An NEH grant helped anthropologists Sarah Hautzinger and Jean Scandlyn greatly expand the scope and reach of their research on the impact of war on Colorado communities. Building on five years of research with a battalion that saw heavy combat in Iraq, Hautzinger and Scandlyn invited civilians to join veterans in Sharing War Circles hosted by four colleges and universities in the Pikes Peak region and a local congregation. They published Beyond Post-Traumatic Stress: Homefront Struggles With the Wars on Terror, which advocates complementing evidence-based treatment of individual veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with community-based programs that bring civilians and veterans together to help soldiers reintegrate into their communities and heal the wounds of war collectively. They have shared their research widely through multiple courses, Veterans Day events, public talks, scholarly presentations, and popular and academic publications.
“We called our dialogues ‘Sharing War,’ because we [came to believe] that civilians should not just be receptors… We really tried to [facilitate] a lot of face-to-face interaction… to remind people that this is all of ours. We have to all step into this and own it…both the healing… and the costs of war.”
–Sarah Hautzinger, Professor, Colorado College
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Hautzinger and Scandlyn began their research in 2008 with concerns about how stigma might discourage veterans from seeking help for PTSD; NEH funding enabled them to go further, investigating additional challenges confronting veterans and the impact upon their communities, both of which are frequently obscured by a singular focus on PTSD. Through Sharing War Circles and Veterans’ Day events involving open-mic storytelling, film screenings, and discussion panels, the researchers invited civilians to learn about veterans’ experiences and share their own stories of war’s reverberating effects. In their book, Hautzinger and Scandlyn relate this journey to recent scholarship on Homer’s Odyssey, which moves beyond reading the epic as an individual male hero’s journey to better appreciate the tangled web of diverse experiences and perspectives in the returning soldier’s community.
Hautzinger and Scandlyn continue to share the lessons learned through this NEH-funded research with a variety of audiences. With a dissemination grant from the University of Colorado, Denver (UC-Denver), they donated books and discussion guides to Colorado libraries to facilitate additional Sharing War Circles. Scandlyn and a colleague at UC-Denver’s College of Nursing are equipping nursing students with a humanities-informed understanding of war’s impact on veterans and women. And Hautzinger has led an undergraduate seminar at Colorado College on domestic violence in the military. Together, Hautzinger and Scandlyn have contributed guest lectures to courses in six distinct disciplines on three different campuses. And they have presented their research through several conferences and lecture series; published pieces in academic journals, edited volumes, and major newspaper; and were featured in two radio broadcasts.