4 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2019
    1. Recent discussions of “trigger warnings” in higher education, notifications that teachers are supposed to provide if class material might provoke a strong emotional response

      This definition is wrong. "Trigger warnings" are notifications that content may provoke post-traumatic responses. (What constitutes "trauma", of course, is up for debate.) The colloquial sense that "anything difficult is triggering" should be eschewed in professional writing.

      That does not invalidate the rest of the sentence.

  2. Jan 2016
    1. Interesting--Filipovic is the author of a March 2014 article in the Guardian arguing that "We've gone too far with trigger warnings"...

  3. Sep 2015
    1. The trigger warning signals not only the growing precautionary approach to words and ideas in the university, but a wider cultural hypersensitivity to harm and a paranoia about giving offense.
    1. Unlike many of my peers, I do think that there are direct and relevant connections between efforts by progressive students to regulate content Look: I have already said more about trigger warnings than I want to. I will simply note that every trigger warning necessarily contains ideological presumptions and political baggage. Someone I know said “I don’t want to ban American Sniper on campus, but I do want it to carry a trigger warning as war propaganda and Islamaphobia.” That trigger warning preempts the very critical conversation that we should be having about it! It’s a classic “when did you stop beating your wife?” tactic. It’s tautological; it presumes precisely the issue in question. Clint Eastwood, who made the damn movie, called it an antiwar film. I disagree with him; I quite despised it, actually, and for political reasons most of all. But I don’t pretend that my opinion on this question amounts to proof positive. Every trigger warning ever devised makes presumptions about the nature of trauma, the treatment of PTSD, and which kinds of content are potentially offensive. You would think that a bunch of close-reading academics would recognize that.