Cultural Trauma Project

The Cultural Trauma Project is a collaborative research and publishing project sponsored by Ron Eyerman and Jeffrey Alexander of the Center for Cultural Sociology.

The plan is to develop, extend, and revise the framework that was introduced in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, and to expand its application to research sites that are, or have been, deeply consequential in defining not only severe conflicts but opportunities for reconciliation in the contemporary world. Even more than in their earlier collaboration – but modeled upon it – they would like to bring this cultural sociological theory to bear on civil wars, military conflicts between states, nuclear conflicts, colonialism and postcolonialism, military occupations, and transitions from authoritarian regimes.

The first formal workshop was held at Yale in May 2008. The final meeting was held in Greece in June, 2009. Participant Victor Roudometof has supplied an overview of this second meeting, which was published in the Newsletter of the International Sociological Association’s Thematic Group # 02 on Historical and Comparative Sociology (Volume 3, 2009).

During these workshops the participants share and discuss their individual papers.

These collaborations have been published in Narrating Trauma: On the Impact of Collective Suffering

           

Guest Participants:                      

Nicolas Demertzis

Athens University, Greece

Radim Marada

Masaryk University, Czech Republic

Sunwoong Park

Korea National University of Education

Victor Roudometof

University of Cyprus

Ari Sitas

University of Cape Town, South Africa

Ivana Spasić

Belgrade University, Serbia

Carlo Tognato

National University of Colombia, Bogotá

CCS Participants:

Jeffrey Alexander

Director, Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University

Ron Eyerman

Director, Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University

Elizabeth Breese

Junior Fellow, Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University

Dominik Bartmanski

Junior Fellow, Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University

Rui Gao

Junior Fellow, Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University

Inge Schmidt

Junior Fellow, Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University