Resisting the Reparative: moving beyond the trauma industry

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

Trauma, a term that is often put in service of the nation-state, is turning out to be a rather vexed frame to understand violence and harm. At the American Studies Association convening in 2024, Dian Million proposed that the word “trauma” has been so weaponized in the service of colonialism that it is no longer a usable term. Taking her call to heart, this roundtable contemplates how decolonial and Indigenous theories offer an understanding of lived experiences of violence and their generative potential, outside of and beyond the weaponization of these narratives by the state. The group seeks to show how, despite its proclamations of providing language to and means of advocacy for traumatized individuals, the concept of trauma is, actually, deeply embroiled in white supremacy and carceral systems built on/reinforced by the combined forces of white-nationalist racism, misogyny, xenophobia, ableism and hetero-cis sexism.

Seeking to articulate how the category of trauma is largely understood and what it means in the context of critical disability studies, this roundtable conversation will center on critical analysis of “the trauma industry.” With each member of this session coming from a distinct disciplinary context, including clinical psychology, psychoanalysis, English, American Studies, Feminist Studies and Critical Disability Studies, participants will explore the ideological underpinnings of research, pedagogy, and diagnosis of trauma, locating them in white supremacist logics and global militarisms. Contesting the reparative approach to trauma, the roundtable will address the complexities of working with students and clients as they actively cope with ongoing state violence, and confront the weaponization of privilege on micro and macro levels that prioritizes white comfort over the radical and transformative potential that comes when those who experience violence organize together.

This dialogue includes academics with lived experiences of trauma and/or disability, who organize with other impacted people, engage in clinical work, and/or facilitate training, and policy work in museums, higher education, and government. Beginning with short lighting talks from the presenters, initial remarks will attend to these critical questions, to be followed up by lively conversation:
- Within your research practice and discipline, how do you understand “the trauma industry?”
- Critiquing the concept of “trauma informed practices,” how are priorities of care and attention in therapy, education, and other institutional spaces constructed around white supremacy, ableism and heteronormativity?
- What would a disability justice approach to thinking about trauma look like?
- How do educators interrupt those moments when the language of trauma is used to protect white comfort, and evade histories of racism?
- Attending to the material violences associated with the concept, how might we seek solidarity and connection around the reality that trauma puts people in connection with one another?
- How does the commitment to trauma’s repair forestall revolutionary potential?

Throughout the conversation, participants will share their analysis, theory and practice about countering the persistent individualization of trauma while resisting the allure of the reparative approach.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Hannah L Brancato, University of Maryland

Panelists

• Angela M Carter, University of Minnesota

• Izetta Autumn Mobley, Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture

• Avgi Saketopoulou, New York University

• Lara Sheehi

Biographical Information

Angela M. Carter, PhD (she/her) amcarter@umn.edu
Founding Member, Critical Disability Studies - University of Minnesota
As a Ronald E. McNair scholar, Angela M. Carter (she/her) became a first-generation college graduate in 2009 when she earned her BA in English from Truman State University. Dr. Carter completed her Ph.D. in Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota in 2019. She has worked in various capacities over the last 20 years teaching, researching, and advocating, around experiences of injustice and inequity in higher education. In addition to co-authoring a chapter in the anthology Negotiating Disability: Disclosure and Higher Education, Dr. Carter’s work has appeared in Lateral and Disability Studies Quarterly. Her most recent publication “The Politics of Praxis: Or, What if I Never Make it to the Mountaintop?” appears in the open access anthology Dear Higher Education: Stories from the Social Justice Mountain. Angela works as an independent educator-scholar-organizer and is currently working to support the University of Minnesota’s Critical Disability Studies Initiative. She is also a founding member of the grassroots community organization, AmplifyMN: A Disability Justice Collective.


Hannah Brancato, M.F.A. (she/her) brancato@umd.edu
Artist and Doctoral Student, American Studies, University of Maryland
Hannah Brancato is an artist, educator and emerging scholar based in Baltimore., currently pursuing her Ph.D. in American Studies at University of Maryland. He research focuses on trauma studies, memory work and the role of art and material culture in anti-sexual violence movements. Hannah’s art practice is grounded in collective storytelling, and the creation of public rituals to bring people’s stories together. Dreamseeds, a socially engaged art, music and workshop series, is her most recent project; it is now on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Brancato is best known as co-founder FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture, an art/organizing collective that produced creative interventions to create a culture of consent. FORCE created the Monument Quilt, a collection of 3,000 stories from survivors of sexual violence on quilt squares which toured the US and Mexico in 50 public displays between 2013-2019. FORCE's work continues through their effort to archive the Quilt in museums, community centers and university archives Brancato’s work with FORCE received awards including the 2015 Open Society Institute-Baltimore Community Fellowship and 2016 Sondheim Artscape Prize. Media coverage includes pieces in Voice of America, Afterimage, Ms Magazine, the Washington Post, MSNBC, and Surface Design Journal. Brancato lectures and holds workshops related to her art practice and research about trauma informed pedagogy, most recently presenting at Northern Virginia Community College, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and Colgate University.

Seol Ha, Ph.D. (she/her) seolha@creighton.edu
Assistant Professor of English, Creighton University
Seol Ha is a scholar in the fields of Critical Race and Disability Studies based in Omaha, Nebraska. Ha received her Ph.D. in English from University at Buffalo, State University of New York in 2023, and has been teaching at Creighton University since August 2023. Ha’s research and pedagogy are informed by Black Feminist Disability Studies and Comparative and Critical Race Studies. Ha’s recent article, “Black Madness Masquerade in a Nineteenth-Century American Asylum,” appears in the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, and another article, “Disability, Shared Vulnerability, and Care Communities in Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” is forthcoming in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. He is currently working on a monograph exploring the representations of disability and madness in 20th-century Black women’s literary and cultural productions. At Creighton University, Ha teaches courses on BIPOC literature, anti-racism, and disability studies, and serves the campus community as the Race and Social Justice Cohort Representative of the College’s Equity-Diversity-Inclusion Task Force.

Izetta Autumn Mobley, Ph.D. izettamobley@gmail.com
Independent Curator
Izetta Autumn Mobley completed her doctoral studies at the University of Maryland, College Park in American Studies. Her research focuses on race, disability, slavery, public history, digital humanities, and material and visual culture.
In addition to her work as a scholar she has extensive experience within the cultural sector, working with Shakespeare Theatre, Woolly Mammoth Theatre, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment for the Arts, Humanities D.C., the Office of Historic Alexandria, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, and the DC History Conference. She is the recipient of the Walter B. Hill Fellowship at the Banneker-Douglass Museum and the Woods Research Fellowship at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. She has served as co-chair for the D.C. History Conference a city-wide conference on the history of Washington, D.C. In 2020, she served as the program committee co-chair for the Association of African American Museums conference. She is also a faculty member for the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s Interpretive Workshop. She was a 2020-2021 ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow. Dr. Mobley is a Certified Interpretive Guide and creator of The Site Unseen, which provides tours focused on exploring submerged, neglected, or under-examined history and culture. She previously served as a lecturer at the Brown University Watson Institute and as faculty for the Brown University in Washington program.


Avgi Saketopoulou, Psy.D. avgisaketopoulou@gmail.com
New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis
Avgi Saketopoulou is a Cypriot and Greek psychoanalyst practicing in NY. She serves on the faculty of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and publications have received The Ralph Roughton Prize, the first Tiresias Prize, and is twice the recipient of the annual essay prize by the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (2014 and 2023). Her interview on psychoanalysis is in the permanent holdings of the Freud Museum (Vienna) and her monograph, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (2023) braids psychoanalysis with performance studies, philosophy, and queer of color critique to explore the vicissitudes of overwhelm and repetition. She is co-author, with Ann Pellegrini, of Gender Without Identity, and in critical conversation with Dominique Scarfone in The Reality of the Message: Psychoanalysis in the wake of Jean Laplanche. She is currently working on her next book project provisionally titled The Offer of Sadism.


Lara Sheehi, PsyD, drlarasheehi@gmail.com
Doha Institute for Graduate Studies
Lara Sheehi (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar, and a Research Fellow at the University of South Africa's Institute for Social and Health Sciences. She is the founding faculty director of the Psychoanalysis and the Arab World Lab. Lara’s work takes up decolonial and anti-oppressive approaches to psychoanalysis, with a focus on liberation struggles in the Global South. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022) which won the Middle East Monitor's 2022 Palestine Book Award for Best Academic Book. Lara is the President of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA, Division 39) and co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality. Lara is on the advisory board for the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network and a member of the founding collective for the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. She is currently working on a new book, From the Clinic to the Street: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures (Pluto Press).