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36 J. Crim. Just. Educ. 1 (2025)

handle is hein.journals/jcrimjed36 and id is 1 raw text is: JOURNAL OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE EDUCATION 2025, VOL. 36, NO. 1, 1-18 /\R'ggg utledge https://doi.org/10.1080/10511253.2023.2264370 Taylor&Francis Group a OPEN ACCESS Cheek updt The Woman in Black: A Defense of Trigger Warnings in Creating Inclusive Academic Spaces for Trauma-Affected Students through a Feminist Disability Studies Pedagogy Laura Jane Bower Department of Sociology, Durham University, Durham, UK ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY Trigger warnings have been at the heart of a heated debate within Received 13 June 2023 academic circles since they burst into higher education in 2013. Accepted 24 September Using an intersectional feminist disability studies pedagogy, this 2023 article traces the ableist assumptions underscoring anti-trigger KEYWORDS warning concerns around avoidance, coddling of students, and Trigger warnings; overcoming impairment language. It also examines the miscon- feminist disability studies structions in anti-trigger warning arguments centered on academic pedagogy; trauma; freedom, and agency, mapping out ambiguous trigger warning teaching; intersectionality definitions. I argue that trigger warnings are vital accommodations necessary for creating inclusive academic spaces for trauma-affected students and students with disabilities to prepare themselves to engage with distressing materials. Academics must heed caution in distinguishing between discomfort and emotional harm to avoid devaluing the lived experiences of trauma-affected students. Introduction Medina (2014) blatantly mocked a student from Rutgers University who requested the inclusion of a trigger warning for The Great Gatsby and Mrs. Dalloway. Lukianoff (2016, p. 65) jumped upon this example, describing students as taking advantage of a psychological term developed to help those traumatized in the ghastly trenches of the First World War to justify being protected from The Great Gatsby; completely dismissing the notion that any student with a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress dis- order (PTSD) could be triggered by the content of the books. Despite Fitzgerald's novel containing depictions of intimate partner violence (Dilevko, 2015), and Woolf's featuring suicidal thoughts and the experiences of war veterans, topics that could be triggering for students with histories of trauma (Campbell & Manning, 2018). These particular comments truly struck a chord with me as a feminist researcher and former criminology student with a formal diagnosis of Complex PTSD, who found it extremely © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.

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