Frontiers in Social Science features new research in the flagship journals of the Social Science Research Council’s founding disciplinary associations. Every month we publish a new selection of articles from the most recent issues of these journals, marking the rapid advance of the frontiers of social and behavioral science.
Archival records reveal an extensive economy built on recycling previously used materials during WWII Germany.
Carceral recycling—a system of camp-based waste labor—was instrumental to the Judeocide. Tracing the connections between resource fetishism and ideas about cleanliness, this article shows that waste utilization lay at the heart of a destructive matrix that exploited camp and prison labor in the service of racial purification and imperial expansion. The Nazi regime imagined itself as resource poor and spaceless and accordingly mined junk and people rather than land in a desperate attempt to close the energy cycle and squeeze annihilative capacity out of forced labor and waste products. As an extreme form of securitization infrastructure, the landscape of prisons and camps manifested the Nazi paranoia about the existential threat that Jews and biosocial others supposedly posed in distinct locations of forced labor and murder. An extraction machine, the camp complex served a crucial economic function in an empire that did not distinguish between junk and jewels. Grounding this story in the history of carcerality, imperial extraction, and discard studies, this article draws attention to the dynamic relationship among ideas about cleanliness, security, and order that firmly ground the Nazi system of plunder and murder in the trajectory of Western imperialism and its enlightened rationality.
A partner’s traits and behaviors can facilitate positive personality changes in individuals who have had a traumatic experience.
Our relationships are an important resource for health and well-being in times of need, often buffering the negative effects of stressful situations. Recent research has expanded on these buffering effects, exploring the role of close others in the experience of posttraumatic growth (PTG), or positive personality change that occurs after someone has experienced trauma. In the current review, we examine how much of a role partners play in PTG for individuals, summarizing the existing evidence suggesting that partners can influence the experience of PTG. Additionally, we examine which partner traits or behaviors may facilitate this growth for individuals, discussing relationship-relevant mechanisms, facilitators, and suppressors of PTG. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we also discuss the quality of existing evidence for the influence of social relationships on PTG, how can we improve the quality of future research, and what is needed for a comprehensive examination of partner-influenced PTG.