Trauma is a concept with wide-ranging impact, moving out of limited psychiatric fields into the popular imagination and policy (Fassin 2009). Psychologists now accompany medical doctors in the wake of disasters, ranging from wildfires to war, bringing with them instruments to diagnose, measure, and treat victims. Feeding into neuropsychiatric research on the effects of trauma, epigenetic studies have established yet another …
Tag Archives: Trauma
Confronting constructs with cataclysms in neuroepigenetics
This article is part of the series: Decentering Metabolism: Peripheral and Southern Diffractions
I went to a Science and Technology Studies (STS) conference in Melbourne recently and listened to a panel of social scientists share their work about psychological disorders. There was no doubt I had stakes in being there; I study embodiment and trauma and so I knew what I was hoping to hear. I sat, in anticipation, waiting to hear about …
The Human Body on the Verge of Collapse
The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War
Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers
University of Chicago Press, 2018. 416 pages.
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What is the 21st century body if not endlessly open, changeable, and porous? Genes interact with each other and with the environment from the prenatal period through life. The mother´s diet …
“As Americans, We Grieve”: Mass Shootings & Collective Trauma
“As Americans, we grieve…”[1]
Mass shootings in contemporary American society have emerged as events of profound political and cultural symbolism; indeed, the news media has often attributed to them the label of “crisis.”[2] They have a singular status in the modern American collective consciousness, one not occupied by other forms of violence. Mass shootings have attained this status, …
Kelly Ray Knight’s addicted.pregnant.poor
Duke University Press, 2015, 328 pages
addicted.pregnant.poor is the sort of ethnography you start reading and don’t put down again until it’s finished. From its opening pages—where Knight recounts the story of trying to get into the hotel room of Ramona, her extremely high, heavily pregnant and possibly comatose informant—to the last, this is a …
Book Forum — Richard Keller’s Fatal Isolation
This article is part of the series: Book forum
Richard Keller’s Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003 is a careful accounting of the toll the heat wave took on those most vulnerable in the neighborhoods surrounding Paris. The book is about the shape of vulnerability and its amplification over time — in fact, Fatal Isolation requires us to pause on the ideas of risk, vulnerability, …