Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity

In this collaboratively authored work, five distinguished sociologists develop an ambitious theoretical model of 'cultural trauma'-and on this basis build a new understanding of how social groups interact with emotion to create new and binding understandings of social responsibility. Looking at the 'meaning making process' as an open-ended social dialogue in which strikingly different social narratives vie for influence, they outline a strongly constructivist approach to trauma and apply this theoretical model in a series of extensive case studies, including the Nazi Holocaust, slavery in the United States, and September 11, 2001.