REFLECTION FROM THE FIELD: Trigger Warnings in University Teaching

Abstract

I have been teaching courses in feminist theory and politics for about 16 years, and I have recently developed a new course called Critical Victimology, which explores the social construction of victimisation. Across these teaching areas I often address sensitive material, for example, topics about social difference and interpersonal violence, citizenship and sexual politics, systems of inequality and oppression, victimisation and victim-blaming, and the politics of reproductive rights. These are topics I would also want to describe as 'moving', and here I am invoking both the political and emotional sense of 'movement'. These are topics around which many personal and political feelings gather, among students and of course within the political movements that make these matters visible to us.Recent times have seen rising student demand for university teachers to adopt the use of trigger warnings when they are teaching on sensitive topics. Trigger warnings are statements alerting readers, viewers, or listeners to upcoming material that is potentially distressing or, more specifically, potentially 'triggering'. This term is part of the language of post-traumatic stress and describes one of the ways in which someone with a trauma background can be retraumatised. In university teaching, trigger warnings can be either written or verbal. They might be written in the course outline or in an email prior to a class. They might be spoken in class at the beginning of semester or at the beginning of a class. Trigger warnings provide a description of the potentially distressing/triggering content to ensure students are not caught unawares.Trigger warnings are specifically for students with trauma backgrounds; for all other students, they are merely a courtesy. Trigger warnings - or, as I also call them, content forecasts - promote equality of access to education because they can allay the substantial disadvantages associated with being triggered, enabling students with trauma backgrounds to participate in their studies on a more equal footing with their peers. I have begun to incorporate trigger warnings into my teaching, and herein I describe my approach, hoping it will be useful to university teachers who are similarly open to listening to and learning from discussions with students about trigger warnings.For me, student requests for trigger warnings have provided occasion to focus my efforts to address an equity issue in my classrooms, but I have noticed there is no shortage of university teachers who are vocal in their opposition to trigger warnings. Predictably, conservative pundits like Christina Hoff Sommers have been scathing in their opposition to trigger warnings, trivialising student demand for them as 'fainting couch feminism' (Sommers, quoted in Robertson, 2015, para. 3) and misrepresenting trigger warnings as harmful to freedom of speech. However, the most prominent critiques of student demand for trigger warnings have been voiced not by conservatives, but by US left-liberal humanities academics, and their views barely differ from those of Sommers. In a group of prominent and widely shared anti-trigger warnings blog posts written by academics across 2014 and 2015 (Cooper, 2014; Halberstam, 2014, 2015; Kipnis, 2015; Lukianoff & Haidt, 2015; Scholsser, 2015), students who demand trigger warnings are variously depicted as oversensitive, manipulative, naive, illiberal, and threatening, and trigger warnings are misrepresented as a form of authoritarian censorship and student 'coddling' that will 'scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense' (Lukianoff & Haidt, 2015, para. 1). The idea that trigger warnings will empower students to edit syllabi according to whim is a serious misrepresentation. As I will clarify, trigger warnings are not about removing words, ideas, and subjects from the syllabus; instead they are about adding a system of warnings or forecasts about upcoming content. …