In many respects (environmental, social, psychological) late modern societies can be understood as alienating, traumatizing or even catastrophic. Admittedly a great deal of sociological, anthropological and clinical work on trauma relates to the shocking experiences of the 20th century. World wars, authoritarian regimes, colonialism, and of course, the Holocaust, have tremendously impacted upon the way communities think about suffering and trauma. The cultural study of trauma (Alexander, 2004; Smelser, 2004; Demertzis, 2020) defines trauma as a belated experience of a real or imagined situation whose remembrance (and forgetting) not only elicits negative emotions, but also changes the way of identifying with the world. The suffering brought on by de-industrialization (Linkon, 2018; Walkerdine, 2010; Jimenez, 2014; Bithymitris, 2023) has also been examined as a set of shocking experiences that are re-lived and re-remembered through mechanisms of intergenerational transmission (Walkerdine & Jimenez, 2012; Bright, 2016; Emery, 2020).
Notwithstanding the huge contribution to a collective reflection on conflicted industrial pasts, contemporary research on social class has paid less attention to the effects of late modern class relations on the ways subjects cope with their inter-generational legacies. The aim of this collection of papers is to examine the practices and affective life of coping or ‘getting by’ (Walkerdine, 2010; Emery 2020; Bithymitris, 2023; Davoine & Gaudilliere, 2004) intergenerationally in the context of the lived relations of class, defined intersectionally. Precisely because traumas could be seen as trans-subjective encounters with a troubled past that is both belatedly found and created and because these encounters are inextricably linked with the pulls of the unconscious, psychosocial investigations of the subject-object interpenetrations are deemed conducive to reflections that promote transformative trauma work. Therefore, we strongly encourage submission of papers with psychosocial commitment.
Contributions can cover a variety of topics including but not limited to:
• Traumas inflicted from workplace/employer practices; the trauma of loss of work; the trauma of professional identity loss; the trauma of loss of income/over-indebtedness.
• Traumatization in digitized work environments; trauma and automation of work.
• Precarity/precariousness and coping with traumas.
• Alienation, affectivity, and trauma processing in late modernity; alienation and self-alienation as an indication of poorly processed traumas; affective landscapes of traumatized and classed subjectivities.
• Traumatization and signification in settings of deindustrialization, postindustrialization and/or reindustrialization; the intergenerational transmission of the deindustrialization trauma.
• Psychosocial studies on classed, gendered, and raced traumatization processes.
• Polycrisis/permacrisis as a traumatogenic condition; (not) coping with economic crisis, Covid-19 pandemics, institutional crises, wars, energy crisis, climate crisis.
• Migration as traumatizing experience in the era of the ‘acceleration of everything.’ • Class awareness, class consciousness, and transformative trauma work.
Open for submission from:
6/23/24
Submission end date:
2/15/25
Guest Editor: Walkerdine Valerie
Distinguished Research Professor at Cardiff University, UK
Guest Editor: Giorgos Bithymitris
Senior Researcher at National Centre for Social Research, Greece
