Postrauma is the research I am currently conducting as part of the Junior Professor Chair in Minority Studies.

 

The orthographic choice of postrauma — without a hyphen, without consonant doubling — is not incidental. Where post-trauma denotes a temporal sequence, an aftermath that presupposes a locatable event and an individual subject as its bearer, postrauma names a distinct theoretical object. The graphemic departure is inseparable from the theoretical one: the concern here is less with what comes after trauma than with a different way of thinking psychic harm — from the standpoint of relational ecologies, Southern epistemologies and feminisms — departing from the nosographic and chronological frameworks within which Western clinical thought has most often confined it.

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The investigation draws on my own clinical practice, colonial psychiatric archives produced in Algeria, and participatory ethnographic research on traditional  medecine and knowledge. Through this triangulation of clinical, historical and ethnographic data, I examine:

• systemic violence (sexual and colonial violence)

• the psychological harm it causes

• and the knowledge produced around its therapeutic treatment.

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Surviving the violence produced by the social world requires a paradigm shift. The first step in this direction is to identify the paradigm in which we live. In my view, the power relations that give rise to systemic violence constitute what I call the paradigm of breaking in.

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First research objective: analysing the effects of this paradigm on the notion of trauma

Following Fanon, I start from the premise that psychological suffering is an alteration of one's relationship with oneself and with the world, inseparable from the social context in which it occurs. It is therefore not so much the individual who is ill, but the system in which they live — a system which, beneath the apparent peace of its institutions, rests on the continuous violation of land, bodies and minds. By tracing the critical genealogy of trauma, this research seeks to illuminate how power relations structured around capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism have historically shaped the definition and treatment of psychological trauma, generating forms of violence within the field of mental health itself.

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Second objective: characterising systemic trauma

Power relations sever the ontological and relational ties between a subject and themselves, their environment, their society and all living beings. I define systemic trauma as the ensemble of psychological and transgenerational harm caused by chronic and repeated exposure to structural power relations that are historically constituted and socially reproduced.

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Third objective: articulating an alternative paradigm

This paradigm makes it possible to think systemic trauma from epistemologies that are neither androcentric, anthropocentric nor ethnocentric. A paradigm of relations exists that resists and continuously eludes the logic of intrusion. I locate it at the intersection of feminist theories, critical political philosophies and the epistemologies of the Global South. It produces relational ecologies that are both life-sustaining and critically conscious — ecologies that must be further theorised and made visible if they are to prevail over the logics of domination that fracture individuals within society and within themselves, within their own psyche.

To cite this text: Brahim R. (2026). Postrauma, the research, https://rachidabrahim.fr.