The field of composition and rhetoric can often overlook the trauma that researchers have to unpack as they conduct their studies. While the field seems to urge the value of self-writing, as evidenced by Banks, Anzaldua, Rhodes, Alexander, and many others, the field tends to overlook the potential pain that can accompany self-writing. We see a danger in asking colleagues to conduct this kind of research without proper support.

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Through an ethics of care informed by feminist rhetorical practices, queer theories, and disability studies, we’ve accompanied each other on autoethnographic research journeys back to our sites of past trauma in order to thoughtfully engage with these sites as sources of both trauma and research. We fostered safe spaces with one another by allowing our colleague to determine how research sites were entered, how long we were to stay in that space, and how we were to engage in those spaces. In these journeys, we are interested in answering what it means to support a peer when their scholarship demands they engage with trauma or when the work of scholarship triggers a peer and takes them back to those very sites of trauma. We will provide a framework for both how to care for a colleague reliving trauma and how to care for scholarship developed out of trauma.

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This project urges researchers to recognize the reality of working with and through trauma by proposing a method of composition that encourages support for colleagues whose work is traumatic to engage in. In proposing an example of what this kind of support might look like, we hope to construct a model that other researchers might follow when encountering their own research.