ABSTRACT
Trigger warnings are content advisories intended to alert readers, viewers, and/or students with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) about representations or language that may “trigger” panic attacks, flashbacks, dissociation, the impulse to self-harm, or other disabling responses. The intensity of the debates about trigger warnings in the 2010s reveals a culture in which both students and instructors feel vulnerable. Students may feel vulnerable to the faculty who design course syllabi and to their classmates’ comments, as well as to the world beyond the classroom. Faculty may feel vulnerable to student demands, institutional policies, and ever-more-precarious and laborious professional status.
This chapter looks to the debates about trigger warnings to examine the kinds of institutional critiques that have often been blurred or misdirected in these conversations. It also examines more specifically about how the questions they raise can be discipline-specific. Although often framed as a scandal of intellectual freedom, this chapter analyzes the trigger warning movement and the resistance to it as a struggle to define the purpose of higher education and renegotiate what should be taught or can be required of students.
