4th Global Conference
Wednesday 2nd May - Saturday 5th May 2007
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Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers
Session Eight: Trauma, Recovery and Remembrance
Chair: Elke Rosochacki
Understanding of Trauma in Post War Resettlement
Brenda
Roche
The Wellesley Institute,
Toronto, Canada
Trauma’ has emerged as a central defining construct within
professional and popular discussions on refugee health. However,
we have little understanding of how trauma is understood, experienced
and addressed by health and social care professionals and by individuals
in post war situations.
The struggle to comprehend the nature of ‘trauma’ and
suffering has coincided with the rise of particular forms of traumatic
response, such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Conceptualising
trauma in psychiatric terms has implications for the social care responses
of health professionals, and has meant that refugees are encouraged
to engage with psychiatric systems of care.
At the same time, the construct
of ‘trauma’ is increasingly
politicised, understood as having a currency in securing political
asylum. As professionals seek to reconcile notions of social
justice with social care, testimony and therapeutic intervention can
become merged. Ultimately these ways of seeing trauma remain
grounded in a psychiatric paradigm, emphasising the use of clinical
strategies such as the use of ‘talk’ therapy as a means
of achieving reconciliation.
Using qualitative data from health and social care professionals and
women refugees living in the UK, these competing discourses on trauma
are explored. Refugees interact regularly with both popular and
professional discourses on trauma in their daily lives. How they perceive
and respond to these discourses (whether accepting it in whole, in
part or rejecting it) offers insights into the meaning of trauma in
post-war resettlement and the coping strategies they employ in response
to a psychological framing of their experiences.
Approaching New Parameters of Remembrance
in the American War Memorial
David
William Seitz
Department of Communication, University of Pittsburgh,
Pittsburgh, USA
On the front lawn of Kevin Roustazad’s masonry
business in the commercial strip of Manassas, Virginia, a set of empty
bleachers faces a dark wall of four blank granite panels. To
date, this landscape is the extent to which Mr. Roustazad’s dream
of a memorial to American soldiers killed in the ongoing war in Iraq
has come. But
if Mr. Roustazad, an American citizen of Iranian descent, has his way,
these stones will come to serve as the permanent monument to American
soldiers lost in the Iraq war. The wall is designed to accommodate
an unknown number of granite panels that will depict the names, ranks,
and official military portrait photographs (etched in ceramic plates)
of an untold number of soldiers killed in a war that has yet to end. Through
grassroots fundraising and without governmental or military support,
Mr. Roustazad is creating a solemn memorial that exhibits one of the
many human costs of the war in Iraq. He has named the site the
Silent Thunder Memorial to Freedom. “Even though the soldiers’ voices
have fallen silent, their thunder is alive,” says Mr. Roustazad. “And
when you look at them looking back at you, you will feel that they
capture your heart and your mind.”
In this
paper I will discuss how American war memorials have worked as sites of closure
that symbolically reorder, imply, but hide the horror of death in the battlefield. We
will see how inherited narratives of sacrifice—or what Kenneth Burke
calls the “collectivistic motive” for sacrifice—have been
essential to the making and memorializing of war in the United States. Although
certain aesthetic and thematic attributes seem to situate Silent Thunder at
a unique position within the long cultural tradition of American war memorials,
Mr. Roustazad’s memorial ultimately refers to familiar notions of the ‘sacrificial
soldier.’ I argue that particular elements of the Iraq war and
the U.S. military policies have rendered these notions dysfunctional. There
is no longer an easy equation between American war memorials like Silent Thunder
and the memory of the sacrificial soldier. In conclusion, I suggest that
we are approaching new parameters of the memorialization of war.
Torture and the “Ticking Bomb”:
a Case Study in Fantasy in the so-called War on Terror
Bob
Brecher
Reader in Moral Philosophy and Director of the Centre
for Applied Philosophy, Politics & Ethics, University of Brighton,
United Kingdom
Fantasy is a central component of the so-called war
on terror: from Dershowitz’s use of Marathon Man, to
Sadaam Hussein’s
non-existent weapons of mass destruction, to the British government’s “advice” to
universities on how to combat “Islamic extremism”, to the
role of Hollywood in creating America’s picture of “the
homeland”, fantasy is a key element in feeding the requisite
public fear.
My focus here is on one specific example, namely the so-called
ticking bomb scenario, on the basis of which even apparently liberal
thinkers seek morally to justify either the use of torture (Walzer,
Nussbaum) or its legalisation (Dershowitz). As that scenario is presented,
however, it remains not just a fantasy, but a fantasy the constitutive
conditions of which undermine each other. Far from establishing the
necessity of torture, issues of time, effectiveness and knowledge serve
to show that such necessity is misconstrued. Furthermore, the question
for which the scenario serves as rhetorical springboard -- What
would you do if…? –- is itself fundamentally misconceived.
To base public policy on individuals’ likely visceral responses
is both to feed and to feed upon yet further fantasy.
These considerations
help to show that torture (and its legalisation) remains unjustified;
and that is of course vital. Less obviously, perhaps, they also have
implications for the public role of intellectuals: we need to exercise
extreme caution in our use of thought-experiments. The irresponsible
discussion of inadequately detailed “ticking
bomb” examples can easily be used to promote policy proposals
that are all too real, as well as misleading people more generally
into confusing reality and fantasy.
