CFP: Trauma, Institutional Knowledge, and Social Order

 CFP: Trauma, Institutional Knowledge, and Social Order: New Perspectives from Eastern and Western Europe during the Cold War - Graz 12/2025

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This explorative workshop investigates institutional and praxeological approaches to psychic suffering in Eastern and Western Europe after 1945. It investigates the making of trauma through broad political, ideological, environmental or social transformations in the Cold War period through processes of making visible, pathologization, legitimization, or denial. The workshop seeks to uncover specifically European trajectories in the conceptual and institutional history of 'trauma’.

Trauma, Institutional Knowledge, and Social Order: New Perspectives from Eastern and Western Europe during the Cold War

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Institute of History, Department of Southeast European History and Anthropology, University of Graz; Institute for the History of Medicine and Ethics in Medicine, Charité Berlin; German Police University, Münster, 8010 Graz (Austria)

03.12.2025 - 05.12.2025

Bewerbungsschluss: 01.07.2025

How did “trauma” emerge as a therapeutic concept, political discourse, and administrative practice in Europe during the Cold War? How was it treated or silenced, conceptualized or classified? What role did psychiatric diagnoses, forensic reports, police investigations, and bureaucratic procedures play in shaping societal responses to events such as political violence, armed conflicts, displacement, natural catastrophes, epidemics, or other structural forms of harm?

This explorative workshop investigates institutional and praxeological approaches to psychic suffering in Eastern and Western Europe after 1945. It investigates the making of trauma through broad political, ideological, environmental or social transformations in the Cold War period through processes of making visible, pathologization, legitimization, or denial. Moving beyond studies focused solely on World War II and its long-term psychological consequences, we aim to understand the Cold War as a period of continued upheaval, producing new institutional responses to psychic distress while shaped by the legacies of previous violence. In doing so, the workshop seeks to uncover specifically European trajectories in the conceptual and institutional history of 'trauma’.

The workshop focuses on institutional archives and documentary sources - psychiatric and therapeutic case files, forensic assessments, hospital records, bureaucratic documents, police files, and court proceedings. These materials reveal how societies perceived, managed, and classified mental suffering - or failed to do so - under specific historical conditions. We engage with recent historiographical debates that challenge the simplistic East–West dichotomy. The assumption that Western societies openly addressed psychic suffering while the East repressed it has proven increasingly inadequate. Instead, evidence suggests that similar diagnostic and administrative frameworks were in place across both systems until around 1980, with mental suffering often recognized only when considered temporary and treatable. Diagnoses such as “superficial neurosis” in Yugoslavia or “gross stress reaction” in the DSM-I exemplify these limitations in collective recognition.

We invite contributions based on institutional sources that examine how psychic distress was defined, regulated, or marginalized in diverse national and political contexts across Europe during the Cold War.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

- Psychiatric, legal, and other administrative approaches to psychic suffering in Eastern and Western Europe

- Diagnostic strategies: between pathologization and normalization, acknowledgement and ignorance

- Forensic reports, police files, and psychiatric records as sources for the history of trauma

- The relationship between political repression, mental distress, and medical classification

- Social, gender, environmental, health, and economic dimensions of the (non-)recognition of psychic vulnerability

- Institutional logics in addressing war trauma, imprisonment-related suffering, and structural violence

- Interactions between medical knowledge, administrative practices, and norms of psychological normalcy

Date: 3–5 December 2025

Location: University of Graz, Institute of History

We plan to circulate working papers beforehand to allow for in-depth discussion and exchange during the workshop. The workshop language is English. Travel and accommodation costs will be covered.

Submission:

Please send your abstract (max. 300 words) and a short biographical note (max. 150 words) by 1 July 2025 to:

heike.karge@uni-graz.at

Notification of acceptance: by 15 July 2025.

Deadline for paper submission: 3 November 2025.