Trauma Effects: Interpreting the Intersection of Trauma, Psychosocial Interventions, and Humanitarian Praxis

Abstract:

In humanitarian praxis, trauma healing and psychosocial interventions have become an increasingly strong presence in the space of “soft humanitarian interventions” – i.e., that category of interventions that goes beyond “bare life” to accomplish social, psychological, or political effects. In the research conducted by the proposed members of this panel, trauma, psychosocial intervention, and humanitarian practice are often brought together to interrogate the nature of “trauma effects” – the effects of integrating the ‘psychosocial’ into humanitarian interventions as part of the overall management of conflicted, transitional, uncertain, and often dangerous social spaces.

After nearly 20 years of experimentation with psychosocial intervention in humanitarian spaces, a critical mass of anthropological observation has emerged to allow for inter-case comparisons, contrasts, and ethnographically-grounded theorization about the juncture between the two domains. In this panel, anthropologist-scholars of trauma, psychosocial intervention, human rights, and humanitarian intervention are brought together to engage the following questions: What is the “trauma effect” of mass scale psychosocial interventions in diverse, conflict affected spaces? What role does trauma healing play in a broader range of “soft humanitarianisms” in context? What are the intended and unintended social, political, and psychological consequences of these interventions on micro- and macro- scales? How is the resolution of traumas imbricated in the broader goals of specific humanitarian interventions; or alternately, how are these resolutions elided in the service of broader goals of public education or social engineering? Moving beyond the foundational analytic of ‘suffering’ which has shaped many of these discussions thus far, this panel asks what, beyond suffering, do trauma interventions seek to resolve in transitional contexts, and what does this tell us about the operations of global humanitarianism in localized iterations?