1st Edition
Narratives of Transformative Reconciliation Exploring Contours of Happiness
This book looks at ethnographies of survival, reconciliation, and resilience in communities and individuals. It interrogates the definition of happiness, hope and despair and explores how communities and individuals navigate life when besieged by trauma and the processes they must go through to enable healing.
Devastations caused by violence force people to look for ways to deal with seemingly irreconcilable life circumstances. Sometimes these efforts are individual and sometimes collective. People draw on a variety of resources, such as religion, culture, family and kinship networks, friends, literature, storytelling, art, theatre, and counselling to come to grips with their circumstances. This volume discusses such efforts through a multidisciplinary lens. It looks at ethnographic accounts of communities and individuals that showcase methods used to renegotiate, reconfigure the pain and to enable a life of dignity, healing and social transformation. It also looks at violence, memory, trauma, dislocation through different prisms.
Part of the Social Movements and Transformative Dissent series, this book will be of interest to students, academicians, activists, and all those engaged with the study of trauma studies, mental health, philosophy of psychology, behavioural sciences, philosophy, humanities, clinical psychology, gender and peace and conflict studies.
Preface
Acknowledgements
Foreword - On Buoyant Happiness For Transformative Reconciliation
SAVYASAACHI
1. Introduction – Resilience, Recovery, and Social Transformation
GOPI DEVDUTT TRIPATHY AND ANURITA JALAN
2. Revisiting the Memories of Partition: Understanding Resilience
KOYAL VERMA
3. Beyond Partition: The Transition of Refugee Women of Bengal from Victimhood to Activism GARGI CHAKRAVARTTY
4. Happiness or Hollowness… just a Heave: Murmuring as a Form of Negotiating Existence MANOSH CHOWDHURY
5. Collective Commemoration in Sites of Ruin Keep the Palestinian Nakba Alive
HANIA A.M. NASHEF
6. Making Sense of the Gaza Mono-Logues in a Strife torn World
PAYAL NAGPAL
7. Borderlands to Centre: Memories of Violence and Aspirations as Mechanism of Reconciliation among Sindhi and Rohingya Migrants in Delhi
ARATRIKA BHADRA
8. Where Mind is Without Fear
VIVEK SUNEJA
9. Negotiating with Trauma in Everyday Lives: A Sociological Analysis of Women ex-combatants in the Maoist Movement of Odisha
BIJAYANI MISHRA
10. Commemorating and Reconstructing Past: Narratives of ‘Identity’ among Dalit Women
BHAWNA SHIVAN
11. Autoethnography of Forgiveness
HERA SAUD
12. A Practitioner’s Perspective
ALOK SARIN
13. In a World Without Handrails
FEISAL ALKAZI
14. ‘Listening’ as an Intervention in Mitigating Death Cases: from the field diaries/notes of a mitigation investigator
C.P. SHRUTHI
Index
Biography
Gopi Devdutt Tripathy is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, Maitreyi College, University of Delhi. She completed her doctorate on Shia Observation of Muharram from the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her research interests include religion, sociological theory, popular culture, gender studies, sociology of knowledge and literary studies. She has a number of publications in journals and books.
Anurita Jalan is an Associate professor in the Department of Sociology, Maitreyi College, University of Delhi. Her areas of interest are Sociology of Health and Medicine, Gender Studies, Family and Marriage, and Ethics in the everyday life of students. She was the Deputy Coordinator, D.S. Kothari Centre for Science, Ethics and Education, University of Delhi, for the year 2011. Programs were held under the guidance of the D.S. Kothari Centre in consultation with His Holiness the Dalia Lama and scientists/social scientists of national and international fame. She has presented papers in some national and international workshops and symposia related to her areas of interest. She has also written articles/chapters for some journals and books.
