We chose to use a website to compose this project, because we saw it as one of the only composition methods that would afford our narratives to branch and splinter in the ways we envisioned them. Composing our narratives of trauma on a website meant choosing a space that would reflect the projection of those narratives. As Rosemary Winslow writes “trauma's happenings are unpredictable and elude systematization” (618). This, then, too, must also be true of the narratives we compose. Our pasts, and the ways our pasts affect us, are unpredictable. In creating an online text that refuses systematization, we hope to induce that same kind of unpredictability for our reader. Following in the footsteps of Rhodes and Alexander’s Techne, we hope to “delve into the multiple layerings of text, image, and technology as sites from which to perform/write/read the self” (Introduction). In using the digital as a means to “perform/write/read” ourselves, we see the digital as also serving as a space to translate our trauma, which has been bound already to our bodies. As Sara Ahmed writes in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, “the work of emotion involves the ‘sticking’ of signs to bodies” (13). It is this relationship between our bodies and the trauma stuck to them that we are first interested in. If we are invested in representing our bodies, we must too be prepared to represent the trauma that has written it. In composing our bodies in a digital format, we engage with, as Rhodes and Alexander put it, the “contradictory interplay,” between our traumas, our bodies, and the field. As we move within the field, we see an ever-increasing responsibility to support the bodies of those trying to compose their own traumas.

 

In addition to the composing of this project, we collected data. Data collection was a process of visiting past sites of trauma and telling the stories that emerge from those sites of trauma. At each site, two narratives will emerge: the narrative of dealing with that traumatic experience from the person who experienced the trauma, and the narrative of the non-storyteller caring for the person during that moment of vulnerability.

 

Data includes audio, video, photography, and text via field notes and journaling.