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Paper Short Abstract:

This talk explores how reproduction, bodies, and families are heightened sites of inquiry and transformation in relation to generational trauma. By tracing generational trauma across different domains tells a larger story about the crises of expertise, data, evidence, and scientific communication.

Paper Abstract:

Biological mechanisms of transgenerational inheritance are very difficult to trace in human populations. Nevertheless, widespread narratives of trauma as something that can be biologically and socially inherited, also referred to as generational trauma, permeate mainstream discourses. This talk explores how reproduction, bodies, and families are heightened sites of inquiry and transformation in relation to generational trauma. This paper applies a feminist and ethnographic lens onto medical, scientific, and legal cases related to generational trauma that are specific to racist histories of violence and oppression to show how both expert and lay understandings of trauma are transforming and reconstituting conventional ideas of biological reproduction and structural accountability. I argue that tracing the development, translation, and application of generational trauma in social, medical, and legal spaces tells a larger story about the crises of expertise, data, evidence, and scientific communication in contemporary sociopolitical contexts.