Conclusion

“Conclusion: Learning from the Everyday Lived and Felt Experiences of Survivors”, summarizes the study's findings, emphasizing the need to focus on the survivors and their everyday lived and felt experiences to better understand the interface between memory and trauma. The lived and felt experiences illustrate how the politics of memorialization and the resulting institutional and policy indifference marginalize the survivors and manifest in their everyday context. The chapter draws from the theoretical perspectives of necropolitics and bare life to further uncover the processes of marginalization and dehumanization of survivors. In the context of institutional and policy indifference, which results in negligible recovery support services, the valorisation of the agency of the survivors, fuelled by hope and resilience, is problematized. Drawing from the lived and felt experiences of survivors, the interface between the material and non-material facets of trauma recovery is discussed in relation to the key contributions of the book. The agency-materiality interface is taken forward beyond space and embodiment to re-emphasize the socio-structural context and basic material facets of trauma recovery, especially in a resource-constrained Global South context. The book adds to the discourse on the co-constitutive nature of agency and materiality and illustrates the differential recovery trajectories of survivors to circumvent the constraints experienced and felt. It illustrates how anger and disillusionment propel survivors’ counter-aspirations around the constraints of their everyday world. The chapter further discusses the disciplinary divides even among those sub-disciplines that focus on survivors of terror and identifies the key gaps in our current understanding and practice, illustrated by the lived and felt experiences of survivors. The chapter concludes with the way forward as emerging from the hopelessness, counter-memory and counter-aspirations of survivors over ten years.