Moral Injury is a complex phenomenon, the many facets of which are illuminated through multiple conceptual lenses. This session will explore the concept through the lenses of disability and mad studies, the transgenerational memories of immigrant communities, and the Korean concept of shimcheong.
Recent political shifts have intensified immigration enforcement, targeting sensitive locations and reinforcing harmful narratives that criminalize undocumented immigrants. These policies contribute to systemic injustices that fuel racism, xenophobia, and moral injury, leading to profound psychological and spiritual suffering within immigrant communities. This project explores the socio-historical and cultural contexts of immigrant communities and the harmful ideologies that impact their moral and spiritual values. I propose the Korean concept of shimjeong as a critical lens for understanding moral injury. Through an analysis of historical fiction and nonfiction literature from Korean/American authors, I highlight how forced migration and transgenerational memory illuminate the moral, spiritual, and relational dimensions of immigrant’s shimjeong. This research offers insights for religious scholars and moral injury practitioners, raising awareness of structural moral injury related immigration policy. It emphasizes interdisciplinary communal care, education, advocacy as critical for fostering healing and resilience.
A consistent question in the study of moral injury is whether it should be treated as a medical condition, and a consistent focus of mad studies and disability studies is the downsides of medicalization. Despite this, moral injury has largely not been analyzed through the lens of disability. Taking Tyler Boudreau’s paradigmatic argument against the medicalization of moral injury as a starting point, this paper argues that the insights of mad studies and disability studies provide strong additions to the argument against this medicalization. As Boudreau argues, psychiatry tends to privatize discussions of moral injury and avoid real political or ethical grappling with the conditions that lead to moral injury; medicine similarly privatizes and depoliticizes the social conditions that create disability. Psychiatrized people are also discredited as knowers, which excludes the insights of veterans with moral injury from public discourse.