William Grant Wical

WILLIAM WICAL, then a graduate student at University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, was awarded a grant in April 2021 to aid research on “Embodied Emotional Experiences of Young Black Men Participating in a Hospital-Based Violence Intervention Program,” supervised by Dr. Joseph Richardson. Hospital-based violence intervention programs (HVIPs) have been shown to be promising comprehensive service providers for Black men who survive a gunshot wound. Despite the increasing popularity of this intervention model, there is a significant dearth of qualitative research which examines program participants’ experiences related to injury, trauma, long-term participation in psychosocial services, and recovery. This dissertation project begins to fill this gap, as the co-PI completed long-term multi-sited ethnographic research which provided rich qualitative data on the emotional experiences of Black men who survived gunshot wounds and participated in an HVIP. This data revealed that there are significant gaps between how program staff and participants understand the causes and consequences of gun violence. Participants were critical of the politics of caring most frequently utilized in HVIPs. They argued that current efforts do little to help reduce gun violence and in certain cases may legitimize social inequality. Instead, participants offered alternative perspectives on violence, trauma, and care in which they underscored that effective violence prevention was contingent on social transformation.