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Brossard

Trauma in Social Life

A Sociology of the Traumatic Imagination

Medium: Buch
ISBN: 978-1-5095-6614-3
Verlag: Polity Press
Erscheinungstermin: 13.11.2026
vorbestellbar, Erscheinungstermin ca. November 2026

In recent decades, trauma has become an organizing principle of western cultures – one of the most powerful frameworks through which individuals make sense of suffering. But what exactly is 'trauma'? And how does it shape social life?

This book develops a sociological theory of trauma as both lived experience and cultural category. From the micro-politics of flashbacks to global psychiatric discourses, from the biographical disruptions of violence to the historical legacies of war, it traces how traumatic experiences surface in everyday gestures, spread across interactions, reshape lives and haunt human collectives, to become a generative social process. At the heart of this approach is the concept of the traumatic imagination: a shared disposition to experience the present through the imprint of painful pasts. Brossard explains that this imagination configures how individuals come to live with, through and against their memory, and how societies mourn, cope and control.

Ultimately, Trauma in Social Life calls for a renewed task for the social sciences: to treat mental health not merely as a clinical object or a cultural construct, but as a site of political reflexivity and subversion.


Produkteigenschaften


  • Artikelnummer: 9781509566143
  • Medium: Buch
  • ISBN: 978-1-5095-6614-3
  • Verlag: Polity Press
  • Erscheinungstermin: 13.11.2026
  • Sprache(n): Englisch
  • Auflage: 1. Auflage 2026
  • Produktform: Kartoniert
  • Seiten: 208
  • Ausgabetyp: Kein, Unbekannt
Autoren/Hrsg.

Autoren

AcknowledgementsIntroduction: The Traumatic ImaginationSummary of the ChaptersChapter 1 - Mapping Out Memory Lanes: Contextualising TraumaChapter 2 - Haunted Lives: Trauma in/as SocialisationChapter 3 - On Edge: The Interactional Dynamics of TraumaChapter 4 - Staging Trauma: Into the Making of Therapeutic RitualsInterlude: A Sociological Toolbox for the Study of TraumaChapter 5 - Battlefields Within: Modes of Traumatisation Throughout HistoryChapter 6 - What Trauma Makes Possible: A Theory of Power and Social ChangeConclusion: Intergenerational Trauma and the Limits of SociologyReferences