ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the theoretical utility of belonging to address this question and emphasizes how trauma has become a powerful, dominant and extraordinary descriptor that impacts upon people's experiences of the everyday. After defining trauma and noting its professional, political and academic intersections, the chapter illustrates how medicalized perspectives significantly influence people's opportunities to participate as peers in civil society. The chapter introduces a case study of the South Sudanese people who have resettled in Australia to highlight how trauma informs refugees' claims for recognition and the ways in which belonging and transnational ties provide important responses to adverse circumstances - whether these are past, present or future oriented. These implications are then considered in the light of the current refugee 'crisis'. Sociologist Vanessa Pupavac and anthropologist Lisa Malkki have written insightful responses to the discourses of refugeedom and note the historic shift of viewing refugees from a political perspective to a medicalized one.