On February 22, 2011, Christchurch-based journalists were jolted out of their normal work routine by a large 6.3 magnitude earthquake that killed 185 people, wrecked the city and forced reporters to reappraise their journalism. This study considers how the earthquake affected journalists’ relationship to the community, their use of sources and news selection. A theory of collective trauma is used to explain the changes that journalists made to their reporting practice. Specifically, Christchurch journalists had a greater identification and attachment to their audience post-earthquake. Journalists viewed themselves as part of the earthquake story, which prompted them to view sources differently, use those sources differently and see advocacy as a keystone of their news work after the disaster. This study adds to a growing scholarship about journalists and trauma, but focuses on what the event meant for local reporters’ choice of sources and news selection rather than measuring rates of psychological distress.

In considering the Israel-Palestine conflict, focus has remained on conventional major issues: borders, settlements, Jerusalem, Palestinian refugee rights and water. Should there be one binational state, or two states for two peoples? Yet this is a conflict that is sustained by factors more profound than the dispute over limited resources or competing nationalisms. The parties’ narratives, continually rehearsed, speak of a cataclysmic event or chain of events, a collective trauma, which has created such deep suffering and disruption that the rehearsers remain ‘frozen’ amid the overarching context of political violence. This study offers a critical analysis of the concept of collective trauma together with the role of commemorative practices, including core contemporary canonical days of memory, and asks to what extent they may hinder progress in the resolution of an intractable conflict, such as the Israel/Palestine conflict. Without addressing the powerful traumatic current that underpins a chronic conflict, no amount of top-down formal peace-making is likely to be sustainable.

This dissertation is based on a qualitative research project that documents the experiences of nearly 100 elderly African Americans who lived in the total institution of Jim Crow. The collective long lasting psychological effects connected with the racial violence that occurred in the total institution are a critical aspect. In the interviews African Americans shared how on a daily basis they found themselves dealing with anxiety, fear, humiliation, shame, and stress. The narratives were analyzed utilizing the extended case method. The dissertation documents and explores symptoms of a "segregation stress syndrome" for the chronic, enduring, extremely painful experiences and responses to the total institution of Jim Crow that are indicated by numerous respondents in this research project. Preliminary findings indicate that the symptoms of "segregation stress syndrome" are similar to PTSD symptoms documented in psychiatric literature. However, "segregation stress syndrome" differs from PTSD because the traumatic experience was not a one-time occurrence; it was sustained, over time, in African American communities. In addition, the racial violence that occurred was a form of systematic chronic stress, the type that has been shown to have a detrimental impact on a person's psychological well-being. Lastly, the historical and collective trauma that ensued has contributed to an intergenerational aspect of "segregation stress syndrome." The intergenerational aspect predisposes some younger African Americans to psychological damage, stress, and trauma even though contemporary forms of racial violence are seemingly less damaging.

In recent times traditional justice processes have become increasingly adapted to serve as transitional justice tools in post-conflict societies. The healing potential of traditional justice is becoming more recognized, nevertheless there is still little known about its impact on collective trauma and especially about the causal mechanisms behind it. To contribute to this research field, this study is guided by the following research question: Why do some traditional justice processes generate the healing of collective trauma after conflict more than others?The developed theoretical framework argues that bottom-up, locally-led traditional justice processes foster voluntary community engagement which enhances collective trauma healing. Top-down, institutionalized processes, on the other hand, are theorized to produce involuntary contact which leads to lower levels of collective healing. It is thus hypothesized that locally-led traditional justice processes are more likely to generate healing of collective trauma than institutionalized traditional justice processes. An in-depth comparative case study which uses Structured Focused Comparison, analyzes the Rwandan Gacaca trials and the traditional justice processes in Acholiland. The empirical findings lend support to the hypothesis and provide modest support to the proposed causal mechanism.

In this essay, the aim is to analyse the representation of collective and cultural trauma within the narrative of Tommy Orange's novel There There, as well as how the novel is redressing the experience of traumatisation, leading a way towards healing. To do this, the essay will focus on six of the novel's characters as well as the title, prologue and interlude. By using concepts of colonial and transgenerational trauma as well as survivance to approach the novel, the essay will argue that, as it makes the trauma visible, the narrative shows that healing can still be possible after traumatisation.

Turkish denial of the Armenian Genocide is the most persistent case of institutionalized genocide denial in recorded history (Stanton, 2010). Through conducting a multimodal critical discourse analysis based on Foucauldian theories of power and exploring the socio-political dimensions of cultural trauma, memory, and photography, this thesis examines genocide denial in the case of the Armenian Genocide and seeks to understand why the ways in which we choose to remember the past matters. Genocide denial provides a compelling case for identifying how discourses legitimize power, politically, judicially, and globally. By applying a highly theoretical lens, I will consider how history is a highly political project of memory upheld by systems of power, while considering the role of eyewitness narration and documentation. It is in this tension between postmodern conceptualization of the regulatory function of discourse and the existence of historical fact that my thesis situates itself. My research will be informed primarily by Foucauldian (1982, 1995, 2003) theories of power and discourse; the unique role of witness photography in times of atrocity (P. Balakian, 2015; Batchen & Prosser, 2012; Clarke, 1997); and theories of trauma and memory (Alexander, 2004; Halbwachs & Coser, 1992; Herman, 1997; Wertsch & Roediger III, 2008).

Collective trauma infuences the political scene in an often unnoticed way. By focusing on the cases of Argentina and Chile, this study analyses which consequences traumas, experienced simultaneously by a collective, may have over time on generations, the state and its institutions. Linking it with social mobilizations, it outlines how the updating of perceptions, having emerged through the narration of stories of the past, creates distrust towards the state's institutions. This, in turn, increases the likeliness of mobilizations and violent outbreak within them. Interactions between the crowd and institutions such as the police, the military or other political actors could thus change with the depictions' elder generations make of them. These descriptions themselves, as this study shows, are shaped according to one's own experiences, past and present. Through a mixed methodology of quantitative and qualitative tools, this thesis aims to underline how the new generations, having not lived these times, may still be affected by their elders' collective traumatic experiences. While social, economic and political reasons may trigger the rise of mobilizations within a country, collective traumas, and the ensuing perceptions they produce, will be described as an underlying factor, preparing the perfect...

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This thesis explores lifespan and intergenerational trauma effects experienced by Russian Mennonite women who fled from Stalinist Russia during WWII and migrated to Canada, and adult sons or daughters of this generation of women. As an adult child of survivors, I employed an autoethnographic methodology, conducting 1-on-1 interviews with eight women aged 78 to 96, and seven adult children aged 50 to 68. Older women demonstrated a lifelong emphasis on mental strength, faith, and resilience; the marginalization of emotions; evidence of insecure attachment styles; and potential for unresolved trauma to resurface in later life. The majority of adult children experienced attachment and identity issues; their life experiences are viewed through the lens of biological, psychological, familial, cultural (religious) transmission of trauma effects. Results highlight the importance of structural and narrative social work approaches that externalize and contextualize trauma and transform service environments that individualize and/or pathologize lifespan outcomes of trauma.

This thesis explores lifespan and intergenerational trauma effects experienced by Russian Mennonite women who fled from Stalinist Russia during WWII and migrated to Canada, and adult sons or daughters of this generation of women. As an adult child of survivors, I employed an autoethnographic methodology, conducting 1-on-1 interviews with eight women aged 78 to 96, and seven adult children aged 50 to 68. Older women demonstrated a lifelong emphasis on mental strength, faith, and resilience; the marginalization of emotions; evidence of insecure attachment styles; and potential for unresolved trauma to resurface in later life. The majority of adult children experienced attachment and identity issues; their life experiences are viewed through the lens of biological, psychological, familial, cultural (religious) transmission of trauma effects. Results highlight the importance of structural and narrative social work approaches that externalize and contextualize trauma and transform service environments that individualize and/or pathologize lifespan outcomes of trauma.