Trauma-informed Research as Witnessing

Witnessing Survivors

Making sure participants feel secure and have access to the kinds of support they need includes finding collaborators who have different expertise (e.g. counseling). For example, if participants/interviewees get overwhelmed and one of your research team members has experience in counseling, they can help participants process their emotions and keep better control during the interview process. This might require you to sometimes leave the space entirely, but working under an ethics of care sometimes requires a change in usual protocol. It’s also not always the case that survivors don’t want to tell their stories, or that they will be re-traumatized by doing so, and researchers should not assume that every individual will respond in the same way. For example, journalist Kathy Gannon talks about how she “consciously makes an effort” to retell her story because she finds it important, and it keeps the memory of her colleague Anja alive [41:00]. This can still be done within an ethics of care and a trauma-informed approach. 

When working on a research team, a key ethical issue is ensuring that confidentiality and anonymity is maintained for the subjects/participants: what is disclosed to you in the context of any interviews or fieldwork should be considered confidential unless the survivor has granted consent to share. An ethical and trauma-informed approach is not exploitive or extractive, but works in collaboration with survivors. It is important to be conscious that the information shared is not wrongfully utilized against the interviewee. This could, for example, come in the form of renewing prosecutions.

Survivors are often depicted in popular culture as being held to a higher moral standard, operating within a binary of good or bad. However, researchers must recognize that survivors and perpetrators may be complex political actors, that roles such as “survivor” or “perpetrator” cannot be easily prescribed. See Erin Jessee’s “Ethics of Oral History” and Kjell Anderson’s “Oral History in the Shadow” for a more thorough discussion of the complex ways in which survivors can sometimes become perpetrators and vice versa. 

As researchers, our job is not to judge when trauma like this comes up but to frame interviews in a way that makes space for survivors to talk about complex experiences of trauma, rather than impose targeted questions focusing on their experience as “survivors” or their experience as a “perpetrator” as separate identities. We must also be aware of the possibility that, during public talks or conference presentations, these stories may be difficult and re-traumatizing for survivors to hear. Sometimes survivors become co-creators of research outputs, such as with the play Contact! Unload featuring war veterans, in which case it is necessary to create space to have a therapeutic process in place before and throughout the research/creation process, especially for those who have never had experience presenting publicly about their trauma (see Christina Cook and George Belliveau’s “Using Research-based Theatre”).

Decolonizing Methodologies

What is considered “the archive” for any particular research question is negotiated through inherent biases towards who has access, who decides what is worth preserving and what can (or should be) destroyed, and what ways of knowledge production are valued by institutions. Collaborating with community members can allow academic scholars to expose the politics of the academic institution, which has historically operated within the machinery of state propaganda and censorship. In this way, oral traditions, which have been devalued by academic institutions and Euro-American trained academics, can play a hugely important role in bringing new stories to light and thus advancing research. 

It is also imperative to build awareness of the privilege gap of accessibility within Euro-American academic institutions and living up to the ideals of DEI initiatives. There are many barriers for scholars coming from the very places of study in mass atrocities, from communities who have been historically oppressed, to be able to enter the ‘Western’ institution and enjoy the privileges offered by these universities including strict visa requirements, language requirements, the financial burden, etc. These scholars may often have the most insightful perspectives, as well as deepest knowledge of community needs. Listen to Erin Jessee answer questions about negotiating with university research protocols when trying to implement a survivor centered approach [54:17].

Witnessing as Reconciliation

One of the challenges when doing trauma-informed research or storytelling is being aware of who the research might privilege as the survivors,or rather who we are identifying as the group that merits reparations or apologies. This identification always means that there will be people who are then left out of that conversation and are not recognized. The work of reconciliation may be difficult to pursue, especially in the short term, as you must ask participants, collaborators, and yourself to accept that there may be strong emotional responses to this research endeavor–of anger, sadness, and/or defensiveness. Nevertheless, it is important to actively keep doing this work, rather than abstractly gesturing towards it.  

Another way of developing a more collaborative approach is to ask interviewees more open-ended questions beyond excavating traumatic histories. For example, you can end an interview by asking, “is there anything I haven’t asked you about but you want me to know?” Through this practice, participants can share a deeper historical context of their experience, of their cultural heritage, beyond the negative or violent aspects. Listen to Erin Jessee speak about her experience interviewing Rwandan elders [28:31].  

Witnessing Trauma in Real Time

Journalists and researchers are sometimes witnessing violence and trauma as it’s happening, and they sometimes become victims themselves of violence and trauma or later experience effects of “vicarious” trauma. There is a nuanced balance one has to strike between witnessing and second-hand traumatization. A famous example of the effects of vicarious trauma can be seen in Kevin Carter’s 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph, “The Vulture and the Little Girl” depicting a starving Sudanese child with a vulture waiting in the background. Carter developed depression and died by suicide a few months after winning the Pulitzer.  

On the other hand, there are also times when researchers or journalists need to be aware of how they engage with their subjects and whether their encounter causes further harm and trauma. Oftentimes researchers and journalists are outsiders in the communities whose stories they’re telling, outsiders who carry their own assumptions and institutional power and privilege. In Kevin Carter’s case, once the New York Times published “The Vulture and the Little Girl,” controversy ensued. Readers were outraged that Carter had boarded an airplane moments after taking his famous photo rather than attending to the starving child. His Pulitzer win only outraged the public further. Some media scholars condemned the work: “[T]he image of the vulture and the child carries cultural entailments, including the brutal historical genealogy of colonialism as well as the dubious cultural baggage of the more recent programs of ‘modernization’ and globalization (of markets and financing) that have too often worsened human problems in sub-Saharan Africa” (Kleinman and Kleinman 8). They claimed that “witnessing and mobilization can do good, but they work best when they take seriously the complexity of local situations and work through local institutions. Moral witnessing also must involve a sensitivity to other, unspoken moral and political assumptions” (ibid). Good work requires good preparation. It doesn’t matter how benevolent your intentions are – mistakes can hurt other people and yourself.