Coffee Hour with Patricia Ehrkamp

This talk discusses the politics and pitfalls of studying the work that trauma does in the context of the geopolitics of refugee resettlement. The talk is based collaborative research over multiple years. I argue that trauma, taken as an analytical lens, not only allows us to show how violence and conflict stretch across space, but also how humanitarian workers and researchers become involved in perpetuating traumatic experiences. Scholarship in Critical Refugee Studies and trauma-informed humanitarian workers both advise against treating and researching displaced people as inherently traumatized. In heeding these ethical calls, my focus here is to reflect methodologically on the practical tensions between researching the concept of trauma while not further traumatizing research subjects and yet taking the multiplicity and depth of their experiences seriously. In this research project on the resettlement of Iraqi and Syrian refugees to the United States, we did not ask for trauma stories. Yet, people we interviewed shared their difficult stories of dispersal, protracted waiting, and the disappearing possibility of family unification. Their accounts show that trauma is not simply located in sites of war or conflict. They also reveal that trauma-informed research and care are not easily disentangled from the violent realities of interviews that refugees must engage in during the formal resettlement process.