Memory and Recovery in Times of Crisis

This book presents a social scientific reading of the challenges of memory and recovery in times of crisis. Drawing on different interpretations of what constitutes ‘crisis’, this collection uses lenses of economics, identity and commemoration, to question how memory and recovery is being constituted through larger discourses of political claims of moving forward, healing and identity.

Memory and Recovery in Times of Crisis examines how memory is dis- or re-interred through social processes and further, how recovered memories are challenged or legitimized. It also presents a set of questions that will stimulate further reflections on what kind of role understandings of memory of crisis can play in recovery. Given the world we find ourselves living in in 2017 – a world subject to multiple, intersecting crises – how we understand the dynamics of memory and recovery is a pressing issue indeed.

This book will appeal to both scholars and students of anthropology and sociology.

Dr Fiona Larkan is a medical anthropologist with a research interest in chronic disease and illness, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa. For the past 15 years she has worked extensively in the area of HIV and related illnesses, and her PhD was a comparative ethnographic account of Sexuality and Risk in South Africa and Ireland. Based at the Centre for Global Health, Trinity College Dublin, Fiona has a strong commitment to education. She directs the MSc Global Health programme and is co-founder of the recently established Irish Medical Anthropology Network, which aims to develop social medical education throughout Ireland. She has published in anthropological and social medical journals; is the former editor of the Irish Journal of Anthropology and current Deputy Editor of Globalization and Health.

Dr Fiona Murphy is an anthropologist working at the Senator George J.Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security, and Justice at Queens University Belfast. She received her PhD in 2009 from the Department of Anthropology, Maynooth University for work focusing on the cultural modalities of trauma, memory and reconciliation amongst Aboriginal Australians who were forcibly removed from their families. Fiona has published a number of book chapters and articles on this work in American Anthropologist, Ethnos, History and Anthropology and The Irish Journal of Anthropology. Fiona is co-author of Integration in Ireland: The Everyday Lives of African Migrants (Manchester University Press, 2012).