Spatial Trauma: Multidisciplinary Approach
The fractures in the sense of belonging form the key element in understanding and analyzing the long-lasting effects of forced displacement. It has been concluded that spatial trauma sometimes develops especially in those situations where forced displacement has created drastic, often bodily experienced and memorized, psychophysical experiences (Kuusisto-Arponen 2008).
Spatial trauma is considered a conceptual tool, not a clinical indicator, characterized by the prolonged sense of placelessness, difficulties in oral expressions of childhood displacement experiences, and blurred memories of traveling, but also by extremely accurate and vivid memories of specific emotional events and places. Moreover, the concept of spatial trauma should not be associated with negative connotations of persistent traumatization but as a way to elaborate altered dynamics in the existential interconnectedness of self, place, and memory due to forced displacement. Trauma in this context refers to fractures in relating self and place, which have started to define the autobiographical memories, lived experience, and attitudes toward future spatial belongings. Thus, spatial trauma as a concept enables studying of the cultural meanings, contextual nuances, and possible universal features of emotive-spatial tactics employed in the situation of forced displacement.In Humanistic and Social Sciences, memories and mnemonic practices are often studied without connecting these to human physiology or memory systems and functions. In other words, Oral History and Memory Studies scholars seem to focus exclusively on the narrated outcome, i.e., people's verbal and written recollections of their experiences. This is characteristic of the disciplinary traditions mentioned above and their epistemologies, but it is argued here that more attention also needs to be paid to the memory structures and functions which actually define how the narrative autobiographical data is recalled and which memories become voluntarily available and which are left in silence or appear involuntarily. This chapter combines the approach of humanistic geography and memory studies with (neuro) psychological and trauma research. The purpose is to explain why some typical practices of narrating displacement memories occur and to create new and novel ideas in explaining the long-term effects of forced displacement on individuals and communities. The multidisciplinary approach enables one to simultaneously analyze how the spatial trauma develops, how it is reflected in and through
autobiographical memories, as well as how and with what consequences the coping strategies are applied.
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