Browsing by Subject "Trauma"
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Item A Phenomenological Study of the Experiences of Supervisors working with Crisis Counselors(2017-07-10) Tran, Quoc Dung V. L.; Lawson, DavidA phenomenological study was conducted at a Southwestern United States University to examine the experience of nine supervisors who work with crisis counselors. This study examined the training, topics, and difficulties experienced as they sought to support and perform their supervisory duties. Nine themes emerge and described as Learning the job, Crisis topics, Effective Communication, Skills development, Maintaining flexibility, Setting boundaries, Maintaining support, Stress, burnout, and self-care, and Balance. Best practices were identified by supervisors to build resiliency and promote growth for both supervisors and their supervisees. Implications for practice and research are included to further enhance effective supervision of crisis counselors.Item Atomic memory : theorizing post-racial memory and trauma in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum(2012-12) Shaw, Vivian Giboung; Carrington, Ben, 1972-; Bos, PascaleHiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, established in 1955, remains the primary site for recuperating and transforming memories of the atomic bombing into a message for global peace. Within the museum’s transcendental politics, American and European visitors are a key presence, evident in the site’s 1994 renovation adding historical context for the bombings, its design as a bilingual space using both Japanese and English, and in its refusal to criticize the United States for their use of the bomb. However, what remains excluded from this global view is a discussion of race, a critical dimension of U.S.-Japanese relations and Pacific Rim colonialism during and after World War II. This thesis utilizes scholarship on cultural memory and cultural trauma to interrogate how the museum has been constructed as a site of post-racial politics. In examining the mechanics of this space, this thesis focuses on the “objects” that the museum describes as “material witnesses,” to interrogate the historical links between Orientalism and cultural trauma. Through a theoretical development of my fieldwork in Hiroshima in 2011, analysis of the space, and relevant literature, I argue that the gaze of Western tourism is fundamental in the construction of Hiroshima as a global, peaceful, and post-racial experience for museum visitors.Item The corporeality of trauma, memory, and resistance : writing the body in contemporary fiction from Chile and Argentina(2014-05) Tille-Victorica, Nancy Jacqueline; Lindstrom, Naomi, 1950-; Domínguez-Ruvalcaba, Héctor; Heinzelman, Susan Sage; Robbins, Jill; Wettlaufer, AlexandraThis dissertation looks at the representation and impact of gendered violence in the novel Pasos bajo el agua (1986) and in the short stories in Ofrenda de propia piel (2004) by Argentine author and former political prisoner Alicia Kozameh (b. 1953), as well as in Jamás el fuego nunca (2007) and Impuesto a la carne (2010), two novels by Chilean writer Diamela Eltit (b. 1949). By examining the particular expressions of physical and psychological pain in the aforementioned texts, I demonstrate that Kozameh and Eltit write the female body to simultaneously represent a corporeality that, until recently, has rarely been expressed in literature, and reconstruct a body that has been traumatized by state-sponsored violence and by what could be considered economic violence. Both of them denounce violence, torture, disappearances, exile, and indifference to justice as painful events that not only damage the spirits of the victims, but that are also inscribed upon the physical body. I also show how each author addresses the overlapping of individual and collective traumatic memories and how these are felt in the body as well. Finally, I argue that writing the materiality of the lived body, from its vulnerability to its resilience, provides for Kozameh and Eltit valuable insight into the ways in which female bodies are able to resist and reassess the meaning imposed on them by legally-endorsed and non-official systems of oppression. Their work thus has direct viii social relevance that goes beyond feminism's countering of male dominance and women's rights. Yet, I also show that they manifest their feminist commitment by using the voice and body of female subjects to incorporate marginalized Chilean and Argentine bodies into the linguistic realm in order to provide a fuller understanding of female corporeality in Latin America.Item Digging through time: psychogeographies of occupation(2015-12) Simblist, Noah Leon; Reynolds, Ann Morris; El-Ariss, Tarek; Mulder, Stephennie; Di-Capua, Yoav; Flaherty, GeorgeThis dissertation is about the relationship between contemporary art and politics in the case of Israel-Palestine and Lebanon. Specifically, I look at the ways that artists have dealt with the history of this region and its impact on the present, using four moments as the subject of the following chapters: ancient Palestine, the Holocaust, The nakba, and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The historiographical impulse has a particular resonance for artists making work about the Middle East, a political space where competing historical narratives are the basis for disagreements about sovereignty. I focus on works by Avi Mograbi, Gilad Efrat, Ayreen Anastas, Amir Yatziv, Yael Bartana, Omer Fast, Khaled Hourani, Dor Guez, Campus in Camps, and Akram Zaatari. A number of patterns emerge when we look at how these artists approach history. One is the tendency for artists to act like historians. As a subset of this tendency is the archival impulse, wherein artists use found photographs, film or documents to intervene in normative representations of history. Another is for artists to act like archaeologists, digging up repressed histories. Another is to commemorate a traumatic event in a way that rejects traditional forms of memorialization such as monuments. At the core of each chapter are examples of artistic practices that use conversation as a medium. I analyze these conversations about history as a dialogical practice and argue that this methodology offers a uniquely productive opportunity to work through the ideologies embedded within the psychogeographies of Israel-Palestine and Lebanon. Within these conversations and other aesthetic structures, I argue that these artists emphasize the all too common challenge in producing new forms of civic imagination – the tendency to address historical trauma though repetition compulsion and melancholia. They react to this challenge by engaging collective memory, producing counter-memories and, in some cases, produce counterpublics.Item Dissociation and pain perception : an experimental investigation(2006-05) Horowitz, Jonathan David; Telch, Michael JosephDissociative symptoms and abnormalities in pain perception have been associated with a range of disorders. We tested whether experimentally induced increases in state dissociation would cause an analgesic response, and whether this effect would be moderated by participants' history of trauma and dissociative experiences. Participants (n=120) were classified based on their histories of traumatic and dissociative experiences: No trauma or dissociation (NN), trauma without dissociation (TN), or trauma with dissociation (TD). All participants were randomized to a dissociation induction condition via audiophotic stimulation or a credible control condition and were compared on prepost changes in subjective pain and pain tolerance in response to a standard cold-pressor test. Unexpectedly, dissociation induction did not lead to greater pain tolerance or reduced self-reported pain. However, increases in state dissociation significantly predicted increased immersion time and decreased subjective pain.Item Emotional trauma and children’s executive functioning : is there a connection?(2012-08) Holder, Christen Marie; Robillard, Rachel West; Allen, Greg, doctor of clinical psychology; Schallert, Diane; Tharinger, Deborah; Whittaker, Tiffany; Mercer, WaltThe purpose of this dissertation was to examine the connection between emotional trauma and executive function ability in children and adolescents. Trauma is defined as an overwhelming event that is beyond the realm of what might be an expectable occurrence for the average person. A serious outcome, occurring in around 14% of those children who experience trauma, is the development of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which is classified as an anxiety disorder occurring after exposure to a traumatic event, in which symptoms of re-experiencing, avoidance, and arousal are present. In addition to the numerous physical, emotional, and social effects of trauma, neuropsychological and imaging research has confirmed that children’s neuroanatomy and cognitive functioning are often affected. It has been proposed that intrusive thoughts occurring immediately after the trauma event may modify the neural network function, setting the stage for neurobiological dysregulation. One of the most common neural anatomic areas of concern following trauma is the prefrontal cortex, a structure that continues to develop until the third decade of life, and that has been implicated as the home of executive function, an idea conceptualized in a number of ways, but that is most often considered an umbrella term describing essential functions of the mind, such as planning, inhibition, attention, and working memory. The scope of literature addressing the effect of trauma on executive function is minimal. It is the hypothesis of this study that early trauma may disrupt the normal development of the PFC and subsequently result in decreased executive functioning abilities. In order to explore this hypothesis, a set of neuropsychological measures were selected as representative of executive functioning, based on previous research. An initial factor analysis was conducted in order to determine if, as suspected, all subtests chosen load on a common factor of executive function. Multiple linear regression was used to determine whether children who experienced trauma have impaired executive functioning abilities, if there was a significant gender difference, and what, if any, differences there were between children who developed PTSD and children who did not.Item Employing handicrafts to communicate the course of trauma : a test in using handicrafts as an explanatory method(2010-05) Willman, Lisa Anne; Olsen, Daniel M., 1963-; Hall, Peter A.This report contains discussion of four design projects aimed to investigate the ability of handicrafts to communicate complicated subject matter. In this exploration, handicrafts are used to present the experience of recovering from a traumatic experience by challenging commonly held stereotypes about handicrafts. By breaking the trauma and recovery process into four distinct stages, each stage can be discussed in detail via the corresponding design piece. Consequently, each stage also allows for new opportunities to apply handicraft practices in new ways. Through this line of questioning, the four pieces expand upon the imagery, materiality, subject matter, and formal creation techniques typically used in handicraft projects. This collection adds to a greater body of work that intersects traumatic experiences with art and design and that explores the power of design as a communication tool. It opens the door for further investigation into the application’s potential as a teaching tool for trauma victims, nontraditional applications of the craft, its ability to aid in the recovery process, and the potential risk and benefit victims have from such work being done and from creating such pieces themselves.Item Guatemalan diasporic fiction as refugee literature : an analysis of Héctor Tobar’s The tattooed soldier and Tanya Maria Barrientos’s Family resemblance(2014-05) Mills, Regina Marie; González, John MoránDespite a large influx of Guatemalans to cities such as Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., their narrative has largely been subsumed in the traditional Latino/a immigrant narrative. The importance of the historical specificity and traumatic nature of Guatemalan immigration, as a consequence of the Central American revolutions, has only now begun to be studied by scholars such as Arturo Arias and Claudia Milian, though the field of Latino/a studies is still largely focused on immigrants from Mexico, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Thus, through an examination of two novels by Guatemalan-American authors, Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier (1998/2000) and Tanya Maria Barrientos’ Family Resemblance (2003), I compare how each novel differently positions Guatemalan diasporic identity around traumas surrounding the Guatemalan civil war and diaspora. Ultimately, I argue that Tobar establishes Guatemalan diasporic fiction as a kind of refugee literature, while Barrientos attempts to fit the Guatemalan diasporic narrative into a traditional Latino/a immigrant narrative using the genre of chica lit, thus flattening out the unique historical experience of the Guatemalan civil war while also highlighting the constraints of the chica lit genre for Central American-American women writers.Item How is school-based mental health educationally relevant? Exploring the academic outcomes of a CBT intervention for trauma in schools(2016-08) Mitchell, Abigail Grace; Stark, Kevin Douglas; Carlson, Cindy IThe psychological and behavioral effects of trauma are well documented, as are its significant disruptions to developmental trajectories over the lifespan. Besides providing access to children, schools offer familiar and supportive settings in which to conduct trauma therapy. The proposed study uses a randomized controlled design to examine the impact of participation in a school-based treatment program for youth experiencing posttraumatic stress (CBITS). Participants include a sample of 160 sixth graders from a low-income background who have experienced trauma and report elevated levels of posttraumatic stress. In addition to symptom indicators, measures of student engagement and classroom behavior will be collected prior to and following the intervention. Post-score differences between intervention and control groups will be analyzed for each outcome with adjustment for baseline differences. It is expected that students in the intervention group will exhibit lower levels of PTSD, more positive classroom behavior, and higher perceived engagement in learning. These predictions align with research documenting the relationship between academic and socio-emotional functioning. Well-developed school-based programs have the potential to address macro-level disparities in care and to improve academic functioning for students experiencing posttraumatic stress. Finally, addressing trauma in the schools is a wise investment that will head off future social service costs.Item Identification in Posthumanist Rhetoric: Trauma and Empathy(2012-11-21) Larsen, Amy Marie 1984-Posthumanist rhetoric is informed by developments in the sciences and the humanities which suggest that mind and body are not distinct from each other and, therefore, claims of humans? superiority over other animals based on cognitive differences may not be justified. Posthumanist rhetoric, then, seeks to re-imagine the human and its relationship to the world. Though ?post-? implies after, like other ?post-? terms, posthumanism also coexists with humanism. This dissertation develops a concept of posthumanist rhetoric as questioning humanist assumptions about subjectivity while remaining entangled in them. The destabilization of the human subject means that new identifications between humans and nonhumans are possible, and the ethical implications of the rhetorical strategies used to build them have yet to be worked out. Identification, a key aim of rhetoric in the theory of Kenneth Burke and others, can persuade an audience to value others. However, it can also obscure the realities of who does and does not benefit from particular arguments, particularly when animal suffering is framed as human-like trauma with psychological and cultural as well as physical effects. I argue that a posthumanist practice of rhetoric demonstrates ways of circumventing this problem by persuading readers not only to care about others, but also to understand that our ability to comprehend another?s subjectivity is limited and that acknowledging these limitations is a method of caring. his dissertation locates instances of resistance to and/or deployment of posthumanist critique in recent works of literature; identifies language commonly used in appeals that create identifications between humans and animals; and analyzes the implications of these rhetorical strategies. To that end, I have selected texts about human and animal suffering that engage particular themes of identification that recur in posthumanist rhetoric. The chapters pair texts that develop each theme differently. Most undermine human superiority as a species, but many reify the importance of certain qualities of the liberal humanist subject by granting them to nonhumans. The points of identification created between humans and nonhumans will inform how we re-imagine the human subject to account for our connections, and therefore our responsibilities, to other beings.Item The impact of post-traumatic stress symptoms and protective factors on transition factors for youth investigated for maltreatment during adolescence(2015-08) Valentine, Courtney Anne; Carlson, Cindy I., 1949-; Keith, Timothy; Stark, Kevin; Monnat, Lynn; Thompson, SannaApproximately 402,378 of children in the United States received foster care services, and over 1 million received in-home services in 2013 (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Administration on Children, Youth and Families, Children’s Bureau, 2015). All of these children are considered child welfare involved, and adolescents are a sub-group of this population at increased vulnerability. Youth experience multiple adversities prior to entering the foster care system, challenging experiences while in the foster care system, and difficulties related to aging out of care (Miller, 2009; Stott, 2013). Building upon developmental psychopathology and resiliency theory, this study utilized structural equation modeling (SEM) to analyze relations among risk and protective factors in predicting outcomes for adolescents involved in the child welfare system. It was hypothesized that post-traumatic stress and protective factors would mediate the effects of trauma and foster care involvement on adolescents’ scores for school achievement and independent living skills. Using a large national survey of child welfare involved youth, a sample of 818 adolescents between the ages of 12-16 years old at baseline was assessed. Results of this study were consistent with resiliency research highlighting the influence of protective factors (e.g. school effort and engagement; closeness, positive relationship, spends time with and talking about school with caregiver) on adolescents’ school achievement and independent living skills. The presence of protective factors significantly directly impacted adolescent outcomes and mediated the effect of post-traumatic stress symptoms on the outcome variables. These results have significant implications for research and practice with adolescents involved in child welfare.Item Impact of written emotional disclosure of trauma on laboratory induced pain(Texas A&M University, 2008-10-10) Creech, Suzannah KThis study was undertaken to determine whether written emotional disclosure of trauma impacted capsaicin induced pain immediately after writing and at a one-month follow-up, and the extent to which a lifetime history of trauma alters pain under neutral conditions. Three experiments were conducted to answer these questions. In Experiment 1 participants were randomly assigned to write about either a neutral or a trauma topic, and they concurrently completed the capsaicin test. In Experiment 2, the capsaicin test was administered to trauma history and no trauma history participants and pain ratings and secondary hyperalgesia were recorded under neutral conditions. In Experiment 3, participants wrote for three days and completed the radiant heat test before writing on day 1 and after writing on day 3. They also completed the capsaicin test on either day 4 or at a one-month follow-up (day 30). Taken together, these studies had several important results. First, radiant heat withdrawal latencies, ratings of pain intensity and unpleasantness, and area of secondary hyperalgesia were all significantly increased when participants had a history of traumatic experiences. This is evidence that trauma history is sufficient to alter pain regulatory mechanisms, and this may be attributable to the chronic negative affective state induced by trauma history and sensitization of shared circuits involved in both pain and emotion. Furthermore, our findings suggest that written emotional disclosure may lead to long-term changes in pain modulatory pathways that regulate central sensitization, without altering systems that regulate spontaneous pain.Item In flickers and flashes : recovering Jewish loss in three American photographic anthologies(2013-12) Kohn, Tara Gabrielle; Smith, Cherise, 1969-; Reynolds, Ann; Tejada, Roberto; Rossen, Rebecca; Cvetkovich, AnnThis dissertation explores legacies of Jewish loss in three American photographic anthologies published over the course of the twentieth century. I argue that the images bound within the volumes reveal a fluidity between familial and cultural memory in order to foster ethnic, cultural, and religious togetherness. The photographic books function as sites of community formation, framing a shared painful past around which to construct identity and visualizing migration as a trauma that underlies American Modernism. Reflecting the process of unearthing the ancestral past, my study is structured in reverse chronological order. I begin with an analysis of Behold a Great Image (1978), a collection of photographs submitted to an amateur photography contest and compiled by editors Sharon Strassfeld and Arthur Kurzweil. I suggest that the book functions as a visual conduit into a painful past—one that reveals a continuity between the losses of recent history and present-day efforts to revive and celebrate cultural particularity. The subject of the second chapter is Raphael Abramovitch’s The Vanished World (1947), an album of photographs of rural European villages taken for immigrant audiences in the United States during the interwar period. This section explores the ways in which these images, reframed in the volume as monuments to the victims of Nazi terror, take on new layers of resonance as the entwined histories of cultural displacement and genocide continue to recede. Centering on the journal Camera Work (1903-1917), the final chapter contends that editor Alfred Stieglitz made his own Jewishness visible even as he obscured it, veiling it in the complex relationships he created between image and text. Without relinquishing his hard-earned place as an American cultural leader, he framed unanswerable questions about what it means to live between classes, between racial categories, and between cultures.Item Linguistic Markers of Trauma Symptoms Following Sexual Abuse in Female Adolescent Inpatients(2016-11-15) Marshall, Kaisa K.; Venta, Amanda; Barker, Maria; Henderson, CraigSexual trauma is a widespread and serious issue in adolescent females. Unfortunately, subsequent PTSD symptoms is a common consequence for individuals who experience this form of trauma. Additionally, inpatient adolescents report elevated rates of PTSD symptoms and sexual abuse has been found to be the largest contributor to trauma symptoms in adolescent inpatients. Therefore, female adolescent inpatients constitute a high risk population for sexual trauma and resulting trauma symptoms. More concerning are the limitations of current methods (e.g. self-report, clinical interview) in accurately measuring trauma symptoms. The aim of the current study is to use the computer program Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) to analyze trauma narratives of female adolescents in an inpatient facility and determine if specific linguistic markers are associated to an individual’s current symptomology. Additionally, it will be determined if these linguistic markers can predict trauma symptom change from time of admission to time of discharge. Conducting a LIWC analysis will provide objective data about adolescent’s language use that can aid in obtaining an accurate measure of inpatients trauma symptoms.Item Living with the invisibly wounded: how female partners of male OEF/OIF/OND veterans with PTSD understand their experiences(2015-12) Farmer, Annie Elizabeth; Ainslie, Ricardo C.; Suizzo, Marie-Anne; Reddick, Richard; Hammond, Ryan; Sanchez, DelidaThis study builds on the literature demonstrating systemic effects of PTSD on spouses of military veterans. An interpretive phenomenological approach was utilized for interviewing and analyzing data from twelve female partners of veterans of Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Operation New Dawn who have PTSD. Half of these women had begun their relationships prior to the veterans’ deployments and half had met their partners after their military service. Seven themes emerged from the analysis of participants’ narratives that captured the confusion, uncertainty, and emotional distress often central to women’s experiences and highlighted their sense of responsibility to their partners, the challenges with trust and intimacy in their relationships, shifts in their identities, and the strategies they used to cope. Noteworthy was the fact that women’s descriptions of listening to veterans’ trauma disclosures did not support the construct of vicarious traumatization as a primary mechanism to explain participants’ distress. Women’s narratives did lend support to the relevance of the theories of ambiguous loss, caregiver burden, and appraisal theory to understanding the heightened psychological distress and relationship distress in this population.Item The matter of memory : visual and performative witnessing of the Greensboro massacre(2012-08) Pryor, Michael Scott; Lewis, Randolph, 1966-; Hoelscher, Steven D.This report explores the role of documentary art in the constitution of collective memory in Greensboro, North Carolina, between the years 1999 and 2004. In that city on November 3, 1979, Ku Klux Klan and Nazis killed five labor organizers in broad daylight. Television news crews, on site to cover the anti-Klan march scheduled for that day, captured the killings on film. In spite of this evidence, all-white juries twice acquitted the Klan/Nazis of any wrongdoing. In the weeks and months that followed the massacre, city officials and mainstream media sought to disassociate Greensboro from the event, generating a master narrative that portrayed both the Klan/Nazis and labor organizers as outsiders, and the city as an innocent bystander. This narrative covered up the fact that the Greensboro police had extensive prior knowledge about the potential for violence, and yet were mysteriously absent when the Klan/Nazis arrived on the scene. In a third trial—a civil suit brought against the city by survivors of the shooting—Klan and police were found jointly liable for wrongful death. Twenty-five years later, the massacre and its aftermath served as the impetus for the first Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the United States. In the years leading up to the Commission, six artists—including the author—made or presented artwork in Greensboro about the killings. Importantly, none of the artists were from Greensboro or had any direct connection to the massacre. However, through their creative processes and final artworks, they made an implicit claim about the political relevance of remembering and engaging with the full history of November 3, 1979. Collectively, the art spanned a variety of mediums, including theater, paintings, music, and dance. Through interviews with the artists, archival research, and qualitative analysis, this report argues that the artists helped to generate the potential for an expanded, poly-vocal collective memory of the massacre. They did this through practices of citation and translation—converting the archive of factual history into aesthetic and material forms—that made the events of November 3, 1979 available to community members for encounter and interpretation in the present.Item Mindfulness and self-compassion as predictors of functional outcomes and psychopathology in OEF/OIF veterans exposed to trauma(2013-08) Dahm, Katherine Anne; Neff, KristinSelf-compassion is a psychological construct that involves being open to experiencing one's pain and suffering and directing feelings of kindness inwards during moments of distress. Research has found that high levels of self-compassion are negatively associated with depression, anxiety, rumination, and avoidance, and positively associated with overall quality of life. The present study looked at self-compassion as a predictor of psychopathology and functional outcomes in a sample of trauma-exposed OEF/OIF veterans. Baseline data was used from Project PREDICT from of the Department of Veteran Affairs VISN 17 Center of Excellence for Research with Returning War Veterans. The relations among self-compassion, mindfulness, and experiential avoidance were analyzed. Structural equation modeling was used and results found that higher levels of self-compassion and mindfulness predicted lower levels of psychopathology and higher overall functioning. In addition, experiential avoidance partially or fully mediated the association between mindfulness and self-compassion and PTSD symptoms, psychological distress, and functionality. Supplemental regression analyses were also conducted examining the relationship between mindfulness and self-compassion with several outcome variables. Results found that self-compassion significantly contributed to the model predicting acceptance of chronic pain. In addition, mindfulness significantly contributed to the model predicting problematic alcohol use. These findings suggest that inclusion of acceptance-based interventions, specifically self-compassion and mindfulness, may improve emotional distress as well as overall functioning in trauma-exposed combat veterans.Item Murder, mayhem, and mourning: a qualitative study of the experiences, reactions, and coping mechanisms of homicide survivors(2010-07-14) Quisenberry, Clinton EdwardPrevious research has greatly ignored the unique stressors that homicide survivors experience following the murder of their loved one, indicating a general lack of understanding of the experiences and reactions they are subjected to or the coping mechanisms that they utilize. What little research that had been conducted has largely been made up of anecdotal insight of psychological practitioners who had worked with clients. A need exists to speak with the survivors themselves to chronicle their experiences in as much detail as possible to help researchers and practitioners wrap their mind around the totality of the loss as well as ground future research. The participants in the study consisted of twelve persons who had immediate family members who had been murdered. Participants were interviewed utilizing Lincoln & Guba?s Naturalistic Inquiry paradigm. They were initially interviewed and encouraged to discuss their loss in narrative and then were asked a series of specific questions that may or may not have been discussed during the narrative. The collected data was analyzed utilizing the constant comparison methodology. Results indicate that many homicide survivors feel overwhelmed by the changes that occur in the short and long term. None of the participants reported positive experiences interacting with mental health practitioners but virtually everyone endorsed peer-group support. There was also evidence that participants whose loved one was murdered by a person of an ethnicity that differed from their own resulted in racist feelings towards the other ethnicity. Further, there was no evidence that the process of interviewing homicide survivors was in and of itself negatively perceived or harmful; rather some participants reported feeling relieved that they were able to discuss their loss in totality without having to edit themselves. Results suggest that homicide survivors may spend an unusual amount of time reflecting on the person that their loved one may have become had they not been murdered. Suggestions also include how to best notify and support homicide survivors and how practitioners may best relate with their clients.Item Museums and memory representations of violence in Colombia, 2000-2014(2015-05) Perry, Jimena; Garfield, Seth, 1967-; Brower, Benjamin CThis report discusses and analyzes the ways in which some communities remember. Focusing on examples that display violence in museum settings, the main goal of this paper is to illustrate how certain social groups interpret and represent atrocities of their past. Since the decade of 2000, Colombia has seen the emergence of several memory museums that intend to account for the violence of the 1980s and 1990s. These bottom up venues are part of a process of healing and community building that serves the purpose of restoring the social fabric of the peoples affected by brutalities. In contrast, there are the top bottom initiatives, generally undergone by the state, which narrate the past in a different way. This report examines the differences in the stories told by official and non-official museums and the messages both of these venues want to convey. Drawing from sources and secondary bibliography about the National Museum of Colombia and two departmental institutions, The Hall of Never Again, Antioquia, and the Traveling Museum of the Memory of Montes de María, Sucre and Bolívar, this report describes the exhibitions of violence the coordinators of these venues had produced, what are they pursuing, and their intentions.Item Post-socialist regime and popular imagination in Chinese cinema in the twenty-first century : Lu Chan and his films(2012-08) Shu, Yongzhen; Chang, Sung-Sheng Yvonne; Staiger, Janet; Kumar, Shanti; Li, Huaiyin; Tsai, Chien-HsinUnder the tensions of nationalization and globalization, mainland Chinese cinema has undergone tremendous changes in terms of industrial transformations, diversification of film language, style and genre, revenues, etc. in the new century. This is epitomized in a new surge of commercial entertainment cinema. This dissertation examines Lu Chuan and his films among this surge and as a representative of the new development of Chinese popular cinema. The study reveals a new political regime and a new popular imagination in China with its greater integration into the international system of global capitalism in in the first decade of the twenty-first century. I apply Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the field of cultural production to explore structural transformations in the field of Chinese cinema, and trace these changes to the shaping forces in the larger fields of Chinese power and economy. This structural examination is related to the agency of individuals as cultural entrepreneurs maneuvering their way within the state system through alliance of power, capital and talent, and forming their own voices and a public space. Theories of popular cultural studies help me analyze Lu Chuan’s films as a site where different international and domestic social, political, and cultural forces contend and negotiate with each other. I also draw upon theories of film studies to illustrate Lu Chuan’s application of international film language and styles including classical Hollywood cinema and the art film in rendering Chinese socialist stories in the age of globalization. Instead of treating Lu Chuan as an auteur or artistic creator, I look into his authorship as a site of different discourses and a technique of the self, which helps him distinguish his films from others and establish his position in the field. Trauma studies provide a useful tool in discussing Chinese cinematic representations of the national trauma, the Nanjing Massacre, during different historical periods, and Chinese nation’s continuing effort in grappling with this trauma. This textual analysis is to illustrate the newest development in Chinese cinema. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the historical transformation of Chinese society and to identify the forces that shaped Chinese cinema, which took form in a new alliance amongst power, capital, and art, and contributed to a post-socialist popular imagination in China in the first decade of the new century.