By Krista McCay
Reading induces a range of strong emotions in readers, from frustration at a cliffhanger to sadness when something bad happens to a favorite character, Oxford University researcher Emily Troscianko recently told a UC Santa Barbara workshop on trauma-informed pedagogy.
Reading can be a relaxed pastime, or potentially harmful to its audience. “Any text can have triggers for any individual,” Troscianko said. She urged writers and educators to consider the power of texts to affect their readers’ moods and behaviors, saying it is vital for both creating a text and choosing to read one.
Oxford University researcher Emily Troscianko recently led a UC Santa Barbara workshop on trauma-informed pedagogy.
UCSB’s Trauma Informed Pedagogy Project was started in 2022 by professors Julie Carlson and Sowon Park of the English department amid discussions about trigger warnings for university courses that deal with potentially traumatizing topics.
“Students show up to our classrooms and lecture halls with all kinds of traumatic experiences in their past and their present,” said Aili Pettersson Peeker, a Ph.D. student working on the project. “This trauma influences their experiences in the classroom and their ability to learn and participate.”
Workshop leader Troscianko is a faculty member in Oxford’s Medieval and Modern Languages department and a research associate at The Oxford Research Center in the Humanities (TORCH). She said her research on disordered eating that shows that traumatizing content can cause one to re-experience one’s own trauma.
A study Troscianko is conducting measures the reactions of female readers with eating disorders when they read a book with content on eating disorders, versus their reactions to reading a book without that. Readers from each group reported the state of their eating disorders throughout the study and answered questions about how they were doing on a regular basis When members of each group reported the states of their eating disorders at the end of their books, there was not a major difference between the two groups.
While the books themselves didn’t make a difference, what did lead to improvement was the questions they were asked throughout the study. Having someone ask them questions — such as how their day was and how they felt about their eating disorder — made a difference in their lives.
About a dozen faculty and student attendees formed three groups and discussed author responsibility for triggering content in their works, as well as the merits of content warnings or adding an author’s note. Another measure raised in the session was hiring a “sensitivity reader” to ensure that content is discussed responsibly.
The Oxford researcher said authors have the power to choose the content and warnings they include, but it is impossible for them to create something that contains no potential triggers.
“Although you can minimize risks as a whole,” Troscianko said, “you can’t avoid it for everyone.” Traumas like sexual and physical violence are most commonly the subject of warning because those traumas are so prevalent. But that can mean that other traumas go overlooked. “Trigger warnings put tension on certain things over others,” one attendee said.
The workshop also raised the issue of reader responsibility, acknowledging that while authors do have the power to choose the content they include, it is the reader who decides whether or not to continue reading once they realize the potential to be triggered by a book. One attendee referred to authors’ notes and content warnings as a map for readers. “Whether they take the journey or not is up to them,” they said.
Krista McCay is a fourth-year student at UC Santa Barbara who is majoring in English. She wrote this article for her Writing Program course Digital Journalism.