Call for Chapters: Trauma and Covid-19: Transdisciplinary Perspectives
For the series Transdisciplinary Trauma Studies, De Gruyter:
We entered the Covid-19 pandemic in February 2020 and since then it seems that there is a “pre” pandemic life, pandemic life, and the desire for a fully post-pandemic time. Trauma research throughout disciplines has focused on popular responses to pandemic realities – surging mortality, isolation, increased fear, media messaging, government management, mask and vaccine use, food and supplies shortfalls, ventilator scarcity, and blame assignment. A number of studies, such as the recent work by Caruth (Caruth (2022) “Who Speaks from the Site of Trauma? Temporality, Testimony, and Problems of Address in Recent Trauma Discourses”) or Silver (Silver, R.C. (2020) Surviving the trauma of Covid-19. Science, 369 (6499)) look into the discourses of relationship, survival and resilience, where jarring loss seems to dominate. Are we now seeing a new form of trauma? A new means to speak it? A fresh window into defining, narrating, understanding and viewing trauma?
This volume within Transdisciplinary Trauma Studies considers the trauma of the Covid-19 pandemic, and foregrounds the understanding that the catastrophe that is this pandemic will not reach an end-date. There is no return to “normal”. This in itself contributes to trauma. The volume also recognizes the opportunity this pandemic creates for discourse on the nature of trauma. What is the trauma of pandemic, particularly the Covid-19 pandemic? Where is the trauma located within the spheres of public and private life? How have pandemic-specific political strategies for containment and resolution intersected with or created narratives about history, race, age, disability, gender, social media, news and information? What meaning will be made – or is already being made – of the pandemic and what is the role of technology in the process of trauma-related meaning-making? Were we really “all in this together”, building a collective memory? Was collective memory of the pandemic actually possible?
The current volume of Transdisciplinary Trauma Studies invites scholars from different academic fields to submit chapter proposals. The proposals (250 words maximum) shall be submitted by 30 July 2022 and must include information on the conceptual and methodological framework which the authors’ expect to use in their chapter, as well as a keyword list of terms and phrases most relevant and represented within the chapter. The completed chapters are due by 30 January 2023.
Editors: Anna Menyhért, Annie St. John-Stark, Mykola Makhortykh
Anna Menyhért is a Professor of Trauma Studies at the Budapest University of Jewish Studies. She is a senior affiliated researcher at the Democracy Institute of the Central European University, and also the course director of the CEU Summer University Course Transdisciplinary Trauma Studies: Trauma Through Contemporary and Historical Perspectives. She is the author of the monograph ‘Women’s Literary Tradition and Twentieth-Century Hungarian Women Writers’ (Brill, 2020). Currently she is working on a book entitled ‘Trauma in the Digital Age: The Representation, Transmission and Processing of Trauma on Social Media’.
Dr. Annie St. John-Stark is Assistant Professor in History in the Department of Philosophy, History and Politics at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, Canada. She is Co-Chair of the Memory and Trauma Working Group in the Memory Studies Association. She has written on the dilemma of heroic labelling for survivors and first responders and is currently working on a paper on language marker analysis, heroic master narratives and individual experiences of traumatic violence in Britain and the United States, 18th-20th centuries. Her research foci includes trauma-informed pedagogy in university curriculum development.
Mykola Makhortykh is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Communication and Media Research at the University of Bern. In his research, Mykola examines politics- and history-centred information behaviour in online environments and how it is affected by the algorithmic systems, such as search engines and recommender systems. His other research interests include armed conflict reporting, digital Holocaust remembrance, cybersecurity and critical security studies, and bias in information retrieval systems. His research has been featured in a number of peer-reviewed journals including New Media & Society, Digital Journalism, Memory Studies, and Visual Communication.
Contact Info: Boglárka Balajthy