Revisiting Research as Care: A Call to Decolonize Narratives of Trauma

ABSTRACT

As scholars who are interested in the ways in which trauma and rhetoric interconnect, we believe that our field’s narrative research methods, even those rooted in ethical responsivity, too often re-traumatize participants. In this article, we respond to concerns about the re-traumatization of research participants by asserting that a decolonial understanding of trauma helps us better understand both why rhetoricians do this work and begin to address how we can better conduct research with trauma populations. We examine how trauma narratives have been taken up in rhetoric studies, and suggest a need for the field to be cautious with such narratives. Given our concern for how narrative methods re-traumatize participants, we call for rhetoric studies to purposefully adopt a decolonial orientation to trauma work to better enact an approach centered in care. Finally, we offer examples of practices that can help us, as a field, decolonize our scholarship on trauma.

Notes

1. We are grateful to RR reviewers Erin Frost and A. Abby Knoblauch for the guidance, feedback, and mentorship provided in the development of this article.

2. We use the terms “narrative” and “story” purposefully. When we refer to “narrative” we are noting rhetorical studies research methodologies that depend upon narrative methods to gather lived experience and qualitative data. On the other hand, when we refer to “story” we take a decolonial approach to signal how participants who contribute personal narratives for rhetorical research often see their story through the frame of lived experience and not as data. As Thomas King suggests “the truth about stories is that’s all we are” (2). Therefore, when we use the word “narrative” we are noting a disciplinary tendency to collect, repurpose, and (often) reproduce trauma by using narratives of others as academic and institutional commodities. Stories, however, refer to the lived experiences we all have as humans and how some stories are heard and listened to over others. In sum, the authors in this piece listen to stories in respective trauma communities, and as rhetorical researchers, turn those stories into research narratives—published, circulated and shared for academic merit and knowledge.

3. We believe this question to be important, given the range in which trauma is taken up in the projects we cite. The importance is amplified by the reality that our scholarly training frequently does not include mental health training. Interrogating our motivations in the field to study trauma, we feel it is necessary to grapple with the ethics of what it means to engage in trauma-related studies as scholars in the humanities. How can we ensure that our work on trauma does not re-traumatize the communities we are committed to empowering?

4. It is worth noting that trauma-related research has the potential not only to retraumatize research participants but also to create troubling embodied responses for the researchers. It is beyond the scope of this article to address this secondary issue, but the reality that trauma work poses significant risks to those conducting research should not be ignored.

5. As researchers, we are encouraged to turn non-linear, embodied stories of trauma into cohesive, linear narratives. But as we recounted our experiences of listening to stories and turning them into research narratives, we realized that the process was anything but linear—indeed, we started asking what it might mean for us to inhabit more of a nonlinear, non-Westernized orientation in doing this work.

6. See Maria Novotny’s story in “Research as Care” which offers an example of participant’s confusion over their narrative’s use.

7. While we fully acknowledge the risks inherent to narrativizing trauma stories, we are not advocating for the abandonment of narrative-based approaches; rather, we are calling for more careful engagement with the question ofhow we might decolonize narratives of trauma in rhetorical research.

8. While it is important to recognize, resist, and push against the colonial discourses that categorically define trauma, it is just as important to not center the discussion solely on deconstruction; indeed, as Linda Tuhiwai Smith teaches in Decolonizing Methodologies, this type of work is only beneficial when seeking to carve out new paths for improving futures through making options visible. Indeed, throughout that text, she encourages scholars to take on an activist orientation to research in an attempt to redress unbalanced power relations. As such this is not merely an effort that deconstructs; rather we seek to create new, plurivocal ways of seeing an issue that has, largely, been cast through a single frame.

9. The commodification of research is harmful to participants who have told their stories precisely because the motivating factor for their participation in research is rarely, if ever, to support academic professionalization, but rather to create awareness of or to intervene in an area of community or individual concern. More simply stated, capitalizing off of those who are traumatized is itself a form of traumatization and exploitation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John T. Gagnon

John T. Gagnon is an assistant professor of English and former director of the Writing Center at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. He is a cultural rhetorician interested in trauma and the rhetorical framing of human rights issues. His research has been published in Pacific Coast Philology, Reflections, Poroi, Present Tense, The Liminal, Interdisciplinary Humanities, and the Journal of War Crimes, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity.

Maria Novotny

Maria Novotny is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. As a community-engaged scholar, she co-directs The ART of Infertility which curates exhibits featuring patient perspectives of reproductive loss. Her research has been published in Computers & Composition, Communication Design Quarterly, Harlot, Peitho, Reflections, and Technical Communication Quarterly.