just world without settling attribution or guilt, and without knowing what will emerge. Engaging anthropologically with how guilt, debt, response, and responsibility inflect complicity, I will consider the work of navigating the complex ethical knots of fieldwork, collaborative methods, and how we theorise and story suffering. Ethnographically, I will explore diverse moments from fieldwork on environmental illness in New Zealand, Australia and the UK, where the cause of harm remains uncertain, distributed, or denied. In these moments, I ask what complicity comes to mean, and what it calls for, when attribution fails.

Catherine Trundle is a medical anthropologist at La Trobe University. Her research explores contested illnesses, medico-legal debates, climate change and health, heat stress, and the anthropology of ethics. Her poetry and micro fictions have been published in a range of literary journals and anthologies. Her new monograph, Injurious Law: Nuclear Exposure and the Harms of Redress (2026, CUP), explores the lingering impacts of radiation exposure and militarism, how both medicine and law generate a complex mix of spiralling harms and life-affirming possibilities for claimants of redress.