Project Details
Description
There a growing body of literature on the concept of intergenerational, longitudinal impact of historical trauma on health and educational outcomes for children and young people, in politically and racialised marginalised ethnic and indigenous communities across the world. This literature is very much rooted in the intersecting histories of race, colonialism, environmental racism and post-colonial state and citizenship, largely based in North America, Latin America and Australia and New Zealand (UK Trauma Council, 2022; Keels, 2022; McCallum, 2022; Yehuda and Lehrner, 2018; Aguiar and Halseth, 2015; Sotero, 2006). There are parallels here with literature on embodiment, precarity and what Didier Fassin, so poignantly, describes as the ‘politics of memory’, drawing our attention to how bodies remember (inhabit) a collective past/ history (2008: 316).
We want to problematise the term historical trauma, rather than use it as a tool to describe the events in the past or, more specifically, the aftermath of the holocaust. This is acknowledging that the genocide of over a million Romani people by the Nazi regime remains sketchy within forms of memorialisation and archiving of the holocaust, focusing on the Jews (Turda, 2022). Instead, following McCallum, we use it to understand the cumulative impact on individual and collective health, related to the persistent traumas ‘brought into being over time’ through state policies and practices, on racialised communities of ‘nomadic’ heritages living across UK (McCallum, 2022: 166-67). Records of state attempts at cultural erasure, legal exclusion and extermination of people of Gypsy, Traveller and Roma (GTR, used here for heuristic purposes) heritages run through more than 500 years of British and European history (van Baar et al., 2019; Taylor 2014). Recently, however, the history of racialised, political persecution and marginalisation of people of GTR heritages is increasingly being recognised within the broader literature on intergenerational trauma and public health, to explain persistent and cumulative patterns of physical and mental health disparities, transmitted down the generations.
This small UoY grant aims to form a larger inter-disciplinary network of academic and non-academic researchers, alongside voluntary and statutory sector partners, across UK (e.g. Law, sociology, history, literature, anthropology, museum heritage studies, geography, health, clinical psychology). The main aims are:
i) to establish an inter-disciplinary research network with a view to writing a standard grant application to the ESRC/AHRC, using the concept of historical trauma in analysing the poor intergenerational mental health and educational outcomes for people of Gypsy, Traveller and Roma (GTR) communities across the UK.
ii) second, to continue and build on our current community engagement activity with children and their parents from Gypsy, Roma and Traveller heritages, on the links between environment (e.g. air quality), education and health at the caravan sites. Objectives The main objective of the network is to write a standard collaborative ESRC grant application (roughly £ 1 million) . If funded, this network will provide the opportunity to expand the scope and vision for setting up a global centre for GTR studies on precarity, space, environment and community health and citizenship.
We want to problematise the term historical trauma, rather than use it as a tool to describe the events in the past or, more specifically, the aftermath of the holocaust. This is acknowledging that the genocide of over a million Romani people by the Nazi regime remains sketchy within forms of memorialisation and archiving of the holocaust, focusing on the Jews (Turda, 2022). Instead, following McCallum, we use it to understand the cumulative impact on individual and collective health, related to the persistent traumas ‘brought into being over time’ through state policies and practices, on racialised communities of ‘nomadic’ heritages living across UK (McCallum, 2022: 166-67). Records of state attempts at cultural erasure, legal exclusion and extermination of people of Gypsy, Traveller and Roma (GTR, used here for heuristic purposes) heritages run through more than 500 years of British and European history (van Baar et al., 2019; Taylor 2014). Recently, however, the history of racialised, political persecution and marginalisation of people of GTR heritages is increasingly being recognised within the broader literature on intergenerational trauma and public health, to explain persistent and cumulative patterns of physical and mental health disparities, transmitted down the generations.
This small UoY grant aims to form a larger inter-disciplinary network of academic and non-academic researchers, alongside voluntary and statutory sector partners, across UK (e.g. Law, sociology, history, literature, anthropology, museum heritage studies, geography, health, clinical psychology). The main aims are:
i) to establish an inter-disciplinary research network with a view to writing a standard grant application to the ESRC/AHRC, using the concept of historical trauma in analysing the poor intergenerational mental health and educational outcomes for people of Gypsy, Traveller and Roma (GTR) communities across the UK.
ii) second, to continue and build on our current community engagement activity with children and their parents from Gypsy, Roma and Traveller heritages, on the links between environment (e.g. air quality), education and health at the caravan sites. Objectives The main objective of the network is to write a standard collaborative ESRC grant application (roughly £ 1 million) . If funded, this network will provide the opportunity to expand the scope and vision for setting up a global centre for GTR studies on precarity, space, environment and community health and citizenship.
Layman's description
We secured a small Morrell Trust/ UoY grant (£15,950) to establish an interdisciplinary network of academic researchers in collaboration with voluntary and statutory sector partners. Our two main objectives are: i) to write and submit a larger grant application to the ESRC/AHRC using the concept of historical trauma in analysing the poor intergenerational mental health and educational outcomes for people of Gypsy, Traveller and Roma (GTR) communities across the UK, and ii) to continue and build on our current community engagement work with children, young people and parents from the local GTR families in York, on the links between environment (e.g. air quality) and health. The main aim of these two activities is to use ethnographic methods to develop a community based, upstreaming approach to securing health and citizenship rights for the younger generation; challenging institutionalised forms of racialised exclusion, marginalisation and silencing of historical trauma by the state.
Key findings
We are currently developing the grant application and expanding our national network.
| Short title | Precarious Lives and Historic Trauma |
|---|---|
| Status | Active |
| Effective start/end date | 1/08/23 → 30/09/24 |