Data Fellow, Grace Quantock discusses the impact of trauma on the data that we carry with us, and how that is being affected in lockdown.
Full transcript below.
Hello, I am Grace Quantock, and I am a new talent fellow with the South West Creative Technology Network data fellowship.
I’m really excited to be here today, working from home during lockdown, as we all are at this time, and to share with you a little bit about the research that I’m really excited to be doing, and honoured to be spending some time working towards.
As a psychotherapeutic counsellor my work is embedded in the collection and sharing of the rich human data of stories, however because my work is a specialism with people with multiple minoritized, marginalised and oppressed identities, and complex trauma often the level of complexity of data that people are expected or called upon to carry in their bodies and lives it’s very, very challenging.
This could be interpersonal data, data or stories, or impact and effect from racialized trauma, disablism trauma, enableism, through intergenerational trauma, trans-historic trauma, there can be, you know and more, there are a lot of layers that are really happening there.
Now traditional psychoanalytic theory orients the distress in individuals’ psychological processes, so it often tended to kind of look, for example for Freudian, about a difficulty between different drives within oneself but it tended to always locate things being
very broadly within the individual within the consulting room.
That’s not how I work, you know I really recognize the wider trauma response of the environment the fields were embedded in, and so you know that made me think used in the whatever field it draws upon, Gestalt theory which talks about the field that we all live within and the impact. As the Eco psychotherapist Nick Totten said, only a few days ago in a class I was in, saying that many of us, that all of us at the moment, and living traumatized fields because of Covid, but we always lived in traumatize fields because there was always trauma.
I mean in terms of client breakdown, and also you know, in terms of the attacks and the super white supremacy and the ableism and the prejudice that exists within, and through our societies and bodies and how that impacts individuals.
So because everything was oriented in the body I feel like this moves forward into technology. The technology often wants to orient the issue within the individual how do I personally titrate my receiving of data.
But I am looking in his research to actually go and reverse that and instead orient the disturbance within the system, wider system, itself. Instead to look at when creative technologists are delivering data, and this data could be social media, film, gaming, updates on news, use something more than that within a very broad span of what we call data and how to creative technologies design the delivery to deliver it in a trauma-informed way.
How do we do that? How might that be possible? What might the impact of that be, and how might people in these communities feel about that, and want that or not? And what’s that going to look like?
So this is my research question at the moment, this is what I’m currently reading, thinking, and feeling, and conversing into so thank you for listening. Please let me know any thoughts that you have about this you can contact me and I am very excited to be on this journey and to see where it goes.
Thank you.