Unpacking biosocial approaches to stress & trauma - III

Abstract

This panel will bring together scholars researching trauma and stress from biosocial perspectives. Trauma-informed approaches are often positioned as a gold standard of care across biomedical, therapeutic, carceral and policy domains. Historical trauma frameworks have long been central to collective identity and politics among Indigenous, Black and other racially marginalised communities, and have gained momentum through recent anti-racist and anti-colonial movements like Black Lives Matter and Idle No More. Research fields like social epidemiology, critical public health and biological anthropology have explored how trauma and stress “get inside” the body to shape health disparities (e.g. “minority stress”; “weathering” [Geronimus 1992]). Recently, research on the developmental origins of health and disease and epigenetics is redefining trauma as an exposure with a heritable trace (Dubois&Guaspare 2020), raising new questions about ancestral memory and reproductive politics.

We invite scholars from various disciplines to explore how trauma and stress are enacted biosocially through human experience, activist tactics, government policy and scientific knowledge. How are trauma and stress defined, studied and reformulated across these arenas? What are the social and political stakes of trauma-informed practices? What forms of temporality, identity and justice do they produce?

Chair

• Emma Kowal, Deakin University

Discussant

• Elizabeth Roberts, University of Michigan

Individual Presentations

• Trauma Induced Dementia and Rendering the Biosocial Molar - Greg Hollin

• Semantic mining and tinkering: neuroepigenetic figurations of trauma - Elsher Lawson-Boyd, Deakin Univeristy

• Re-enacting Trauma in the Lab. On Environmental Epigenetics and the Molecularisation of Mental Health - Georgia Samaras, Munich Center for Technology in Society, Technical University of Munich

• Stress as an Ecological Disturbance: Interrogating the Connections between the Microbiome, Stress and Obesity - Azita Chellappoo, Ruhr University Bochum

• Checklist Medicine: Managing the Traumatized Identity in Difficult to Diagnose Health Conditions - Alli Morgan, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Session Organizers

• Jaya Keaney, Deakin University

• Megan Warin, University of Adelaide

• Emma Kowal, Deakin University

• Henrietta Byrne, The University of Adelaide