Cultural Trauma, Social Solidarity and Moral Responsibility: The Holocaust and other Mass Murders

Dr. Jeffery Alexander

Featuring Jeffery Alexander, Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology, Yale University

Cultural Trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways.  This lecture will show how a new theoretical model of cultural trauma allows us to understand how the Holocaust provided a new model of moral responsibility that influenced subsequent societal understandings of social suffering from colonialism to racism in the United States. Dr. Alexander discusses how cultural trauma established a new global framework within which contemporary struggles over memories of mass murders in China, Korea, Russia, and Japan are increasingly understood.

[Bio]

Dr. Alexander's talk was held in the Escondido Theater located in the Student Union Building at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, TX on March 23, 2016.