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In this article the author would like to discuss information and the causal-temporal models as discussed in trauma theory and reports from trauma therapy. The article discusses two modes of temporality and the role of narrative explanations in informing the subject as to their past and present.

Conceptual analysis.

Information in trauma has different meanings, partly as a result of different senses of temporality that make up explanations of trauma in trauma theory. One important meaning is that of explanation itself as a cause or a therapeutic cure for trauma.

The research proposes that trauma and trauma theory need to be understood in terms of the role of explanation, with explanation being understood as persuasion. This follows the historical genealogy of trauma theory from its origins in hypnosis and psychoanalysis.

The article examines the possibility of unconscious information and its effects in forming psychological subjectivity.

The work connects classic theories of selfing to the COVID-19 pandemic to make fresh connections between pandemic-induced trauma to the self and digital resources. This research introduces the concept of the “traumatized self” emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic in relation to digital disadvantage and digital hyperconnectivity. From Cooley’s original “looking glass self” to Wellman’s “hyperconnected” individualist self, social theories of identity work, and production of the self have a long and interdisciplinary history. In documenting this history, the discussion outlines key foci in the theorizing of the digital self by mapping how digital selfing and identity work have been treated from the inception of the internet to the epoch of the pandemic. The work charts the evolution of the digital selfing project from key theoretical perspectives, including postmodernism, symbolic interactionism, and dramaturgy. Putting these approaches in dialogue with the traumatized self, this research makes a novel contribution by introducing the concept of digitally differentiated trauma, which scholars can employ to better understand selfing processes in such circumstances and times.

Using Margaret Price's concept of kairotic space, this chapter asserts that the first-year writing classroom is a particularly fitting place to explore topics like consent and sexual assault. However, I caution the importance of using a trauma-informed approach to these topics. I provide an overview of the distinctions between related fields: trauma-informed pedagogy, trauma theory, and disability studies in order to argue for a pedagogical approach that takes each into account. First-year writing instructors, as well as other instructors in the university, should strive to live in the discomfort that often emerges from difficult material not only because it is necessary for building a better society but also because it is pedagogically sound. Furthermore, I argue that in order to have a truly trauma-informed approach, we need to change the very foundations of the university.

To understand how females who had recently been street homeless made sense of their lived experience, seven women engaged in semi-structured interviews. This study aims to provide an insight into the complexities of the gendered homeless experience, while using theories of trauma and victimisation to propose a new approach to understanding the cycle of female homelessness.

An interpretative phenomenological analysis approach was chosen to explore the phenomenon of female homelessness. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a small homogenous sample of women recruited in a city in the south of England.

Two super-ordinate themes emerged: victimisation and trauma and the group and the individual. In the male-dominated world of homelessness, women were caught in a cycle of multiple traumatic loss, compounded by pervasive gender-based violence, struggles in identity and systematic control. Gendered, trauma-informed women’s homelessness services are required.

Findings demonstrate the desperate need for an expansion in female-only homelessness services. The lived experience of the participants adds to an evidence base, which is vital to inform effective trauma-informed gendered service provision.

Homelessness policies draw principally on the prevalent literature on men; the UK research with women is lacking. This study gives voice to a hidden population, using the lived experience of women to suggest a new model of female homelessness.

The domain of study on mediated suffering is ensconced within an Orientalist paradigm which ideologically structures our visuality and gaze. The consignment of suffering through bodies of alterity and the geo-politics of the Global South encodes the coloniality of power as a dominant reading. It then naturalizes the West as the voyeur in its consumption of the abject bodies of the Global South. Creating a binary through this East-West polarization in the oeuvre of suffering as a realm of study, it creates the hegemony of the West as the moral guardian of suffering, imbuing it with the right to accord pity and compassion to the lesser Other. Beyond elongating the Orientalist trajectory which lodged the body politic of the Global South as a sustained ideological site of suffering, it hermeneutically seals the East as irredeemable, ordaining it through the gaze over the Other as a mode of coloniality. In countering this Eurocentric proposition, this chapter contends that this coloniality of gaze needs further rumination and new sensibilities in the study of mediated suffering, particularly following 9/11 and the shifting of the geo-politics of suffering in which the West is dispossessed through its own manufactured ideologies of the ‘War on Terror’ such that it is under constant threat of terrorist attacks and through the movement of the displaced Other into the Global North. Besieged and entrapped through its own pathologies of risks and threats, the West is projected through its own victimhood and the politics of the Anthropocene within which risks are seemingly democratized by environmental degradation as an overarching threat for all of humanity. Despite these shifts in the global politics, the scholarship of suffering is locked into this polarity. The chapter interrogates this innate crisis within this field of scholarship.

This introductory chapter opens up with the notion of ‘technologies of trauma’ and the appropriation of trauma as a cultural form in modernity aided by technologies of vision and sound. Trauma in modernity has been intimately welded with witnessing and testimony, illuminating an inter-relationship with technologies which simulates our senses and affect, with its capacities to re-present past events through present consciousness, and its ability to produce a moral economy in their own right. Humanity's reliance on technologies to narrate and circulate trauma as a cultural form of exchange and transaction articulates a moment of transcendence in which media as cultural artefacts reconfigure trauma as a cultural form. The notion of second-hand witnessing and the simulation of trauma as a shared and popular genre unleashes trauma as a resonant genre bound with technologies which renew human bonds. Equally it can be reduced to fiction or give way to compassion fatigue. In historically tracing the movement of technologies of trauma as a cultural form over time from televisual witnessing to its aesthetic or perverse renditions in the digital age, the chapter discerns trauma's machinic bind and its enactment as a cultural artefact couched within the sensorium of affect and ethics. The development of mass technological forms over time, from print to the digital age, also concerns the rise of trauma as a cultural form in terms of witnessing, testimony, memorializing, mourning and commemoration. Within these configurations the traumatized human figure is submerged through time as one equally enacted and abstracted through the formats of technology and consumption.

Poland’s political and economic transition of 1989 resulted in a cultural trauma experienced by consumers, which has influenced their perception of the retail experience. However, younger Polish consumers can remember neither communism nor the transition period. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the differences in perception of customer experiences in retail between Poland’s pre- and post-transitional generations.

A quantitative survey is first conducted with a sample of 1,045 Polish consumers measuring their perception of utilitarian and hedonic customer experiences in retail environments. Then, five qualitative focus group interviews with 29 participants provide an in-depth understanding of the survey results.

The quantitative study suggests that the pre-transitional generation is focused on utilitarian experiences, whereas the post-transitional generation is attracted to hedonic experiences in retail environments. The qualitative study provides an understanding of how the utilitarian and hedonic aspects of customer retail experiences are perceived and how the cultural trauma manifests in consumers’ values.

The study provides a new perspective on the customer experience in retail contexts from a society that has undergone a cultural trauma. The findings focus on generational differences in consumer attitudes toward hedonic and utilitarian experiences in a post-transition society and expand the theory of cultural trauma into the field of customer retail experience.

The purpose of this paper is to review the purpose of the Community Meeting and how it fits within the Sanctuary Model®, it will outline the tools theoretical underpinnings and finally how the tool is used in other trauma models specifically Therapeutic Communities.

This paper draws the key literature together related to the Community Meeting within the Sanctuary Model®, making links to theoretical influences between the Community Meeting, Trauma Theory and Attachment Theory. Finally it provides a comparison of the Community Meeting within Therapeutic Communities and the Sanctuary Model®.

The paper detailed how the Community Meeting tool is underpinned by the norms and theories of the Sanctuary Model®. It detailed the direct link between healing from trauma and building attachments to the Community Meeting. It found the similarities of the Community Meeting within both Therapeutic Communities and the Sanctuary Model® in that they always included all participants and occurring regularly in circular groups. However, it noted the distinct differences including in Therapeutic Communities the Community Meeting forms a significant intervention, whereas within the Sanctuary Model®, the Community Meeting supports the broader intervention of the model for all members of the community including staff and clients.

The Sanctuary Model® is gaining international interest and as such, critical consideration of its theoretical influences, similarities and differences with existing models is critical to understanding the model.

Purpose – In this chapter, I examine the ways that various trauma carriers, including social movements, self-identified survivors, professional organizations, and advocates make public claims about trauma and the PTSD diagnosis as they work to define moral and political issues.

Methodology/approach – Employing the method of social pattern analysis, I analyze a variety of narrative data pertaining to issues such as child sexual abuse, war, slavery, and genocide.

Findings – Trauma carriers engage in significant social memory work and collective identity work, define social problems, and practice social activism as they address the causes and consequences of psychological suffering. Within the context of modern diagnostic psychiatry, the PTSD diagnosis stands out as a unique narrative of social illness. The PTSD diagnosis is a powerful cultural script that various individuals and interest groups use to interpret mental health symptoms while attributing psychological consequences to social causes as opposed to problems rooted in the individual's psyche (as with psychoanalysis) or neurophysiology (as with modern diagnostic psychiatry). By implication, the social world must be “cured” for the individual to be healthy.

Originality/value of paper – I detail the unique sociocognitive implications of the PTSD diagnosis, highlighting its impact on our collective understanding of particular traumatic experiences and the shared nature of posttraumatic affect. I show the relevance of social memory studies, the more broadly conceived sociology of culture and cognition – especially as it pertains to collective identity and classification norms, the sociology of health-focused social movements, and the analysis of social problems claims-making to an emerging sociology of diagnosis.

Rwanda established a deinstitutionalization program to end institutional care and transition to family-based care for children. Part of their program involved training local volunteers in an evidence-based, trauma-informed caregiving model, Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI), to provide education, support and TBRI training to caregivers who reunited or adopted children from institutional care in Rwanda. This study aims to describe the process of disseminating a trauma-informed intervention, TBRI, as part of the national deinstitutionalization program in Rwanda.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten lay social workers about Rwanda’s care reform and their experience using TBRI. A phenomenological approach was used to qualitatively analyze the interviews.

Analysis revealed five themes centered on the usefulness and universality of TBRI, the power of community in meeting the needs of children and youth and the importance of connection in supporting children who have experienced institutional care.

A global call to end institutional care and shift to family-based care for children has organizations, governments and experts seeking pathways to implement care reform. Although care reform is a complex process, Rwanda created and implemented a deinstitutionalization program focused on spreading the message of care reform and providing sustainable support for caregivers and families.