How can academics write with compassion and ethical clarity about issues of sexual violence? How can they craft works of analysis that are sensitive to the fraught emotions the subject so often calls up? Another way to put this: what does it mean to research and write about trauma with care: care for one’s subjects, care for one’s readers, and, critically, care for oneself?
Those questions provided the spur for an innovative project launched by two historians, Ruth Beecher and Julie Wheelwright. Entitled Writing Difficult Subjects, it explores how academics in the field of sexual violence might process harms associated with their research and develop self-care skills through creative writing techniques. With funds provided by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant, they brought academics working on sexual violence together in a series of workshops. From those pilot projects, they developed a digital trauma-informed creative writing ‘toolkit’ that identifies techniques and strategies that those working on sensitive and complex subjects can draw upon as a vital resource. We talk to them about why they launched this project, what they learned in creating it, and why they see it as particularly valuable in the present moment.
