"To approach brain injury and the development of treatment options a social experience and thereby increase access to beneficial outcomes among under-supported groups"
This is the opportunity that Harvesting the Social Meanings of Brain Injury will build upon. Approaches to the study of brain injury over the years have increasingly centered brain imaging technologies and focused on the brain as a biological object possessed by individuals. This has also caused us to focus on the experience of harm as individually experienced as well. However, we know that brain injury is a material and social experience and that how people experience injury and recovery greatly depends on their social context. What it means to have a brain injury and how individuals, families, providers, and communities experience brain injury is very complicated and to treat them adequately requires a more holistic and culturally situated approach.
This ASC Signature Engagement Project recognizes that the symptoms or impacts of brain injury often go misnamed or misunderstood in particular populations because of the cultural ideas that get attached to these groups. The challenge, for example, that survivors of domestic violence face around having their brain injury-related symptoms understood as resulting from brain injury rather than assumed to be related to ideas of gendered emotionality or catastrophizing, has been the topic of recent discussion and patient advocacy. Similarly, under-resourced BIPOC and LGBTQ+ youth, often have their experiences of brain injury under-noticed because of a general avoidance of discussion about their social experience. For different reasons first responders sometimes seek to avoid having brain injury effects be noticed or legible to the institutions in which they work, for fear of being seen as damaged or of diminished social worth.
This project leverages insights from both physiologically oriented approaches and those that acknowledge the social meaning of brain injury in order to surface the cultural meanings of brain injury among these groups while also considering multiple intervention approaches and creating a context in which these populations of people become more visible and understood to one another.