Trauma: social and psychological dimensions
- Submission status
- Open
- Submission deadline
This Collection supports and amplifies research related to SDG 3- Good health and wellbeing.
Trauma is often understood as an individual psychological event, yet its roots and repercussions are profoundly social, political and cultural. From war and displacement to systemic oppression, corruption and collective violence, trauma manifests not only in personal suffering but also in community ruptures, social fragmentation, cultural silence and generational memory.
We invite contributions that explore trauma as a socially embedded, psychologically complex and politically situated phenomenon, with particular attention to its transcultural, transethnic and transgenerational dimensions. We invite perspectives on how a sense of trauma is both shaped by and shapes the world, including for instance, geopolitical realities, institutional policies, identity politics and cultural practices.
We welcome perspectives from across the social sciences, humanities, and public policy, including sociology, anthropology, psychology (non-clinical), political science, history, cultural studies, education, international relations and related fields.
We welcome papers that engage with topics including (but not limited to):
- Individual versus collective trauma: community-level impacts and shared grief
- Global unrest, conflict and upheaval: the psychological and social toll of war, migration, and political instability
- Trauma and activism, NGOs, and grassroots organising: roles in witnessing, documenting, resisting and rebuilding
- Transgenerational transmission of trauma: memory, silence, inheritance and intergenerational resilience
- Transcultural and transethnic perspectives on how trauma is understood, narrated and treated
- Oral history and narrative approaches to trauma: bearing witness through testimony, storytelling and memory
- Trauma in the context of corruption, state violence, systemic inequality and extremism
- The role of trauma in shaping or disrupting individual and collective identities
- Trauma and cultural production: literature, art, music, film and performance as sites of expression, healing and resistance
- Collective memory, forgetting and memorialisation: who gets to remember and how
- The intersections of trauma with race, gender, class, sexuality, indigeneity and migration
- Trauma and policymaking: the ethical responsibilities of governments and institutions in post-trauma recovery
- Case studies of political, historical or post-conflict trauma, including marginalised and minority experiences
- The politics of recognition and invisibility: when trauma is denied, ignored, or strategically deployed
Research that is clinical, diagnostic or neuroscientific in focus will be considered out of scope.
