CFP: 3rd Global Conference: Trauma: Theory and Practice

Tuesday 19th March – Friday 22nd March 2013

Lisbon, Portugal

Call for Presentation:

This inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary conference seeks to examine and explore issues surrounding individual and collective trauma, both in terms of practice, theory and lived reality. Trauma studies has emerged from its foundation in psychoanalysis to be a dominant methodology for understanding contemporary events and our reactions to them. Critics have argued that we live in a ‘culture of trauma.’ Repeated images of suffering and death form our collective and/or cultural unconscious. The third global conference seeks papers on a variety of issues related to trauma including: the function of memory, memorial, and testimony; collective and cultural perspectives; the impact of time; and the management of personal and political traumas.

Whilst we continue to warmly welcome research papers of theoretical and clinical interest, we would also encourage papers that address: critical questions of practice; practical projects; first-hand survivor/bystander reports of individual and collective experiences; and, those that interrogate, critique, represent, or create works that deal with fictional and actual traumatic events.

Case studies, papers, performance pieces, reports, works of art, work-in-progress, workshops and pre-formed panels are invited on issues related to any of the following themes: 1. Public and Political Trauma
~ War and trauma, both past and present
~ Captivity and torture
~ Public disasters and trauma including environmental catastrophes
~ Disease, public health and trauma
~ Political trauma, silencing dissent/voicing dissent
~ Social trauma
~ Traumatic displacement and cultural uprooting
~ Inherited intergenerational trauma

2. Personal and Individual Trauma
~ Bereavement: parent; sibling; partner loss
~ Abandonment
~ Betrayal
~ Peer pressure and bullying
~ Murder and assault
~ Domestic violence
~ Child abuse and childhood trauma
~ Survivor guilt
~ Disability
~ Witnessing trauma and secondary trauma
~ Coping strategies – stress management and reduction

3. Diagnosing and Treating Trauma
~ Medical, therapeutic, and holistic approaches to trauma management
~ Non-medical therapies/approaches – the uses of drama, dance, narrative, bibliotherapy and scriptotherapy, music, art, and digital technologies
~ Vicarious traumatisation, secondary stress, and compassion fatigue
~ From person to survivor – perspectives of change

4. Theorising Trauma
~ Trauma and post colonialism
~ Memory
~ National identity
~ Trauma studies
~ Individual versus collective trauma
~ Socio-cultural perspectives on traumatic experience
~ Gender
~ The body from the inside and out
~ Psychic trauma

5. Representing Trauma
~ Affect, trauma, and art
~ Trauma on stage, screen, and in cyberspace
~ Traumatic expression
~ Media images: reality and fiction
~ Literature and poetry
~ Eyewitness testimony
~ Gaming and violence
~ New technologies
~ Reporting on trauma
~ Aesthetics and experience
~ Fear and horror
~ Otherness, spirituality, and trauma

What to Send

The Steering Group also welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 12th October 2012. All submissions are minimally double blind peer reviewed where appropriate. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 18th January 2013. Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract f) up to 10 key words

E-mails should be entitled: Trauma 3 Abstract Submission.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs

Peter Bray 

Rob Fisher

The conference is part of the ‘At the Interface’ programme of research projects. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting.

For further details of the conference, please click here.

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.