Abstracts and bios

Bringing War Home: Object Stories, Memory, and Modern War

Susan Grayzel and Molly Cannon (Utah State University)

Our project, “Bringing War Home: Object Stories, Memory and Modern War,” shows the power of physical objects (material culture) to connect veterans and members of military families to recovering hidden memories of war.  As a collaboration not only between a historian and an anthropologist but also something deliberately co-curated with our students and communities, we seek to preserve not only the objects brought to our collection events but as important the stories associated with them. The set of questions that we developed to ask participants about the objects includes directly inquiring into the emotional resonances that they contain.  

For the past two years, our grant-funded project has gone in to local communities, many of them rural and thus rarely the focus of scholarly attention, and engaged with veterans and members of military families.  We have collected objects as varied as a dress made from silk brought home from Vietnam preserved by a veteran’s daughter and a notebook filled with Buddhist teachings given to a Vietnam veteran; our oldest object is a family heirloom (a set of US Civil War drumsticks) and our most recent object is a tiny bottle filled with sand from Iraq and Afghanistan.  

What all of these objects share is their preservation in the home as a living reminder of these moments of armed conflict. The emotions evoked and embodied by these items, however, vary enormously, showcasing both resilience and discomfort. They are the starting pieces of a broader understanding of these conflicts and their legacies not always found solely in written texts. By building a publicly accessible archive, our project thus aims to connect individual and family experiences with community and even global histories.

 

Susan R. Grayzel (Utah State University) is a Professor of History at Utah State University, researching and teaching about modern Europe and its empires, women’s and gender history, and war and culture, especially of the world wars. Her books include Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (1999), awarded the British Council Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies in 2000; Women and the First World War (2002, 2nd edition 2024); At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz ( 2012); the co-edited volume Gender and the Great War (Oxford, 2017), and most recently The Age of the Gas Mask: How British Civilians Faced the Terrors of Total War (Cambridge, 2022); this focuses on one material object—the civilian gas mask—to explore how the state and individuals responded to the first weapons of mass destruction. She has received funding from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has been both a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College Oxford and held the UK Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the University of Leeds. She currently serves as co-director of the Bringing War Home Project: Object Stories, Memories, and Modern War —documenting and digitally preserving veteran and military families’ object stories.

 

 

Molly Cannon (Utah State University) is an assistant professor of anthropology and director of the Museum of Anthropology at Utah State University. Molly specializes in community engaged museum practice and training the next generation of students in museology. Her museum work is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the National Park Service. Her work is published in American Antiquity, Journal of Archaeological Science, and Advances in Archaeological Practice. She holds a B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska and M.A. from the University of Wyoming. Molly serves as co-director for the Bringing War Home Project that documents and preserves veteran and military families’ object stories.

 

Birth Shock! Exploring Iatrogenic Processes & Trauma using Arts-Based Methods

Susan Hogan (University of Derby)

Births can be traumatising for all involved; obstetricians and midwives are subject to very different stresses to the women they serve. Yet all those witnessing the birth (and death) of babies may also be traumatised - both professionals and birth-partners. Furthermore, hospital protocols, coupled with the unpredictability of birthing itself, can override what women want and expect in terms of a birth experience, leaving some women frankly in shock. Childbirth is dangerous terrain for women. Using a range of visual research methods, this work looks at women’s experience with a cultural lens and thinks about iatrogenic illness and how institutional practices impact on women’s wellbeing in the perinatal period.
 

 

Susan Hogan (University of Derby) is Professor of Arts and Health, University of Derby and a Professorial Fellow, Institute of Mental Health, University of Nottingham. She is a member of the European Federation of Art Therapy (EFAT) Research Committee and the advisory panel of the International Health Humanities Network and a founding member of the Royal Society of Public Health (RSPH) SIG for Arts, Health & Wellbeing. Her books are used in the training of arts and health professionals internationally. Her books are: Feminist Approaches to Art Therapy (as editor, 1997); Healing Arts: The History of Art Therapy (2001); Gender Issues in Art Therapy (as editor, 2003); Revisiting Feminist Approaches to Art Therapy (as editor, 2012); The Introductory Guide to Art Therapy (with Coulter, 2014); Art Therapy Theories. A Critical Introduction (2016); Inscribed on the Body. Gender and Difference in the Arts Therapies (as editor, 2019); Gender Issues in International Arts Therapies Research (commissioned by the European Consortium of Art Therapy Educators – ECArTE) (2020); The Maternal Tug: Ambivalence, Identity, and Agency (with La-Chance Adams and Cassidy, 2020); Therapeutic Arts in Pregnancy, Birth & New Parenthood (as editor, 2020); Photography. Arts & Health Series (2022).

 

Landandmybody . . . body from the stillness drinking in’: spatial thinking and its relational turn within arts practice

Michele Whiting (Open College of the Arts, UK)

Considering diverse approaches made to investigate modalities of spatial thinking through the discipline of a Fine Art drawing practice, this paper aims to prospect for embodied strategies so as to address spatial drawing concerns, responding to a conversation between the body present and a set of waypoints used to explore developments of spatial thinking and its relational turn within arts practice. Methodologies of walking and drawing are employed to encounter the land, mindful of Frederique Gros’ observation that the landscape is a set of tastes, colours and scents which are absorbable by the body, in this instance, absorbed through my walking gendered body.
 

 

Michele Whiting (Open College of the Arts, UK) As a practicing artist I exhibit regularly and have enjoyed showing my work to wide audiences both here in the U.K. Europe and U.S.A. In 2011 I was awarded my PhD after gaining AHRC funding through The Critical Topologies of Landscape Research Hub, at Bath School of Art and Design. I have given many academic papers as an artist/researcher both here and abroad including OCAD Toronto, Canada and many European Universities.

I consider myself a research artist, and having a strong background across media seems essential in order to articulate the critical themes of the work, which centre around notions of space place and artistic practice; drawing and painting are the mechanism or spring board that I use to explore ideas in the making of larger digital works (multi screen video films) often resulting in becoming exhibited works of art themselves, in this way all roads lead back to a robust base of art making. www.michelewhiting.com Collaboration is also key, and I work closely with Dr Linda Khatir who is based in Sweden in our collaborative practice Quilos and the Windmill. www.quilosandthewindmill.com We have had residencies and shown in The USA and Sweden, and are seeking new experiences within Europe at present. Working collaboratively is exciting, generative and discursive.

 

TraumaZone or Zones of Resilience? Psychological Resilience and Reconstruction under late Stalinism

Robert Dale (Newcastle University)

Trauma occupies a curiously ambiguous position in the history of the Soviet experiment.  Without doubt Soviet citizens were exposed to extraordinary and sustained levels of hardship, suffering, violence, and trauma.  Yet the historiography frequently treats trauma as an ever-present backdrop to the seventy-four years of communist rule, and something that simultaneously went unacknowledged or unexplored by Soviet society and culture.  This paper asks to what extent the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the Second World War could be understood as a TraumaZone or the site of pockets of resilience?  It consciously borrows from the title of Adam Curtis’s seven-part documentary film Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone released in October 2022.  A central premise of this film, I argue, is that the slow and painful collapse of the Soviet Union deeply traumatised Russia, helping to generate the toxic politics of contemporary Russia.  Curtis is not alone in seeing the Putin regime as a product of the unresolved trauma of the 1990s.  Yet, to what extent does the focus on trauma obstructed an analysis of the resilience of Soviet populations, and their ability to keep going?

If we treat the Soviet Union as a remarkable TraumaZone where successive waves of revolution, civil-war, political violence, famine, war, environmental and ecological disaster had a devasting impact on individuals and societies, how does one explain the remarkable resilience that enabled Stalinist society to keep functioning (albeit imperfectly) in the aftermath of the Second World War?  How did late Soviet society understand the individual and collective capacity for resilience amidst the physical and material wreckage of war?  Furthermore, the paper seeks to explore how mechanisms of psychological and emotional survival varied across the Soviet TraumaZone? It contrasts, in particular, support for traumatized veterans treated in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, with notions of trauma in Russian cities with different experiences and conceptions of trauma.  Ultimately, the paper attempts to explore the complex relationship between hidden forms of trauma in Stalinist society, and the mechanisms that allowed late Stalinist society to recover and rebuild.

 

Robert Dale (Newcastle University) Robert Dale is Senior Lecturer in Russian History in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at Newcastle University, where he has been based since 2015.  His research interests centre upon how Soviet society dealt with the aftermath of extreme and traumatic events.  He has published widely on the aftermath of the Second World War in the Soviet Union after 1945, focusing particularly on the complicated processes of post-war reconstruction and recovery.  His first book Demobilized Veterans in Late Stalinist Leningrad: Soldiers to Civilians was published with Bloomsbury academic in 2015.  He has published articles on aspects of Russian and Soviet war memory in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History and the Journal of War and Culture Studies.  Rob is currently writing a book on the Leningrad flood of September 1924.

 

Chimeras of Resilience. Military Healing Fantasies in John Huston’s 1946 LET THERE BE LIGHT

Julia Köhne (Humboldt University, Berlin)

The educational film LET THERE BE LIGHT (1945/46), directed by American filmmaker John Huston, was not officially shown until 1980, after having been banned for decades by the US-Army that initially had commissioned it.  It portrays a large group of so called “psychoneurotic” soldiers being ‘cured’ by therapy methods such as hypnosis, narcohypnosis (Sodium Amytal), and group psychotherapy over a period of eight weeks during the Second World War at the psychiatric center of the Mason General Hospital on Long Island, New York, under the direction of Lt. Colonel Dr. Benjamin Simon.  

In the film, a neuropsychiatric fantasy is spelled out, in which mentally hurt US war veterans are alledgedly collectively healed via narco hypnosis and group therapy—by reaching back into their subconscious regarding childhood and recent war experiences, and retroactively installing a rescue anker.  The goal is to make them more resilient for future military activities and/or home.  This pro-military narrative is supported by christological and light metaphors, which are torpedoed by the film’s use of one-by-one interviews in which veterans show their deep irreversible mental wounds.

That means that, simultaneously, LET THERE BE LIGHT contains subtexts that subvert the trajectory of healing and building of resilience.  The subtexts reflect the fact that the allegedly convalescent “war hysterics” were by no means always and permanently free of symptoms.  In this educational film, ‘recovery’ and ‘health’ in the aftermath of psychological war trauma, which herein was characterized as a ‘normal’ reaction to the threat of death, are instead exposed as fragile, unstable, and imaginary categories.  This contribution analyses the specific cinematic aesthetics and dramaturgical means by which this counter-running double message (healing/resilience vs. persistence of symptoms/incurability) was created and conveyed.

 

Julia Köhne (Humboldt University, Berlin) is a researcher and reader at the Institute for History and Theory of Culture at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her research interests include: visual culture, trauma (film) studies, histories of the humanities;military psychiatry (1914–1920), as well as gender and corporality.

Her publications include: with Peter Leese and Jason Crouthamel, ed., Languages of Trauma: History, Media, and Memory (2021); with Michael Elm and Kobi Kabalek, ed., The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema. Violence, Void, Visualization (2014). Currently Köhne is writing a monograph on victim-perpetrator-inversions in transnational film cultures and interrelations to violence and trauma research (forthcoming 2024).

 

Introduction to Day 2

Todd Meyers (McGill University, Montreal)
 

 

Todd Meyers (McGill University, Montreal) is an anthropologist who teaches at McGill University in Montreal, where he is Professor and Marjorie Bronfman Chair in Social Studies of Medicine.  His most recent book is All That Was Not Her (Duke University Press, 2022), an ethnography of chronic illness that spans twenty years, and with Stefanos Geroulanos, he is the author of The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe (University of Chicago Press, 2018), a book on concepts of bodily integration and disintegration during the First World War.

 

Making New Witnesses to the Great War: trauma, modern memory and the centennial

Ross Wilson (University of Nottingham)

This discussion examines how the Great War was remembered in Britain during the centenary of the conflict, 2014–2018. It explores how the modern memory of the war demonstrates ideas of belonging, regionalism and identity in contemporary Britain through a traumatic history. By studying the new memorials that were constructed, the events that were organised and the communities that were mobilised to participate in the centenary, this assessment will examine the different types of citizenship that are reflected as individuals remembered the Great War.
 

 

Ross Wilson (University of Nottingham) Ross's research is in modern history and heritage, focusing on conflict, museums, media and memory in contemporary society. He has written extensively on a wide range of fields but concentrates on how individuals and communities form a sense of place in the past and the present. Recent works include, New York and the First World War: Making an American City (2014), The Language of the Past (2016), Natural History: heritage, place and politics (2017), Gender and Heritage (2018), New York: A literary history (2021) and Museums and the Act of Witnessing (2022).

 

Finnish Resilience Narratives as Cultural Scripts during and after World War II: Collectivizing Hardships and Suppressing Traumas

Ville Kivimaki (Tampere University)

During World War II, Finnish public discourse was strictly controlled by state authorities. In addition to censorship, the officials also employed academics, novelists and other writers to produce different kinds of “resilience narratives,” which were more subtle in their style and substance than direct war propaganda and which often paralleled people’s current hardships to historical events. The idea was to offer the citizens a national-historical context, in which to interpret their personal experiences. These narratives also constructed either a linear continuum or a cyclical sequence of events, where war-related sufferings were described in collective terms as an unavoidable or a regenerative part of Finnish history. “Resilience narratives” continued to be published also in the postwar era, demanding people to get over their personal losses. In my presentation, I will think of the resilience narratives as cultural scripts, which were meant to give cohesive meaning to individual hardships but which also streamlined and suppressed the traumatic experiences of war.
 

 

Ville Kivimaki (Tampere University) Ville Kivimäki is a social and cultural historian of the Second World War and its aftermath. He has studied especially Finnish soldiers’ traumatic war experiences, military psychiatry, and the war veterans’ readaptation back to civilian life after 1944–45. Most recently he has focused on people’s war-related dreams and on experiencing the nation in the post-war context. Kivimäki leads the Lived Nation research team at the Finnish Research Council’s Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences at Tampere University. Fron January 2024 onwards, he will start in a new position as the research director of the Finnish Literature Society in Helsinki.

 

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)

During the Cold War, the United States played a significant role combating the rise of left-wing movements in Latin America, supporting the establishment of dictatorships, but also financing civil wars and chaos, as for example in Colombia. In the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall, many countries in the region re-establish their democracies and implemented new policies to ensure civil rights and social protection. Yet in 1990s Colombia, a rise of criminality led instead to the strengthening of guerrilla forces as well as the plantation and export of coke. Armed conflict arose in virtually all parts of the country. In the process of peace building since the 2010s, mental health has become an important political tool. To achieve mental health in the context of peace building meant bringing peace of mind. To do so, mental health policies relied on three main axes of preventive action: violence, drug abuse suicide.

In this talk I present the case of one of my interviewees in the periphery of Bogotá, Luz. Luz was introduced to me as a community leader to help me in understanding the experience of the community during the COVID-19 pandemic. But when I started the interview, my first question was, please can you tell me a bit about yourself. Luz, then, decided to tell me the story of her life. Her life story passes through several conflicts and touch all of the three main issues identified in the mental health policy proposal. Nonetheless, despite her terrible experiences, she does not present a mental health problem. Her story ends by describing how she engage with a political movement for housing, and how this political engagement and social drive helped her to move forward in life. 
 

 

Felipe Szabzon (University of Copenhagen) is a postdoctoral fellow of the “Covid-19 and Global Mental Health” project at the Centre for Culture and the Mind at University of Copenhagen. He is also a research associate of the Section of Psychiatric Epidemiology of the São Paulo Medical School from the University of São Paulo and a Permanent Researcher at the Brazilian Centre for Analysis and Planning. He holds a PhD degree in Dynamics of Health and Welfare from the National School of Public Health, in Lisbon and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, in Paris; He is also a co-founder of the Platform for Social Research in Mental Health in Latin America - PLASMA.

 

Beyond Trauma: Narrating the Wartime Present after February 24, 2022

Anna Wylegała (Polish Academy of Sciences)

This paper will focus on Ukrainian narratives on the Russian invasion, occupation, flight, refugedom and war-time everyday life, gathered within the 'Testimonies fro the War' project (https://swiadectwawojny2022.org/en/). I will discuss our trauma-oriented methodological and ethical approach, explaining how we aim to avoid re-traumatization of the witnesses and traumatization of interviewers, and how we try to give back the agency to our interviewees. I will also briefly describe how the interviewees themselves deal with traumatic events in their wartime experience and how they manage to move towards resilience.
 

 

Anna Wylegała (Polish Academy of Sciences) is a sociologist and Associate Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences. Her work focuses on the individual and collective memory in Poland and Ukraine, and on the social history of the II World War and the immediate postwar period. She is the author of “Displaced Memories: Remembering and Forgetting in Post-War Poland and Ukraine” (2019) and “Był dwór, nie ma dworu. Reforma rolna w Polsce” [There was an estate, there is no estate any more. Agricultural reform in Poland] (2021). She also co-edited two other volumes: “The Burden of the Past: History, Memory and Identity in Contemporary Ukraine” (2020), and “No Neighbors’ Lands: Vanishing Others in Postwar Europe”. Currently she is a coordinator of the Polish part of the project "24.02.2022, 5 am: Testimonies from the War", focused on the documenting of the Ukrainian experience of the current war.

 

Contemplating Post-Traumatic Futures: Indigenous History, Eco-Trauma, and Traumas of Technological Change

Joy Porter (University of Hull)

Indigenous histories have much to teach us about survivance, a term of art within Native American studies used to describe varieties of self-reliant communal survival not rooted in ideas of victimization. This talk contrasts survivance with resilience, foregrounding the latter concept’s ecological roots and relationships to complexity, transformative change, scale and the dynamics of power. As the planet is increasingly forced to respond to multiple threats challenging multiple systems simultaneously, this talk makes the case for new language in this space and for a new attention to be paid to balance across disciplines concerned with trauma, resilience, and change.
 

 

Joy Porter (University of Hull) is author of Trauma, Primitivism and the First World War (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Principal Investigator of the Treatied Spaces Research Group, an international interdisciplinary consortium of scholars working on treaties and Indigenous environmental concerns based at the University of Hull, UK. More on Joy’s externally funded work on Indigenous diplomatic and environmental themes can be found here.

She is a Lead Editor of the Cambridge University Press series Elements in Indigenous Environmental Research and welcomes proposals.