The Ethics of Collecting Trauma offers an interdisciplinary dialogue on the ethics of contemporary museums that are involved in collecting moments of collective trauma. Including a range of international contributions, the volume explores the ethics of collecting material that documents contemporary traumatic events. The case studies focus on four categories of such events: forced migration; terrorism attacks; major natural disasters; and cultural traumas, such as the ongoing legacy of colonization. Contributors consider whether cultural institutions have a right to collect materials about these events and what kind of materials they should focus on, if so; who is being memorialized, who should hold the power to decide what is collected, and what the critical timeline for such initiatives is. The volume also considers what the larger purpose of such collecting is and how to deal with past collecting practices, arguing that museums need to consider, in a careful and deliberate way, their ethical responsibilities as cultural institutions. The Ethics of Collecting Trauma will be of interest to academics and students working in the areas of museum and heritage studies, cultural studies, trauma studies, memory studies, and migration studies. The book will also appeal to museum professionals working around the globe.

Trauma and Meaning Making highlights multiple practices of meaning making after traumatic events in the lives of individuals and communities. Meaning making consists both in a personal journey towards a new way to exist and live in a world shattered by trauma and in public politics locating and defining what has happened. In both perspectives, the collection evaluates the impact achieved by naming the victim/s and thus the right of the victim/s to suffer from its aftermath or by refusing to recognise the traumatic event and thus the right of the victim/s to respond to it. A range of paradigms and techniques invite readers to consider anew the specificities of context and relationship while negotiating post-traumatic survival. By delineating how one makes sense of traumatic events, this volume will enable readers to draw links between practices grounded in diverse disciplines encompassing creative arts, textual analysis, public and collective communication, psychology and psychotherapy, memory and memorial.

This volume grapples with the potentials and limitations of illness narratives as diverse cultural perceptions probe into those stories from literary, textual, empirical, ethnographic, historical, and personal bases.

This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2014. Susan Sontag claimed that ‘everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well, and the kingdom of the sick,’ and while ‘we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.’ We are all, in other words, past, present, or future patients. This collection examines the many ways in which the idea of the patient can be conceptualized in different cultural, professional, intellectual, and emotional contexts as part of an on-going, multidisciplinary and international attempt by scholars, health care professionals, and, indeed, patients themselves to rethink and re-examine patienthood and patient care. These chapters attempt to put the patient at the centre: not just (although clearly not least) at the centre of the processes, institutions, and ideologies of medical care, but of a wide range of intellectual and social practices.

This book makes the case for a unique coastal-urban experience of war on the home front during the First World War, focusing on case studies from the north-east of England. The use of case studies from this region problematises an often assumed national or generalised experience of civilian life during the war, by shifting the frame of analysis away from the metropolis. This book begins with chapters related to wartime resilience, including analysis of pre-war fear of invasion and bombardment, and government policy on public safety. It then moves on to a discussion of power relations and the local implementation of policy related to bombardment, including policing. Finally, the book explores the ‘coastal-urban’ environment, focusing on depictions of war damage in popular culture, and the wartime and post-war commemoration of civilian bombardment. This work provides a multi-faceted perspective on civilian resilience, while responding to a recent call for new histories of the ‘coastal zone’.

This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2013. This is a multidisciplinary book on crises of all kinds from different parts of the world. Interesting? Not unless crises can be made to serve as opportunities for the future. Fifteen chapters present accounts of empirical research into personal and group crises where people have not just survived their losses and grief but have in most cases gone on to meaningful future growth. Tragedy from natural calamity, war, accident; crisis in the family and at work; despair from physical and spiritual displacement; helplessness from political and economic disenfranchisement – from Australia and America to Asia and Europe. These subjects receive expert multidisciplinary scrutiny with one common goal in mind. To account for the ways in which recovery and regrowth can take place. But this is not a book about the phoenix’s fable. It is empirical, evaluative, and pragmatic. It is about turning crises into opportunities.