The Waterford Memories Project is a survivor-centered, collaborative project in digital humanities run by a small group of academics based at the South East Technological University (SETU) located in Waterford, Ireland.

The ongoing project captures and examines the oral histories and archival data of those who lived and worked within the system of coercive confinement (including Magdalene Laundries and Industrial Schools) located in the South-East of Ireland, with the primary goal of creating educational supports for a wide range of audiences about Ireland’s history of coercive confinement.

Further, we believe that gathering, analyzing, and publishing this data is essential to documenting our cultural heritage, amplifying the voices to those held in these institutions, and locating these stories within a larger social and historical narrative. The project’s open-access ethos ensures that all of the developed materials are freely available to scholars and members of the public.