Friday Morning Seminar in Culture, Psychiatry and Global Mental Health
Date and Time
Edgy Aftermaths: Affective Legacies of Disaster in Post-Earthquake Turkey
This talk explores the affective legacies of a massive earthquake that struck western Turkey in 1999—a disaster that left more than 20,000 people dead and hundreds of thousands of residents displaced. Focusing on accounts of a pervasive sense of collective irritability and edginess, this talk moves beyond dominant frameworks through which the psychological effects of disaster are commonly rendered—namely, idioms of psychological trauma and PTSD—and traces how these “edgy aftermaths” of disaster took shape within the period’s shifting political and economic conditions. As such, I consider how everyday feelings of edginess, irritability, and alienation in the long aftermath of disaster offer a series of unexpected commentaries on the event itself (as both a sudden rupture and set of chronic conditions) and the structural dimensions of embodiment, affect, and sociality that define its legacy.
Speaker
- Dr. Chris Dole, Professor of Anthropology, Amherst College.
Moderator
- Byron Good, Faculty Associate. Professor of Medical Anthropology, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School; Professor, Social Anthropology Program, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University.
Contact
Francesco Rolando
francesco_rolando@g.harvard.edu