Environmental Violence and Social Trauma in a Post-War Context: A Psychoanalytic Approach

Author(s):  
Damir Arsenijević
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Hetty Blades

Sri Lanka's long civil war (1983-2009) resulted in large-scale personal, physical and social trauma. It led to a large number of deaths and many people became disabled due to the war. Disabled people in Sri Lanka are often marginalized and excluded from the public sphere. Whilst there are initiatives to support disabled people from both the State and Non- Governmental Organisations, support often adopts a charity-based approach which has been criticised for contributing to marginalisation and the dependency of disabled people on other people and organisations. Performing Empowerment (2016-18) was a research project that responded to this context by seeking to examine whether combining dance workshops with human rights education might lead to greater legal empowerment for disabled people in Sri Lanka. In this paper, I reflect on the experiences of five Tamil women who took part in the project, outlining how they gained confidence and rights awareness which enabled them to self-advocate and make changes to their everyday lives, demonstrating increased legal empowerment. I argue that this change arose in part through different forms of performance that they experienced within the workshops, which enabled a series of transportations from their daily lives.


1982 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 144-146
Author(s):  
Lloyd H. Silverman

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Layne ◽  
Brian Allen ◽  
Krys Kaniasty ◽  
Laadan Gharagozloo ◽  
John-Paul Legerski ◽  
...  
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