Voicing Trauma And Truth Narratives Of Disruption And Transformation

An ethical re-presentation of trauma demands attention to the power relations embedded in the events which cause such harm. By attending to the details of what happened, our understanding of events can transform and uncover pathways to recovery and new strengths.

Trauma and Meaning Making highlights multiple practices of meaning making after traumatic events in the lives of individuals and communities. Meaning making consists both in a personal journey towards a new way to exist and live in a world shattered by trauma and in public politics locating and defining what has happened. In both perspectives, the collection evaluates the impact achieved by naming the victim/s and thus the right of the victim/s to suffer from its aftermath or by refusing to recognise the traumatic event and thus the right of the victim/s to respond to it. A range of paradigms and techniques invite readers to consider anew the specificities of context and relationship while negotiating post-traumatic survival. By delineating how one makes sense of traumatic events, this volume will enable readers to draw links between practices grounded in diverse disciplines encompassing creative arts, textual analysis, public and collective communication, psychology and psychotherapy, memory and memorial.

This volume grapples with the potentials and limitations of illness narratives as diverse cultural perceptions probe into those stories from literary, textual, empirical, ethnographic, historical, and personal bases.

This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2014. Susan Sontag claimed that ‘everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well, and the kingdom of the sick,’ and while ‘we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.’ We are all, in other words, past, present, or future patients. This collection examines the many ways in which the idea of the patient can be conceptualized in different cultural, professional, intellectual, and emotional contexts as part of an on-going, multidisciplinary and international attempt by scholars, health care professionals, and, indeed, patients themselves to rethink and re-examine patienthood and patient care. These chapters attempt to put the patient at the centre: not just (although clearly not least) at the centre of the processes, institutions, and ideologies of medical care, but of a wide range of intellectual and social practices.

This book makes the case for a unique coastal-urban experience of war on the home front during the First World War, focusing on case studies from the north-east of England. The use of case studies from this region problematises an often assumed national or generalised experience of civilian life during the war, by shifting the frame of analysis away from the metropolis. This book begins with chapters related to wartime resilience, including analysis of pre-war fear of invasion and bombardment, and government policy on public safety. It then moves on to a discussion of power relations and the local implementation of policy related to bombardment, including policing. Finally, the book explores the ‘coastal-urban’ environment, focusing on depictions of war damage in popular culture, and the wartime and post-war commemoration of civilian bombardment. This work provides a multi-faceted perspective on civilian resilience, while responding to a recent call for new histories of the ‘coastal zone’.

This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2013. This is a multidisciplinary book on crises of all kinds from different parts of the world. Interesting? Not unless crises can be made to serve as opportunities for the future. Fifteen chapters present accounts of empirical research into personal and group crises where people have not just survived their losses and grief but have in most cases gone on to meaningful future growth. Tragedy from natural calamity, war, accident; crisis in the family and at work; despair from physical and spiritual displacement; helplessness from political and economic disenfranchisement – from Australia and America to Asia and Europe. These subjects receive expert multidisciplinary scrutiny with one common goal in mind. To account for the ways in which recovery and regrowth can take place. But this is not a book about the phoenix’s fable. It is empirical, evaluative, and pragmatic. It is about turning crises into opportunities.

Mediations of Disruption in Post-Conflict Cinema is a transdisciplinary volume that addresses the cinematic mediation of a wide range of conflicts. From World War II and its aftermath to the exploration of colonial and post-colonial experiences and more recent forms of terrorism, it debates the possibilities, constraints and efficacy of the discursive practices this mediation entails. Despite its variety and amplitude in scope and width, the innovative and singular aspect of the book lies in the fact that the essays give voice to a variety of regions, issues, and filmmaking processes that tend either to remain on the outskirts of the publishing world and/or to be granted only partial visibility in volumes of regional cinema.