Resilience and reconstruction: Histories of the present

This event brings together a cross-disciplinary group of scholars from cultural and medical history, anthropology, transcultural psychiatry, as well as therapeutic and fine arts practice to explore how individuals and societies narrate, process, and attempt recovery from traumatic experiences. The workshop draws on varied disciplinary approaches to better understand what past models and present thinking we can draw on, and what new methods we can deploy, to better understand individual and collective recovery.

 

 

Programme

30 November 

9:30-11; Session 1 Bringing War Home: Object Stories, Memory, and Modern War (project presentation)
Susan Grayzel and Molly Cannon (Utah State University)
11:15-12:45; Session 2 Birth Shock! Exploring Iatrogenic Processes and Trauma
using Arts-Based Methods (Including documentary film)
Susan Hogan (University of Derby)

‘Landandmybody . . . body from the stillness drinking in’:
spatial thinking and its relational turn within art practice
Michele Whiting (Open College of the Arts, UK)
12:45-13:45; Lunch
13:45-15:15 Session 3 TraumaZone or Zones of Resilience?
Psychological Resilience and Reconstruction under late Stalinism.
Robert Dale (Newcastle University)

Chimeras of Resilience.
Military Healing Fantasies in John Huston’s 1946 LET THERE BE LIGHT
Julia Köhne (Humboldt University, Berlin)

1 December

9:30-11:15; Session 4 Introduction to Day 2
Todd Meyers (McGill University, Montreal)

‘Making new witnesses to the Great War: trauma, modern memory and the centennial’
Ross Wilson (University of Nottingham)

Finnish Resilience Narratives as Cultural Scripts during and after World War II
Collectivizing Hardships and Suppressing Traumas
Ville Kivimaki (Tampere University)
11:30-13:15; Session 5 Resilience and Reconstruction from the Armed Conflict in Colombia:
Reflecting on the life story of a survivor in the peripheries of Bogotá
Felipe Szabzon (University of Copenhagen)

Beyond Trauma: Narrating the Wartime Present after February 24, 2022
Anna Wylegała (Polish Academy of Sciences)
13:15-14:15 Lunch
14:15-15:15 Session 6 ‘Contemplating Post-Traumatic Futures: Indigenous History,
Eco-Trauma, and Traumas of Technological Change’
Joy Porter (University of Hull)

Abstracts and bios 

Read abstracts and bios