Trauma-informed Methods of Public Scholarship

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Trauma-informed methods of public scholarship

“I learned this the hard way. In one of the projects we did–a project which I thought was, oh, hugely successful–one of the community partners chatted to me later and said, ‘Oh that was, like, a really awful project.’ I was like, ‘What was awful about it? It seemed like such a successful project; it seemed like you guys had gone on so well, and you did this amazing research. They said, ‘What happened was, we felt like the academics took the research and then they swung off to New York um to give a paper based on the research at this swanky, fancy conference.’ It felt like there was a point where all this kind of mutuality or co-production fell down, that there was no longer participation. It felt like it was back to a traditional transactional model where you extract this research from a community, and then you go off and make your fame and fortune for it. It was really interesting because I really thought, ‘Gosh, research stretches not just from framing the research question, but it moves all the way through to all of the aspects of dissemination of a research project’” - Dr. Tim Cole (“Participatory Action Research”)

Creating an Equitable Space

From an ethical standpoint, community-engaged research should incite meta-level questions about the purpose of doing research, as it seeks to overturn oppressive, institutional power structures. Instead of the academic defining what is important and what should be funded, research questions must be framed according to community interests and needs. In this sense, trauma-informed research is very much community driven. Indeed, there may be times when you are met with a certain level of resistance that must be honored; some community groups may say that this issue is not for outsiders, it is not a priority right now, or it is not a priority for you, as an academic researcher, to be engaged in. This can often slow down what a timeline is usually imagined to be. But that is an important part of conducting research ethically and with intention.

A primary challenge in doing trauma-informed research and public scholarship in an ethical way is navigating institutional priorities and how they might be different from or clash with community, creative, industrial, government, policy, or other public sector partners. This difference can also crystallize in methodology, where research can become more transactional than actual participation. A lot of the time, trauma-informed research requires learning how to conduct slow–and interdisciplinary–research.

Questions to Consider When Developing a Methodology of Co-producing Work

Why are we doing this research and what do we seek to achieve?
Who gets to do research? What power structures are at play? How can we reposition research so that the people involved have a much more shared agenda, with much more evenly distributed power and access?
On the issue of what Tim Cole calls “critical gatekeepers” and intersectionality: Who (which social, ethnic, minority groups) are we working with from a community, and who are we not working with?
How can we be of service to the community?

“People need money just to get in the room together sometimes.” - Dr. Tim Cole (“Participatory Action Research”)

Planning Advice

Before conducting research:

Work on incorporating the ethos of participatory action/trauma-informed research into your proposal language–especially when writing about research outputs, which may very well change in the collaborative process.
Identify your own self-interest (as academic researchers or as community partners) in engaging with any given subject, and developing opportunities for everyone involved in a project to own what they need for a project–whether it be research goals, institutional resources, or boundaries for what they can contribute in terms of labor, time, effort. Beyond the idea of “shared authority” in collecting oral histories, think about what interests both the researcher and the community partner, and begin framing questions together from the outset. In this way, we can cultivate a sense of mutual respect and trust, and the abstraction, or obfuscation, of knowledge can be avoided; history can thus be brought back on a more concrete level.
Go into the communities and spending time talking to and with them about what your sort of expertise is and what their interests and needs might be in relation to that. This will then help you co-develop key research questions you might want to pursue, and you can talk about what an appropriate methodology and ethical frameworks might look like for that work.
Allot time for difficult conversations about who gets paid, for what, and how.
Ensure that everyone’s labour is paid for, and that unpaid labour is not asked for.

During research:

Be mindful of how you are going about melding “(academic) expertise” and community lived experience.
Have a governing body for the project representative of everyone involved in the project (academics, community partners alike): everyone is involved in co-designing the project–from methodology to allocation of funding and resources to dissemination of research products.
Build into the iterative process of research moments of reflection where as a whole collective and individually you can reflect on the process of research and generate a feedback loop of producing a set of learning–not just an output
Practice humility during collaboration

After research:

Compensate any continued outputs. Unfortunately, money matters. A lot. And sharing any form of knowledge needs to be compensated–scholarly, lived, creative.
Think about what types of research outputs best align with the work that was done (See cluster 6 for examples of non-traditional research outputs)
Reflect on what space you are taking up as a researcher. There may be times when it is more appropriate to step back as a public scholar and privilege the voices of survivors. When media outlets, for example, reach out to do an interview, maybe refer them to community members instead who may have historically shut out of the prestige of the academy and thus are not otherwise be considered an “authoritative” entity.

Examples of Publicly-engaged Research Initiatives

Connected Communities Project (Tim Cole): https://www.essex.ac.uk/research-projects/connected-communities
Humanities Without Walls, https://www.humanitieswithoutwalls.illinois.edu/
The UBC Research-based Theatre Lab: https://rbtlab.ubc.ca/
The Community-Engaged Research Initiative at SFU: https://www.sfu.ca/ceri.html
UBC Public Humanities Hub: https://publichumanities.ubc.ca/

Articles

Barke, J., Cole, T., Henry, L., Hutchen, J. & McLellan, J., (2022) “Recruiting and retaining community researchers for a historical research project”, Research for All 6(1). doi: https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/r4a/article/id/1464/.

Cole, Tim. "Crematoria, Barracks, Gateway: Survivors' Return Visits to the Memory Landscapes of Auschwitz." History & Memory, vol. 25 no. 2, 2013, p. 102-131. Project MUSE, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/histmemo.25.2.102.

Jessee, E. (2017) Managing danger in oral historical fieldwork. Oral History Review, 44(2), pp. 322-347. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1093/ohr/ohx038.

Jessee, E. (2012) Conducting fieldwork in Rwanda. Canadian Journal of Development Studies = Revue canadienne d'études du développement, 33(2), pp. 266-274. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02255189.2012.687356.

Books

Steiner, Erik B. Geographies of the Holocaust. Edited by Anne Kelly Knowles et al., Indiana University Press, 2014. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16gzbvn.