Cult C: Communal writing for dignity against trauma and war

This course will introduce communal writing for dignity as a public humanities and social sciences anti-methodology to study and transform the economies and politics emerging from trauma and war. In particular, this course will concentrate on the study and the making of stories about the medical definitions of trauma concerning war and different forms of structural violence during and after conflict; the global political economies that allowed their emergence, their contours, and their popularity; and the consequences of this threefold linkage for transnational violence and activisms. 

Communal writing is a form of writing made among a group of people sharing the same politics concerning a social justice project, such as transforming social and personal trauma related to war and different forms of structural violence in universities and social activism, and based on six principles: compassion, intersectionality, oppositional thinking, plurality, rest, and transnational solidarities/politics. In each session, we will do different writing exercises based on one of the principles and each exercise will be accompanied by academic-activist discussions. 

This course seeks to cultivate a language of care by and for survivors of trauma, war, and different types of structural violence, to engender a practice of listening to people’s different, and sometimes competing and contradictory, needs about the same social justice project, and to be attentive to which responses to trauma, war, and different form of structural violence might be inadequate to meet the needs of people given their locations across axes of oppression. Overall, this course will be successful if, in the end, participants can start narrating critically what their social justice projects about trauma, war, and different forms of structural violence are, how their projects relate to larger social justice struggles around the world, and how they will act and struggle to achieve their aims of social transformation.