Trauma in Social Life

In recent decades, trauma has become an organizing principle of western cultures – one of the most powerful frameworks through which individuals make sense of suffering. But what exactly is trauma? And how does it shape social life?

This book develops a sociological theory of trauma as both lived experience and cultural category. From the micropolitics of triggers to global psychiatric discourses, the biographical disruptions of violence to the historical legacies of war, it traces how traumatic experiences surface in everyday gestures, spread across interactions, reshape lives and haunt human collectives – thereby becoming a generative social process. At the heart of this approach is the concept of the traumatic imagination: a shared disposition to experience the present through the imprint of painful pasts. Brossard explains that this imagination configures how individuals come to live with, through and against their memory and how societies mourn, cope and control.

Ultimately, Trauma in Social Life calls for a renewed task for the social sciences: to treat mental health not merely as a clinical object or a cultural construct but as a site of political reflexivity and subversion.