Ethnographies on Language (Variation) and Local Cultures of Trauma

[Nathaniel Dumas]

Dear Colleagues,

I hope all is well. I am currently working as a consultant with a local
non-profit on trauma among urban boys/young men of color, with the goal of
designing a written survey tool for screening trauma symptoms and is also
culturally-sensitive to issues of marginalized communities. The survey tool
itself will be actually be spoken by physicians, nurses, or some other
institutional being and the answers will be recorded by hand. Thus, it's a
mixture of the verbal and the literal in the broader activity. As the only
linguistic anthropologist on the team, I'm also encouraging the other
researchers to be sensitive to sociolinguistic variation, the dynamics of
literacy practices/events, and indexicality within the overlapping speech
communities and communities of practice in the broad category of
"boys/young men of color." That said, I am wondering if anyone knows of any
work that focuses on the (socio)linguistic construction of trauma,
particularly in regards to the linguistic relativity/language and worldview
angle (a la Hill and Mannheim 1992). I'm interested especially in research
that takes an ethnographic and discourse analytic approach to this area of
trauma and, if possible, its intersections with gender, race, and place.
Also, if you know of any works that also examine the use of African
American English or Chicano English in discussions of trauma, that too
would be helpful. Please email me offline at nadumas at ucsc.edu for responses.

Thank you in advance and best wishes to all of you on your research,
teaching, and service commitments.

Best,
Nate

-- 
Nathaniel Dumas
Research Associate, Department of Anthropology
University of Santa Cruz
nadumas at ucsc.edu