Read Jeffrey Alexander’s comments on the effects of collective/cultural trauma during and after the COVID-19 pandemic in the article COVID-19 Is Traumatizing All of Us. How Will We Cope After It’s Over? online at the Rolling Stone.
“Most people are traumatized as individuals, and as family units, and perhaps also the collectivity of, let’s say, New Yorkers…but the collective of the United States is experiencing a sense of tremendous instability and anxiety because we thought we were a great country — the greatest country. And now we see other countries doing a lot better than we are. So then the question is, who are we then?”
Professor Alexander has conducted research on Cultural Trauma theory, and it is a primary interest of our Director Emeritus Ron Eyerman, now retired from Yale and continuing to work on Cultural Trauma from his home base in Sweden. The Cultural Trauma project (2008/2009) and the Social Performance, Cultural Trauma and the Reestablishing of Solid Sovereignties Project (SPECTRESS) (2014-2018) are two examples of the research that our center has been involved in on this subject.