Youth conflict-related trauma through generations: an ethnography on the relationship between health and society in post-conflict Northern Ireland

This project aims to analyse the relationship between the post-conflict Northern Irish environment and youth trauma in deprived areas. Using an anthropological perspective and methodology, the study wants to investigate the possible contribution that a socio-cultural perspective can give to the current research on the field, with a special focus on the role of transgenerational trauma.
The recognition of the role that socio-economic determinants have on health is usually a challenge for social researchers. In post-conflict Northern Ireland, the overall lack of research about connections between the social context and youth trauma opens the way to the present project. Anthropological studies on social implications of mental disorders have achieved impressive results in many societies; they show how conditions of sufferance and poverty are not intrinsically given, but are the products of historical processes and events (Farmer 2003: 130). The continuum of violence (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004) and the politics of victimhood (Fassin and Rechtman 2009) sustains a culture of silence and fear in deprived areas (Taussig 2004); this implies the need of investigating the structural and symbolic violence (Farmer 2004; Bourdieu and Wacquant 2004) that lies behind the diffusion of mental suffering. The project would refer to these concepts from Medical Anthropology in order to look at connections between trauma and social, political and economic structures. Accordingly, the study will consider factors such as poverty, unemployment, social inequality and gender and class perspectives. At the same time, the project will problematise categories such as youth and trauma. 'Trauma' is currently debated within the social sciences since the 'invention' of the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in 1980 (Summerfield, 2001). Current critics made to its clinical conception (Good, DelVecchio-Good and Grayman 2015; Young 1995) show how trauma has been mainly analysed as a memory of the past. On the contrary, medical anthropological research focuses on wider perspectives on society and its structures; this would be a new and original approach to the study of youth trauma considering that, at this stage, there is no research of this kind regarding Northern Ireland.