Trigger Warnings

How do instructors navigate the tension between facilitating safe spaces for students while also challenging students intellectually in increasingly politicized classroom settings? How can trigger warnings be used to empower and/or support students and facilitate antiracist, queer, anticolonial, and other social justice-oriented pedagogies?

Trigger Warnings: Teaching Through Trauma brings theory and praxis to examine the ideological underpinnings and pedagogy around trigger warnings and trauma, offering multiple heuristics for classroom implementation. The ongoing interest in trigger warnings is partly a result of trigger warnings and trauma becoming more inextricably interwoven in the past few years in the wake of COVID-19, mental health crises, right-wing attacks on educational institutions, climate change, and attempts at political redress and educational equity. Critiques of trigger warnings come from all sides of the political and pedagogical spectra, and even scholars and practitioners who offer a trauma-informed approach to the topic are not unified in their view of the benefits or drawbacks of trigger warnings.

Trigger Warnings: Teaching Through Trauma provides insights through a range of forms: research articles, personal essays, long and short teaching narratives, student perspectives, memoirs, vignettes, autoethnographies, reflections, case studies, manifesto, theory, and history. Not only does this collection create a more varied engagement experience for readers, but, in line with recent scholarship in “counterstory,” it also allows for a wider variety of voices to be heard and for the articulation of experiences that might not be well accommodated by traditional scholarly essays.

Ian Barnard (they/them/their) is Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Chapman University, and the author of three monographs, including Sex Panic Rhetorics, Queer Interventions (U of Alabama P, 2020), winner of the 2021 Conference on College Composition and Communication Lavender Rhetorics Book Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship.
Ryan Ashley Caldwell (they/them/their) is an Associate Sociology Professor at Soka University of America. They teach and research about gender, sexuality, and power across multiple cultural contexts—from Abu Ghraib to drag performance and queer archives. Dr. Caldwell gives their time and talents to The Los Angeles House of The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (an international LGBTQIA2-S+ nonprofit) as Sister Electra-Complex, as a Board member, and their archivist.
Jada Patchigondla is a lecturer in Writing Programs at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she teaches a wide range of writing courses including first-year writing, business communication, and graduate composition pedagogy. 
Aneil Rallin (they/them/their) is a recovering academic who has survived working at nine universities in the US and Canada (including Soka University of America, York University, California State University, San Marcos, and University of Southern California) and author of Dreads and Open Mouths: Living/Teaching/Writing Queerly.
Morgan Read-Davidson is Associate Professor of English at Chapman University, where he directs the Rhetoric and Composition program. He teaches both rhetoric and creative writing, with a focus in composition pedagogy, posthuman rhetorics, ludonarratology and game writing, screenwriting, and fiction. 
Ethan Trejo is a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California, working towards a PhD in English with a graduate certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies. His teaching and research interests lie in Latinx Studies and Queer Studies.
Kristi M. Wilson is Professor of Rhetoric and Composition and Affiliate in the Humanities at Soka University of America. She is also the Film and Media section co-editor and editorial collective member at the journal Latin American Perspectives (SAGE Publications).