Traumatic Information: Interpersonal Violence and the Cybernetic Human
Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
History of Science and Medicine
First Advisor
Radin, Joanna
Abstract
Proceeding from the early 1970s to the first years of the twenty-first century, “Traumatic Information: Interpersonal Violence and the Cybernetic Human” looks genealogically at psychological trauma by tracing a network of researchers and clinicians who made trauma into an object of scientific inquiry and medical intervention, only to grapple with its uptake in clinical practice, jurisprudence, criminality and popular culture. Overall, “Traumatic Information” offers two interventions as reflected in its sub- title. First, it offers an alternative origin story for the history of trauma that spotlights theories of interpersonal violence, de-stabilizing the usual narrative that centers Vietnam war veterans and the formation of Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder. This alternative origin and focus insists upon a history of healing, care and recovery over than diagnosis and pathologization, using principles from feminist science studies that values subjectivity and lived experienced, disability studies scholarship re-examining notions of health and recovery, and writing in critical Black studies that insists upon an intersectional understanding of violence and risk attuned to ongoing legacies of harm. The second intervention the project makes is revealed by this new origin story, namely the deep roots trauma has in information theory and cybernetics. The cybernetic, information- processing model of the human trauma researchers built the concept of trauma from both encouraged and foreclosed certain models of injury and recovery and had a lasting impact on the role of trauma science in the criminal justice system, public health and popular culture. “Traumatic Information” looks not only at how cybernetics and information facilitated the creation of trauma, but also how this history reveals the power of the language of information and the limits of cybernetic and information for understanding the human in their environment.
Recommended Citation
Clayton, Angelica Barbara, "Traumatic Information: Interpersonal Violence and the Cybernetic Human" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1322.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1322
