Issue 2: Reflections on Trauma

Cover artwork by Tyler Rai.

In the midst of migration, war, and systemic oppression, illness, injury, and violence are often felt with disruptive force. Trauma has emerged as both a ubiquitous embodied experience and a contested category of thought and diagnosis. While institutional, medical, and legal uses of the term tend to domesticate the embodied experience of trauma—stripping it of the life conditions that generate it—trauma can be a useful way to apprehend the aftereffects of great difficulty. The ubiquity, weight, and many scales at which trauma can be invoked beg for collective, interdisciplinary endeavors, to heal those subject to disruptive and wounding experiences; to describe such experiences in a way that exceeds disciplinary conventions; and to interrogate what we mean when we say the word. What is trauma? How might a scholar, artist, or practitioner follow the ways in which a sudden rupture reverberates into a life? How has trauma entered into ways of knowing, addressing, or healing in study, creation, or practice? How might we think about the relationship between language, trauma, and expression? How does trauma as both category and experience affect the expression and sharing of pain?

Content Warning
Some pieces make references to topics some readers may find difficult, such as torture, suicide, sexual abuse, and nudity.

Edited by
Iro Filippaki
Sarah Roth
Grace Chen
Alise Leiboff

Print Edition Designed by
Zachary Stanik