Trauma, Memory and Care

SWWDTP Memory Studies Research Cluster

A workshop is about modelling a caring and careful environment for examining trauma and memory

University of Exeter

Mnemoscapes of the South West

Running across the South, West and Wales, this series of workshops combines solid research with immersive experience. Join us in exploring nostalgia, trauma, protest, haunting and decolonization. Everyone is welcome!

Please note the date of this workshop has changed from 20th March to 4th May.Please join the SWWDTP Memory Studies Research Cluster for a workshop on trauma, memory and care – a workshop which aims to model a caring and careful environment for examining trauma and memory. We invite researchers and practitioners who work with trauma to present and discuss their research, and to explore how practices of collage and attentiveness can support this process. The workshop aims to encourage exchanges of knowledge around trauma between scholars and practitioners, while also developing practices of care as an integral part of working with trauma.The workshop will consider individual, collective, historical and structural trauma, as well as related topics including violence, (in)justice, shock, disaster, suffering, time and victimhood. It will consider the role of trauma in the creation of broader social identities, and the ways in which trauma can be mediated, constructed, inherited, triggered and reproduced. Researchers and practitioners from any discipline are invited to take part. The workshop will take place in the Digital Humanities Lab at the University of Exeter. Lunch and refreshments will be provided.Programme (full programme details below):10:00 – 11:00 Collage workshop (led by Catherine Cartwright)11:15-12:45 Paper presentations12:45-1:45 Lunch (provided)13:45-15:15 Paper presentations15:15-16:00 Sculpture tour of Streatham Campus (led by Naome Glanville, Arts and Culture Exeter)16:00-17:00 Reflections on method: collage, presentations and sculptureFor further information, please email memorystudiessw@gmail.com.Full ProgrammeCollage workshop10:00 – 11:00 This collage workshop, led by Catherine Cartwright, will be an informal approach to visual expression using pre-existing imagery. Collage is an accessible and democratic arts medium - it&#x27;s easy to get started - and we intend for this to be a relaxing start to our day. There&#x27;s no pressure to participate if you don&#x27;t want to, you&#x27;re welcome regardless to sit with your morning coffee or tea and meet the other attendees. Panel 111:15-12:45 Pietro Cannatella (Durham University), ‘The Role of (Traumatic) Experiences in Shaping Athens in the Fifth Century B.C.E.’Certain schools of thought within trauma studies emphasise the role of “experiences” in constituting a traumatic event for individuals and collectives. Others place absolutely no emphasis on them, believing that traumatic events are a backward-engineered social phenomenon. Divergent modern approaches to trauma, coupled with a lack of extant written sources for the period, has proved identifying an Athenian trauma outside of available material evidence and euphemistic art-forms, a difficult task. Notions of an all-encompassing “master narrative” in Athens subsequently remain appealing. Conversely, this paper aims to demonstrate that within the Classical period, writers such as Herodotus, Thucydides and Plato had begun to construct a clear and defined view of what traumatic events were – and how they influenced the actions of individuals, sub-groups and collectives. In narrowing the search for Greek trauma to a semantic analysis of Classical Greek texts and by identifying nouns and verbs that denote affliction, suffering and ‘victimhood’ in the Classical period, this paper suggests that a programmatic yet complex representation of trauma had been broadly contrived. A close engagement with episodes of extreme negative experiences within these texts may provide a more detectable method of trauma observation, and polis transformation, for Athens in the fifth century.Federica Colella (University of Siena), ‘A Case in Point of Trauma: A Cognitive Approach to Ancient Vulnerability in Exile’The predisposition to be injured is an ontological condition that characterizes every human being at first in its bodily status and then also in a psychic sense, and it is this that makes trauma particularly flourishing for an anthropological and cognitive study. Trauma is an event that disrupts the balance and continuity of the self and it can depend either on a set of stressful elements that are concentrated on a single moment or on a single upsetting event in a person&#x27;s life. Exile is one of those traumatic events in which disorientation and isolation are metaphorically traced back to a wound. In this light it is striking how talking about exile is useful to investigate vulnerability and wounded memory from an emotional perspective. Indeed, a fairly pervading theme related to the experience of exile, considered as a true mourning for the loss of one&#x27;s homeland, is the relevance of memories that can work either as a relief or as a parameter against which the new life is evaluated. By the depicture of Ovid&#x27;s suffering exile, compared to the paradigmatic banishment of Philoctetes and his victimhood, my paper will chart how trauma can be dealt with and healed on different levels both emotionally and culturally.Millie Wan Marriott (University of Bristol), ‘Considering Trauma in Performances of Ovidian Rape’The opposing narratives of the poet Ovid as a ‘feminist’ or ‘misogynistic’ writer have long since been debated, but it is clear that Ovid is foundational in discussions of gendered violence. My paper will examine modern performance reception of Ovidian scenes of sexual violence, considering different methods for staging rape and associated trauma, and focusing on The Globe’s production of Metamorphoses (2021) as a case study. I will explore this through the lens of trauma, not only with respect to the mythical treatment of rape victims but also with the lived experiences of both audience and performers in mind. The question of what can, or what should, be performed on stage reaches as far back as antiquity. Theatre provides a live spectacle; violence on the stage can be shocking, tangible, and triggering, more so than in other art forms; and embodied spectatorship can create affective responses from the audience. I will also examine the extent to which performance can assist in healing processes, as a form of catharsis or through inspiring a collective imagination of a better future.Lunch (provided)12:45-1:45 Panel 213:45-15:15 Aishwarya Mohan (University of Reading), ‘Mediation of trauma in Shobasakthi&#x27;s Traitor’Recent scholarship to promote inclusivity and cross-cultural solidarity in trauma studies has altered the predominantly western approaches to trauma. I propose to present the ways of mediation of trauma in Shobasakthi&#x27;s Traitor. Shobasakthi, currently in France, was a former soldier of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). His works explore the social and political aspects of the Sri Lankan civil war. The presentation will reconfigure the existing notion of trauma as incomprehensible, sudden and event-based and the relationship between trauma and its articulation. It will focus on some excerpts from the novel to highlight traumatic representation and the inherent structural trauma that dominates the Sri Lankan Tamil society. It will also focus on the perception of trauma in non-western contexts.Elaine Hutchinson (University of Exeter), ‘Creatively Speaking – The role of creative arts in child and adolescent trauma therapy’Taking a case study approach, I will explore how child and adolescent clients make sense of traumatic experiences in therapy using creative projection into their artwork to titrate their exposure to trauma content. I will explore how the client’s externalised artwork then offers new possibilities to them as they draw on their implicit knowing in the form of insight, objectivity, meaning-making and experiencing new ways of being. I will also look at how clients can use artwork to create a coherent trauma narrative which allows them to address their thought-life, challenge maladaptive cognitions and faulty attributions and make positive meaning of their post-trauma self. I will draw on my clinical experience, creative responses, and the use of a range of creative mediums in therapy and explore briefly how the therapist can be a co-agent of change supporting the client. Examples of my companion art (art completed by the therapist in sessions with the client) and response art (therapist art completed outside client sessions), along with reconstructed, anonymised client work, will be used as illustrations to maintain client confidentiality.Phoebe Martin (University of York), ‘The political grammar of memorials for sexual violence’In the landscape of contemporary memorialisation, memorials commemorating gender-based violence are rare; memorials for sexual violence are even rarer. Yet, in the aftermath of movements like #MeToo there are a growing number of memorials dedicated to the victims and survivors of sexual violence across conflict and peacetime. These memorials have taken various forms: statues, gardens, and plaques among others. Many of these memorials take a trauma-informed approach and are designed as calm spaces of healing for victim-survivors. Yet, there is a tension between the need for individual healing and the political urgency of accountability. This raises questions about what memorials can say, and what we can feel about sexual violence in public space. This paper uses discourse analysis to examine the forces shaping the ‘political grammar’ (Hemmings 2011) of different memorials: including institutional stakeholders, activist groups, and conservative backlash. Analysing the influence of these on the conditions of possibility for memorialisation, it therefore asks what these memorials can, and importantly cannot, say about sexual violence and trauma.Sculpture tour of Streatham Campus (led by Naome Glanville, Arts and Culture Exeter)15:15-16:00 Reflections on method: collage, presentations and sculpture16:00-17:00

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