Just Emergencies Episode 4: Trauma and Storytelling

Dr. Ayesha Ahmad (twitter:@AcademicAyesha) listens to the stories of women in conflict and crisis struck areas. In Episode 4 of ‘Just Emergencies’, Ayesha talks about how poetry and storytelling can be used as a way to understand and interpret trauma and suffering.
Listen to the full episode or read the transcripts: Trauma and Storytelling
“We often hear phrases such as ‘giving voice to the voiceless’, so there’s an assumption that those women do not even have a voice. But actually, there’s a huge difference between – a crucial difference between – being silent and being silenced.”
These narrative accounts of trauma and suffering can be very different from the medicialised frameworks and therapeutic interventions that we tend to use in the Western world. Ayesha shares her experiences of developing projects that aim to move away from medicalisation, deconstruct structures of silencing, and make sure that women’s voices in these contexts are heard.
To find out more, listen to Episode 4: Trauma and Storytelling
Acronyms
SHAER: Storytelling for Health, Acknowledgement, Expression and Recovery
Links and Further Resources
Credits
‘Just Emergencies’ is produced and edited by Rebecca Richards and made with funding from the Wellcome Trust.
Image by lsdforsociety on Unsplash.
Our intro song is ‘The sun comes up, I come down’ by Silicon Transmitter.
Our outro song is ‘Surge and Swell’ by Pictures of the Floating World.
Both are available under an Attribution-Noncommerical-ShareAlike3.0 Creative Commons License from Free Music Archive.