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Stephanie Houston Grey, Wounds Not Easily Healed: Exploring Trauma in Communication Studies, Communication Yearbook, Volume 31, Issue 1, January 2007, Pages 174–222, https://doi.org/10.1080/23808985.2007.11679067
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Abstract
The study of trauma, a pervasive subtext throughout the field of communication, runs like an invisible thread that links the research of scholars who study a diverse range of discursive activities. It connects the work of researchers interested in the analysis of interpersonal, family, and organizational communication to critical theorists and historians who explore the symbolic dynamics that bind cultures in times of stress and political contest. This chapter attempts to expose these threads and develop a heuristic vocabulary for foregrounding these research practices and perspectives. The first half of the chapter explores the impact of trauma upon local peer communities—the way that it both binds and fragments people as they grapple with the wounds left by disaster, war, and disease. Issues of authority and stigma remain central to these discussions as the traumatized individual searches for a legitimate vocabulary through which to make sense of these experiences. The second half of this chapter explores the impact of trauma on collective identity and representation, particularly in the fields of history and popular culture. Here trauma can be addressed overtly through mass-mediated spectacles or run as an unconscious thread through the accumulated images and texts that constitute the fabric of society. By recognizing the symbolic dissonance produced by traumatic memory, exposing the complexities of these discursive practices provides insight into individual, national, and global responses to tragedy.
