A01=Baptiste Brossard
Author_Baptiste Brossard
Category=JBFN
Category=JMH
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forthcoming
how to understand trauma sociologically
how trauma affects us
how trauma is understood
mental health
mental illness
social aspects on trauma
society and mental health
society and trauma
sociology
trauma
traumatic
traumatic experiences
traumatic imagination
traumatized
traumatized people
traumatized societes
what is trauma
what trauma means
Product details
- ISBN 9781509566136
- Publication Date: 22 Oct 2026
- Publisher: Polity Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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In recent decades, trauma has become an organizing principle of western cultures – one of the most powerful frameworks through which individuals make sense of suffering. But what exactly is 'trauma'? And how does it shape social life?
This book develops a sociological theory of trauma as both lived experience and cultural category. From the micro-politics of flashbacks to global psychiatric discourses, from the biographical disruptions of violence to the historical legacies of war, it traces how traumatic experiences surface in everyday gestures, spread across interactions, reshape lives and haunt human collectives, to become a generative social process. At the heart of this approach is the concept of the traumatic imagination: a shared disposition to experience the present through the imprint of painful pasts. Brossard explains that this imagination configures how individuals come to live with, through and against their memory, and how societies mourn, cope and control.
Ultimately, Trauma in Social Life calls for a renewed task for the social sciences: to treat mental health not merely as a clinical object or a cultural construct, but as a site of political reflexivity and subversion.
This book develops a sociological theory of trauma as both lived experience and cultural category. From the micro-politics of flashbacks to global psychiatric discourses, from the biographical disruptions of violence to the historical legacies of war, it traces how traumatic experiences surface in everyday gestures, spread across interactions, reshape lives and haunt human collectives, to become a generative social process. At the heart of this approach is the concept of the traumatic imagination: a shared disposition to experience the present through the imprint of painful pasts. Brossard explains that this imagination configures how individuals come to live with, through and against their memory, and how societies mourn, cope and control.
Ultimately, Trauma in Social Life calls for a renewed task for the social sciences: to treat mental health not merely as a clinical object or a cultural construct, but as a site of political reflexivity and subversion.
Baptiste Brossard is Lecturer of Sociology at University of York.
