Collaborative Research: How do histories of violence shape affect and experience?

Violence affects individual and community health in both subtle and obvious ways, acutely and over the long term. Even in areas that are no longer impacted by direct violence, historical legacies of violence can cause lingering trauma among those who experienced it. These traumas can be transmitted to individuals who were not otherwise affected by violence.

This research project addresses the question of how regional and temporal histories of violence affect emotional responses and ongoing experiences of individuals affected -directly or indirectly - by violence. Using theory from cultural anthropology and geography, the project will contribute to more innovative science by considering how violence over time and space continues to elicit emotional responses in affected communities.

The project widens the pipeline of highly qualified minority students into leading graduate programs. It will build scientific infrastructure at a minority-serving institution and increase public literacy of science by making findings publicly accessible.

The investigators seek to answer the following questions: 1) How does variation in the history of violence affect perceptions of danger and safety embedded in associated landscapes? How are legacies and ongoing dynamics of violence reflected in the human body and in geographic space? How can public histories be re-constructed to account for these legacies and ongoing dynamics?

The Co-PIs and their teams of student researchers will conduct ethnographic research over a three-year period in fourteen communities with variable histories of violence. The team will identify, collect, and aggregate existing spatial data and maps related to violence; affected communities, and their dynamics over time. For comparative perspective, the researchers will conduct a range of interviews with people across study sites. The results will provide insights relevant to decreasing the burden of violence on human societies.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.