Portraits of Impact
Katie Fisher
PhD Graduate Works to Understand Collective Memory, Trauma Caused by Environment
When Katie Fisher PhD’24 left her Nebraska family farm in 2011, she never thought she would be researching the development of urban infrastructure for her dissertation research at The University of Texas at Dallas nearly 13 years later. Working as a research assistant in the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies, Fisher would come to kindle a passion for understanding the connections between urban design and historic trauma on a global scale.
“When I was an undergraduate student, I always had interest in trauma studies,” Fisher said. “I spent some time working at a homeless shelter and many of the guests there had resettled to Nebraska from other countries in order to escape some sort of violence. Their stories really changed the way I understand the world. Then, when I moved to Cambodia to do relief and development work, many of my colleagues had lived through the Khmer Rouge genocide in the 1970s. Both of these experiences left a huge mark on me.”
Her time working in shelters and in Cambodia led to a lot of questions about the relationship between culture, society and trauma.
“I had a lot of questions about how someone could go through these horrific events, but also how they resettled afterwards,” Fisher said. “I knew I needed to be somewhere that could handle all my big questions about this, and the Ackerman Center is that place.”
Fisher’s research at UT Dallas was largely funded by her fellowship, the Selwin Belofsky Fellowship in Holocaust Studies. It is awarded to students working on topics related to the Holocaust, genocide, and human rights violations—like understanding collective trauma.
“As a Belofsky Fellow, I have a research stipend which has paid for three of my research trips and several conferences worldwide,” Fisher said. “Without the funding, there was no way I could go do site visits to different countries. None of my research would have been possible.”
At UT Dallas, Fisher enrolled in Exploring Urban Cultures, a course taught by Dr. Nils Roemer, dean of the Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology and director of the Ackerman Center. The class studied the growth and development of Berlin, Paris and London throughout the mid-19th century and into the early 20th century.
“The class wasn’t specifically about genocide, but we looked at the cultural and physical development of each city and what each of those cities went through during key moments in world history,” Fisher said. “The class provided the resources that I needed to look at the layers of memory embedded in urban sites, like The Topography of Terror in Berlin.”
She focused her dissertation research on issues surrounding collective memory and trauma in urban environments with a specific focus on two wetland metropolitan areas: New Orleans and Mexico City.
“Both cities are known as places that flood a lot, but moments of crisis like the situation following Hurricane Katrina didn’t happen randomly,” Fisher said. “Same with Mexico City. The city used to be a lagoon and it’s also a space that floods a lot. There is tension between humans and the environment built into the infrastructure of these cities..”
Fisher writes in her dissertation that because the violence towards the environment is so slow, it is difficult to name perpetrators. Instead, she analyzed the tools used for violent acts, such as the creation of drainage canals development purposes in New Orleans.
She argues that slow violence and built environments ultimately impact collective memory and trauma as its consequences affect multiple generations of countless families, as seen in the examples of those who lived in the Ninth Ward, East Orleans and other socioeconomically depressed sections of New Orleans.
“I’m trying to argue that the landscape itself, the assemblage of human and non-human beings, should be considered as an entity capable of experiencing trauma,” Fisher said. “I don’t want to remove humans from the conversation or say that what the trees are experiencing is more important. I just want to say that there is something here that includes the trees too.”