Monday, March 29, 2010

Out and About

Your blog editor was out and about at events around Cape Town in March. I attended a workshop on Transgenerational Transmission of Trauma presented by Professor Kaethe Weingarten from Harvard Medical School. She talked about the need to consider the impact on child witnesses in situations of violence. Their psychobiological response to violence is similar to that of the victims. They too become transmitters of transgenerational trauma. To appreciate the depth of her work and thinking, take a look at her website, The Witnessing Project.
The following week Miriam Fredericks and I attended a stimulating symposium organised by Debbie Kaminer from the Psychology Department at UCT on Continuous Traumatic Stress in South Africa: Towards a Collaborative Research Agenda. It was an impressive gathering......



of academics, researchers and practitioners, including partners like Ilse Ahrends from SBC and Monica Bandeira from CSVR. Craig Higson-Smith, our consultant on many issues especially monitoring and evaluation, responded in his usual incisive way to an important
paper on Continuous Trauma presented by Sarah Crawford-Browne and Lane Benjamin (both former colleagues). Lane used the work of the community organisation she started in Hanover Park, (CASE) to try to understand this phenomenon. Other former colleagues from the Trauma Centre who participated were Kirsten Thompson and Wonique Dreyer. Sia Maw, now a lecturer at UCT, discussed the challenges she has encountered in using different research instruments to measure the extent of trauma in women who have been raped. We began to discuss how we might collaborate and we decided to have another symposium next year.

Craig Higson Smith has an excellent website full of resources; he shares his clear thinking on many issues, and even flags job opportunities in far-flung places!

1 comment:

  1. It really was a great symposium and made me aware of how far we have drifted from the our earlier (and better) more politicized understanding of traumatic stress. I hope we can find effective ways of keeping this conversation going and gradually reintroducing the critical components that are so important to our field.

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