Violence, Trauma, Memory
This is the course page for the class "Violence, Trauma, Memory" at University of Texas at Austin. This course explores violence, trauma, and the politics of memory from an anthropological perspective. Through reading ethnography and philosophical texts on violence, the course queries the ethics of writing about and researching violence and trauma. Throughout the class we think through the question “what is violence?” as we discuss the concept’s physical, structural and symbolic forms. Specific topics include war, the police state, colonialism, terror(ism), witnessing, representation, surveillance, power and discourse, with special attention to the dynamics of gender, race, class and sexuality that complicate these themes. We particularly focus on the politics of writing and theorizing violence when doing social analysis, the precarious balance between addressing violence and glorifying it, and the coping mechanisms that we often require to do this work.