Trauma, Disability, and War

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

War and violent conflicts leave wounds that often are not visible to the naked eye, and yet just as painful and incapacitating as physical ones. These invisible wounds are borne not only by the victims of violence, but also by the perpetrators and sometimes even by observers. Today in the US, whose troops have been involved in countless war theaters in the last thirty years, there are hundreds of thousands of former soldiers who are grappling with the wounds these conflicts caused to their minds and to their moral compass. At the same time, there are millions of individuals in faraway countries who are battling the psychological traumas caused by those very same conflicts. Through case studies ranging from child soldiers in Sierra Leone to women in Afghanistan, from US military personnel recovering at home to the civilian victims of repressive authoritarianism in Argentina, and beyond, we will investigate what violence and war do to the mind and the psychological dynamics of people who have been exposed to such phenomena, as well as explore the degree of disability that pervades the afterlife of war. We will discuss literature from anthropology, psychology, psychiatry and public health, and will include in our conversations the personal experiences of the instructor, who served in the armed forces for years and was deployed to several war theaters abroad, as well as guest speakers who have lived through experiences of violent conflict.