This will be the final Research Seminar in Health for the 2017-2018 academic year. The ongoing seminar has been an opportunity for students, faculty, and community members to come together to learn and share ideas around current research into human health and disease from a variety of different disciplines.
This seminar will feature Dr. Robin Conley Riner (Anthropology) who will be presenting her current research project (in progress). Riner’s presentation is titled “Veterans’ Stories of Combat: The Narrative Structures of Moral Injury.”
Moral injury has emerged recently as a diagnostic construct to account for the so-called “soul wounds” many veterans struggle with after deployment. Defined as a disruption in one’s expectations about just and ethical behavior, moral injury is for many a more fitting model for veterans’ experiences than other frequently used diagnoses, such as PTS. Probing this and similar constructs such as “moral breakdown” and “moral disengagement,” this presentation examines how veterans construct themselves as moral persons within the stories they tell about their combat experiences.
