Purchase this article
USD $22.00
Thinking about Thinking
Mild Traumatic Brain Injury and Finding Continuity in US Military Veterans’ Embodied Minds
in The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
Abstract
This article examines American military veterans’ metacognition – their ‘thinking about thinking’. After sustaining mild traumatic brain injuries (mild TBI), some veterans experience impaired memory, poor concentration and other cognitive problems that surface when they begin attending colleges and trade schools. In response, clinicians at a specialized TBI clinic at a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Centre created a programme that encourages veterans to become reflexive about their cognition. Symptoms that veterans experience as cognitive impairments are reframed by clinicians as conflicts between their military-minded bodies and their new civilian environments. We have seen the growing influence of the neuro-disciplines on the government of populations, but newly materialist understandings of the mind also shift the boundaries of what constitutes ‘the body’, suggesting new terrains for the disciplinary techniques of institutions. Analysing veterans’ experiences of their injuries and clinicians’ efforts to help them reveals cognition as a site of discipline.
Contributor Notes
Anna Zogas is a PhD candidate at the University of Washington. She has recently published ‘US Military Veterans’ Difficult Transitions Back to Civilian Life and the VA’s Response’, which is part of The Costs of War Project.