South African Review of Sociology

Decolonising Trauma and Care: Inequality, Healing and Institutional Practice in the Global South

Special Issue Overview

Across the Global South, trauma is not simply an individual psychological experience but a socially and historically produced condition shaped by colonialism, structural inequality, dispossession, violence, exclusion, and institutional neglect. At the same time, communities, practitioners, and institutions have developed diverse forms of care, resilience, healing, and social repair that challenge dominant understandings of trauma derived primarily from Euro-American contexts.

This special issue, Decolonising Trauma and Care: Inequality, Healing and Institutional Practice in the Global South, seeks to advance critical scholarship on the social production of trauma and the political organisation of care. Situated at the intersection of clinical sociology, decolonial theory, psychosocial studies, and critical social science, the issue examines how trauma is produced, governed, experienced, resisted, and transformed within contemporary Global South contexts.

The collection is guided by three interrelated domains:

1. Therapeutic Practice - clinical, psychosocial, and health-related interventions addressing trauma and recovery.
2. Community-Based Healing - collective resilience, indigenous knowledge systems, mutual support networks, and culturally embedded practices of care.
3. Institutional Governance - state, educational, legal, welfare, and organisational responses to trauma, vulnerability, and social suffering.

By foregrounding scholarship generated from the Global South, this special issue aims to challenge universalising trauma paradigms and contribute to the development of decolonial, justice-oriented, and community-grounded sociologies of care.

Themes and Areas of Interest
We invite theoretical, empirical, methodological, and policy-oriented contributions addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:

• Clinical sociologies of trauma in contexts of poverty, inequality, racialisation, gendered violence, displacement, and exclusion.
• Structural violence, historical injustice, and the social production of trauma.
• Trauma, inequality, and institutional power.
• Decolonial approaches to healing, wellbeing, and psychosocial care.
• Community resilience, mutual aid, and collective healing practices.
• Indigenous and culturally embedded traditions of care and restoration.
• Institutional responses to trauma within health, education, welfare, legal, and governance systems.
• The politics of care within clinics, communities, and state institutions.
• Environmental trauma, ecological crises, and climate-related suffering.
• Everyday practices of survival, repair, hope, and social recovery.
• Sport, resilience, identity, and psychosocial wellbeing.
• Queer, LGBTQIA+, and gender-diverse experiences of trauma, exclusion, belonging, care, and healing.
• Trauma as a site of ethical responsibility, relational reconstruction, and transformative social change.
• Public policy interventions and institutional innovations addressing trauma and inequality.

Disciplinary Scope

Submissions are welcomed from a broad range of disciplines and interdisciplinary fields. Contributors are encouraged to engage critically with questions of power, inequality, coloniality, relationality, care, and social transformation across diverse Global South settings. We especially welcome contributions that deepen understanding of trauma, care, healing, and institutional transformation in the Global South and that advance sociological scholarship committed to equity, relationality, and social justice.