Logo image
Back
Injury Recidivism, Structural Vulnerability, And Embodied Violence: Analyzing Social Patterns Of Fracture Occurrence And Surgical Intervention In A Modern Forensic Ct Sample From New Mexico
Thesis   Open access

Injury Recidivism, Structural Vulnerability, And Embodied Violence: Analyzing Social Patterns Of Fracture Occurrence And Surgical Intervention In A Modern Forensic Ct Sample From New Mexico

Emily Margaret Romdenne
University of West Florida Libraries
Master of Arts (MA), University of West Florida
2024

Metrics

75 File views/ downloads
15 Record Views

Abstract

In inequitable societies, people with marginalized social identities may face violence,adverse health outcomes, and early death when structural violence becomes physically embodied. Structural vulnerability describes how people with certain identities can be at higher risks of experiencing structural violence due to social inequity that generally maps onto the axes of social race, sex, and class (Quesada et al., 2011). This study explores how injury recidivism, or recurrent injuries, illuminates the lived experiences of injury and violence, direct or indirect, over the life course. When integrated with these theoretical frameworks, injury recidivism can elucidate how sociocultural and economic inequities, along with the systems that reinforce them, perpetuate further violence on vulnerable bodies as they attempt to heal. It was therefore hypothesized that people with increased structural vulnerability experienced more injury recidivism and fewer antemortem surgical interventions than those with greater social privilege. To test these predictions, skeletal trauma data were collected from 339 anonymized forensic decedent cases—authorized and contextualized by next-of-kin—curated by the New Mexico Decedent Image Database (NMDID), a repository of CT imagery (Edgar et al., 2020). Black, Hispanic, and Native American females generally had higher frequencies of injury recidivism than their White counterparts, regardless of socioeconomic status (SES). Overall, males had higher frequencies of injury recidivism than females, particularly males of low SES, except for high-SES Native American males, who had the highest frequency at 52%. There was some evidence of social privilege among high-SES White males, who had the second highest frequency of surgical interventions. The hypothesized embodied effects of social marginalization and structural vulnerability did not mirror a single axis of identity. This presents a strong argument for how these identities come together to create a new positionality that cannot be explained by a single axis alone. Intersectionality theory encourages the holistic interpretation of these findings as they reflect the lived experiences of people facing a continuum of violence amidst the everyday realities of social inequity.
pdf
Injury Recidivism, Structural Vulnerability, And Embodied Violence21.94 MBDownloadView
Preprint Dissertation pre-print Open Access

Details

Logo image