The Trauma and Memory Working Group panel brings together researchers who study the relationship between trauma and memory from diverse disciplinary angles, bridging various methodological and theoretical approaches. The current panel brings together scholars working on individual and collective trauma in the context of different aspects of today’s polycrisis: from the environmental trauma and its relationship with community memory to the social (in)justice and how it can be affected by the trauma-informed care to the emergence of new forms of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and their capacities for facilitating (but also impeding) the transmission of historical trauma. While doing so, the panel showcases the methodological diversity of the field of trauma and memory studies, including qualitative interview-based approaches to explore the process of developing and applying trauma-sensitive hope-based interventions for dealing with traumatic experiences to mixed-method approaches to studying environmental trauma and its narration to agent-based simulations for understanding how new forms of generative AI perceive the impact of intergenerational trauma on the political attitudes of voters and whether such perception is prone to certain forms of bias. A central question that these studies address is how social and technological practices may impact individual and collective capacities for addressing the polycrisis in different cultural and national contexts, and what are the implications of these practices for processing, transmitting, and coping with traumas and memories associated with the polycrisis.
Allan Martell, Indiana University Bloomington, USA - "Remembering the Climate Crisis: Community Memory and Future Aspirations in Climate-Affected Urban Contexts" This project aims to investigate how communities affected by climate change in urban settings recall and narrate their experiences, how these memories shape the communities’ aspirations for the future, and their resilience and adaptive strategies. We aim to advance the intersection of memory studies and information research by grounding it in the lived realities of climate-impacted communities. Our primary goal is to understand the role of social memory in shaping adaptive capacities, social imagination, and future-making. Specifically, the project will investigate social memory among residents of urban slums in Bangladesh and Latinx populations in Indiana, USA, both facing the disproportionate effects of climate stress. We draw from the diverse theories of memory studies that explore how individuals and groups encode, store, retrieve, and forget information. Through this lens, the project aims to address questions of information empowerment, digital inclusion, and climate justice, all central to the study of climate change. Funded by an iSchools Organization grant, the research team will collect data between January and June of 2026. During this time, we will organize 5 focus groups with residents of climate-affected urban slums in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and conduct a parallel set of focus groups with members of the Latinx community in Indianapolis, Indiana, United States. The project team will coordinate recruitment, data collection, and transcription in both sites and will hold joint meetings to share emerging insights. Our presentation will focus on the emerging findings of our data analysis.
Priya Mani, University of Manitoba Canada "Resilience, Mattering & Belonging: Articulation of Social Justice and use of Trauma Informed Care and Hope based Interventions by Counsellors during Turbulent Times" This presentation explores results of a qualitative descriptive case study of ways in which thirty professional counsellors from Central and Western Canada reconstructed their social justice and multicultural orientation by using trauma- and hope-based interventions to inform their practice during societal times of turbulence. Noting systemic oppression (social, economic, and political structures) and cultivating a sense of self-empowerment with the client, where they are also encouraged to tap into undiscovered potential in the contexts of their lives, requires a shift to practice cultural humility within a critical pedagogy. The strategies that counsellors could potentially use to address challenges were by developing a sense of cultural humility through a trauma-informed lens, which incorporates hope. This presentation focuses on what hinders the process of engagement with diverse clients, the importance of developing a curiosity competency, the nature of identifying failed attempts and learning through failure, increasing risk tolerance, exploring and building resilient coping mechanisms, and sustaining cultural humility over time through a lens of hope. This presentation will enhance practice by providing a preliminary framework identified by professional counsellors regarding the development of multicultural knowledge and trauma alongside hope-based interventions from which novice counsellors may be able to draw in order to enhance their practice during tumultuous times. This study should help us in understanding how professional counsellors handle and address challenges in deciding about culturally relevant interventions, draw from hope-based interventions when working with clients, and how counsellors sustain their own hope and well-being in the work that they do.
Mykola Makhortykh, Vihang Jumle, Victoria Vziatysheva, University of Bern - "Can a robot understand trauma? Investigating how large language models perceive the effects of intergenerational trauma on political attitudes" The rise of large language models (LLMs) presents new methodological opportunities for social science research, particularly in simulating and predicting human behavior. Traditional social science methods often face challenges when applied to studying highly sensitive issues related to intergenerational trauma and memory, due to social desirability bias and difficulties with respondent recruitment. LLMs offer a possibility to address these constraints by simulating attitudes towards the past and the present societal issues for respondents with different demographic purposes. However, before such a possibility can be realistically realized, it must undergo a thorough scrutiny, especially concerning the frequent lack of transparency in LLMs and the risk of them being subject to bias. To contribute to such scrutiny, we investigate how LLMs perceive the impact of intergenerational trauma on the political attitudes of German citizens. Specifically, we simulate survey responses via a selection of LLMs regarding voting behavior and the perceived relevance of two memory-formative events: the Holocaust and German reunification. By systematically manipulating participant features, including demographic characteristics and modes of memory/trauma transmission, we explore the reasoning behind LLMs' perceptions of the effects of historical knowledge on human behavior and potential biases affecting such perceptions.
20260730T110020260730T1230America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires5.12. Studying Trauma and its Relationship with Technology, Justice, and Hope at the Time of PolycrisesA111MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
Perpetrators or Victims? The documentary “Soldados do Araguaia” (Brazil) and the Politics of Memory
Individual paperTrauma, Affect, and Emotion00:00 Midnight - 00:00 Midnight (America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires) 2026/07/30 03:00:00 UTC - 2026/07/30 03:00:00 UTC
This work examines the documentary Soldados do Araguaia (Brazil, Belisário França, 2017), which aesthetically and conceptually reframes low-ranking state combatants from presumed perpetrators into claimants of victimhood. It probes what this shift reveals about the ethics of remembrance, the boundary between private suffering and public history, and the links between individual and collective trauma. Using a qualitative, interpretive reading of testimony and form—scene construction, voice, framing, and a sparse visual economy that theatricalizes testimony—the study places the film within Brazil’s transitional justice context, notably the National Truth Commission and Testimony Clinics that generated its source narratives. It draws on memory and trauma theory (Todorov; Huyssen; Freud; LaCapra; Caruth). Discourse analysis explores how soldiers’ accounts negotiate responsibility, symptoms, and recognition, while contextual analysis contrasts these narratives with dominant public framings of the Araguaia conflict. Contributions include: highlighting the traumatic experiences of low-ranking agents, complicating the perpetrator/victim binary; showing how therapeutic practices migrate into the public sphere via documentary form, reshaping recognition and accountability; clarifying ethical dilemmas of remembering versus forgetting, arguing that remembrance entails graded forgetting; proposing a framework for reading perpetrator-centered documentaries under archival scarcity, where minimalist aesthetics organize empathy and inference; refining debates on trauma’s scale by mapping interfaces between individual symptoms and putatively collective trauma; and advancing Brazilian memory studies by reinterpreting Araguaia through testimony, reception, and narrative position rather than new facts. Finally, the article situates the film in global memory studies under reconciliation without equivalence: listening to traumatized perpetrators balances recognition of suffering with responsibility, informing transitional justice that joins truth, care, and accountability.
Silvana Seabra Adjunct Professor, Pontificia Universidade Católica De Minas Gerais
Remembering-as-Witnessing: Adora's testimony
Individual paperTrauma, Affect, and Emotion00:00 Midnight - 00:00 Midnight (America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires) 2026/07/30 03:00:00 UTC - 2026/07/30 03:00:00 UTC
This essay examines the testimony of Adora Faye de Vera, a survivor of torture during the term of President Ferdinand Marcos (1965-86) in the Philippines. Like Rigoberta Menchu and others, her story is that of an autobiographical subject witnessing the violence enacted upon the larger community to which she belongs and with whom she shares traumatic memories. By 1972, Marcos had placed the entire country under Martial Law. His military silenced the political opposition by detention, torture and death. Amnesty International estimates that there were 107, 240 victims of human rights violations, 3,240 killed by the military and police, 70,000 arrested (most with no arrest warrants), and 34,000 tortured. Marcos maintained authoritarian rule until he was ousted by the People Power uprising in 1986. Over several interviews, Adora describes a life of resisting the Marcos dictatorship as a student at the University of the Philippines, prisoner subjected to harsh conditions during 4 separate detentions, fugitive hiding in major cities and far flung rural areas, and ranking member of the Philippine Communist Party. Her first arrest took place when she was just 16; after her fourth release, she was 69 years old. Adora sustained numerous physical injuries throughout, undergoing 7 corrective surgeries after being shot. But the sexual violence she endured – from members of the Philippine military and civilian police during much of her second incarceration – remain her most virulent memories. Worse, she was forced into sexual slavery to one military official for over a year. How does Adora’s recollection of torture constitute a kind of witnessing that’s associated with the testimonio genre? How does remembering as witnessing issue a call to us to share in her community’s search for justice? What is at stake in this ethical form of listening in an era of resurgent fascism?
