Event Description
Please join the Center for Science, Technology and Society and the Department of Sociology for the first installment of the Science, Technology and Society Colloquium series for the Winter 2018-19 academic year!
Our visiting guest, Paige Sweet, PhD, will be joining us from Harvard University to present Administering Trauma: Feminism & Biomedicine in the Domestic Violence Agency.
Recent years have witnessed a significant increase in medical responses to domestic violence. Domestic violence agencies scramble to hire trauma therapists and federal funding guidelines require services to become "trauma-informed." This shift is puzzling, since the domestic violence field has historically opposed psychiatric paradigms, positing domestic violence as a political problem rather than a psychological one.
In this talk, Sweet will focus on how domestic violence therapists and policy leaders use the category of trauma to produce the figure of the domestic violence "survivor" as an object of therapeutic intervention. She will draw on theories of articulation, biomedicalization, and expertise to reveal how and why trauma emerges as a unifying discourse of the therapeutic welfare state that allows for re-processing domestic violence victims as psychological sufferers who are recoverable through expert means.
This event is free and open to the public, lunch will be provided!
About Paige Sweet, PhD:
Paige L. Sweet is a 2018-2020 Postdoctoral Fellow with the Inequality in America Initiative at Harvard University. Paige recently completed her PhD in Sociology at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her research focuses on the politics of health, expert knowledge, inequalities around gender and sexuality, violence against women, and social theory. |
