Have We Gone Too Far with Trauma?

A Community Gathering with Catherine Liu

Trauma is real. It lives in our bodies, our families and communities through war, displacement, poverty, and dispossession. It is passed down through generations. But how did our language of deep injury become something to brand, sell, and display?

In her new book Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering, cultural theorist Catherine Liu traces how trauma moved from the battlefield and the clinic into memoirs, wellness markets, corporate trainings, and celebrity confessionals. Along the way, she argues, our culture lifted suffering out of its social and economic roots, turned it into a private story and a marketable identity, and handed it to credentialed experts who now manage our pain from above.

Join us as Liu places our pain in its larger history and asks what it would take to hold it in common again, in a place where we can grieve it, understand it, and heal it together.