Description
The Grenfell Tower Inquiry was established to uncover the truth of the fire in which seventy-two people died. This article interrogates the truth-seeking and truth-producing role of the Inquiry. As with any attempt to explain a social event or phenomena, the Inquiry is defined by a series of epistemological and methodological commitments. These shape the contours of the account of the fire that it has produced: predisposing it to particular forms of explanation, whilst excluding others. We describe this as a process of prefiguration in which the scope and form of the Inquiry circumscribes and foreshadows its findings. This encourages us to see the Inquiry as productive of the social reality it seeks to describe. This raises important and under-theorised questions about how public inquiries operate and their role in informing public understanding of consequential events and processes.
