Audio Recordings
Laura Madokoro - Introduction to Loss: A Symposium
00:00 / 08:50
Hank Greenspan - “Alive in Another Life”
00:00 / 15:16

Agi Rubin, a Holocaust survivor who was a friend of Dr. Greenspan’s for over thirty years (and a co-author), once reflected: "The life I was made to live is gone. I am alive, in another life." This piece aims to describe what it means to be "alive in another life." Hank Greenspan argues that the phenomenon is in central, but not limited, to survivors of genocide or other overwhelming trauma. Indeed, living multiple lives, punctuated by loss, may be more rule than exception. If so, the fact critiques conventional notions of a unified "life story," of "integration," of "working through" and similar. Rather, "integration" is better understood as "integrating the lack of integration." And that, he arguse, happens between people, interpersonally and collectively, rather than as individual psychic process. It also grounds compassion.

David Tough - “Declension and Trauma in Oral Histories of Deindustrial Ontario”
00:00 / 08:37

That white working-class Americans sense of cultural loss made them respond positively to a reactionary message has been debated testily since late 2016, with cultural loss being treated, implicitly or explicitly, as a euphemism for fear of immigrants; this insistence has since turned ironic, with many wags using cultural loss to mock the post-Trump normalization of xenophobia. But in communities where familiar intergenerational life paths have vanished when major employers close down or move away, it is churlish to insist that the loss is economic and not cultural. David Tough’s paper, drawing on ongoing interviews with workers affected by deindustrialization in Peterborough, Ontario, in the late 20th century, addresses what causes loss, exploring loss as an affect of the working class under neoliberalism that people use to explain the effect of political economy on their cities and towns.

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