On the Horizon: Survivorhood as Process Through Re/Orientations of the Borders of Community, Home, Family

Keywords: Community, survival, violence, trauma
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 32

Abstract

The unrelenting sociopolitical conditions of 2020—including the COVID-19 pandemic and inter/national uprisings against anti-Black racism and state violence—resulted in experiences of trauma at individual and collective scales. At the same time, networks of care were developed by survivors of sexual, domestic, and relationship violence in Minneapolis, MN. Kathleen Stewart (2011) and Tim Ingold (2011) complicate discourses on space and place through the concept of atmospheres that establish an understanding of our “nameable clarities”—home, family, community, love, among others—not as stable concepts but as horizons towards which we orient (Ahmed, 2004). These orientations impact the ongoing and unstable “doing” of these concepts, marking them as verbs perpetually in progress. Through interviews with survivors of violence experienced while attending college or university in Minneapolis, MN, this paper identifies possibilities that emerge by complicating our “nameable clarities” in and through times of crisis. How might our sense of self, relationships, and communities be troubled, nuanced, or torn apart by naming and embracing the horizons of our nameable clarities? Based on ongoing conversations with my interlocutors, this autoethnographic paper explores survivorhood through ongoing traumas and times of crisis and identifies possibilities for new ways of being and living—individually and in community—between and beyond our notions of fixed places, borders, or identities to that challenge cultures of violence and hegemonic limitations.