‘I’m still there : Institutional memory and spatial legacies at the former Waterford Magdalene Laundry

This article examines the institutional legacy of coercive confinement at the former Good Shepherd Magdalene Laundry in Waterford, Ireland — now part of South East Technological University. Framed by the question of whether educational reuse reproduces, erases or transforms the site's carceral legacy, it draws on carceral geographies and gendered confinement to position the Magdalene Laundries as enduring systems of moral and spatial control whose afterlives demand ethical scrutiny. Focusing on the Waterford site as a single case study, the article traces its institutional transformation from a Catholic-run site of forced labour and confinement to a functioning technological university campus. It analyses survivor oral histories and spatial testimonies that disrupt institutional forgetting and examines how educational initiatives, particularly the Waterford Memories Project and When Silence Falls , activate the site as a space of memory, resistance and public pedagogy. In doing so, it interrogates the role of universities as inheritors of carceral spaces and asks what responsibilities such institutions hold in contemporary Ireland. By centring a survivor-informed, site-specific analysis, the article contributes to debates on spatial justice and institutional accountability. It argues that transforming a former carceral site into an educational space is not closure, but a critical threshold where memory, silence, justice and hope remain in active negotiation.