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Book Reviews by Emily R Johnston

Research paper thumbnail of Women's Studies in Communication

In this review of The Hunting Ground (Dick & Ziering, 2015), a feature-length documentary on camp... more In this review of The Hunting Ground (Dick & Ziering, 2015), a feature-length documentary on campus sexual assault, I discuss how the film exposes rape as an "epidemic" on U.S. college campuses, as well as how institutions screening the film can address its dearth of intersectional analysis.

Papers by Emily R Johnston

Research paper thumbnail of Pathologizing the Wounded?: Interrogating the Efficacy of 'Post-traumatic Stress Disorder' in An Era of Gun Violence

Rhetoric of Health and Medicine

Drawing on the 2017 Las Vegas Shooting as a potent example of trauma, this article investigates h... more Drawing on the 2017 Las Vegas Shooting as a potent example of trauma, this article investigates how classifying post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) (APA, 2013) shapes cultural understandings of traumatization and survival in an era of gun violence. “PTSD” reproduces colonizing arrangements of power, as elucidated by an activ¬ity theory analysis of the DSM-5, the global authority on psychiatric diagnoses, alongside both diagnostic protocols for PTSD and PTSD discourse in news cov¬erage of the Las Vegas Shooting. This rhetorical approach to the DSM-5 as a complex system of activity exposes conflicting effects: classifying post-traumatic stress as “mental disorder” qualifies traumatized survivors for medical treatment, while also pathologizing the debilitating, long-term trauma that mass shootings can cause. This potential conflict between alleviating and pathologizing suffering shores up an individual or biomedical...

Research paper thumbnail of Sharing Lessons Learned

Research paper thumbnail of Chapter 3. Methodology and Accountability: Tracking Our Movements as Feminist Pedagogues

Composing Feminist Interventions: Activism, Engagement, Praxis, 2018

Research paper thumbnail of Dick, Kirby (Director), & Ziering, Amy (Producer). The Hunting Ground

Women's Studies in Communication, 2017

Research paper thumbnail of Trauma Theory as Activist Pedagogy: Engaging Students as Reader-Witnesses of Colonial Trauma in <em>Once Were Warriors</em>

Antipodes, 2014

A trauma is a wound-psychic, emotional, physical, spiritual-and the state or condition brought ab... more A trauma is a wound-psychic, emotional, physical, spiritual-and the state or condition brought about by that wound. Trauma produces excess. Overwhelmed by external stimuli, the traumatized mind cannot process what is happening while it is happening. Trauma's story, then, is not a cohesive narrative of events, but its aftermath of perpetual conflict between denial and telling. The traumatized can never say what happened, yet they never stop trying to say. As traumatologist Judith Herman, M.D.1 explains, trauma "surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom" that at once signals "the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect[s] attention from it" (Trauma and Recovery 1). Trauma sets in motion a vicious cycle that never resolves: trauma erases the possibility of witnessing; yet validating the very occurrence of trauma requires witnessing. In interviewing Holocaust survivors, Dori Laub2 found that "the very circumstance of being inside the event [. . .] made unthinkable the very notion that a witness could exist." No one, neither Nazis nor those they imprisoned, could observe the Holocaust from the outside. There was no outside of its "coercively totalitarian and dehumanizing framework." Indeed, Laub concludes, "one might say that there was, thus, historically no witness to the Holocaust" (Laub 66).While Laub speaks to the impossibility of witnessing the Holocaust from the inside, his claim resonates with other historical traumas as well. For example, European colonial expansion across the globe-its settlements, missionaries, and policies of forced assimilation-also rendered witnessing from the inside "unthinkable" through its "totalitarian and dehumanizing framework" of genocide in the name of civilizing barbarian nations. If traumatic events effectively erase themselves, as Laub suggests, then witnesses exist only outside the events, such as post-event generations carrying the passed-down testimonies of those who survived. Witnessing the witness, that is, may be the only way to tell trauma. Reading traumatic literature is a form of witnessing the (outsider) witness. Even as outsider witnesses (i.e., writers of traumatic literature) and those witnessing them (i.e., readers of traumatic literature) can never get inside of what happened, literature represents trauma as it contends with "the vexed intersection of facts and meaning, events and narratives" (Roth 93).3Colonial trauma and Once Were WarriorsOnce Were Warriors, Alan Duff's controversial, bestselling novel about colonial trauma in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand4 contends with the "vexed intersection" of facts (Aotearoa New Zealand's history of Maori subjection to European rule)5 and meaning (what those events signify in a postcolonial nation). As the back cover states, Duff's novel provides "a harrowing vision of his country's indigenous people two hundred years after the English conquest." Set in the fictional Pine Block-a slum on the outskirts of Auckland, New Zealand's largest and most heavily populated metropolitan area-Once Were Warriors depicts the "harrowing vision" of one Maori community on the verge of extinction by poverty, abuse, and alcoholism. In portraying trauma's simultaneous past and present presence, the novel offers readers an opportunity to bear witness to post-event generations dwelling both outside and inside of colonial trauma.A prolonged, chronic trauma like colonization involves "a history of subjection to totalitarian control" informed by and resulting in genocide (Herman, Trauma and Recovery 121). According to the United Nations, genocide is "any act committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, national, ethnic, racial or religious groups" and can include killing, physically harming, and "inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction of the group in whole or in part" (emphasis added, "Genocide"). Traumatic life conditions such as poverty imprison, "shatter[ing] the attachments of family, friendship, love, and community" (Herman, Trauma and Recovery 70). …

Research paper thumbnail of Split Wounds: Diverging Formations of Trauma in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders V, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, And the Rat Laughed, and Once Were Warriors

Research paper thumbnail of Pathologizing the Wounded?: Post-traumatic Stress Disorder in an Era of Gun Violence

Rhetoric of Health & Medicine, 2020

Drawing on the 2017 Las Vegas Shooting as a potent example of trauma, this article investigates h... more Drawing on the 2017 Las Vegas Shooting as a potent example of trauma, this article investigates how classifying post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) (APA, 2013) shapes cultural understandings of traumatization and survival in an era of gun violence. "PTSD" reproduces colonizing arrangements of power, as elucidated by an activity theory analysis of the DSM-5, the global authority on psychiatric diagnoses, alongside both diagnostic protocols for PTSD and PTSD discourse in news coverage of the Las Vegas Shooting. This rhetorical approach to the DSM-5 as a complex system of activity exposes conflicting effects: classifying post-traumatic stress as "mental disorder" qualifies traumatized survivors for medical treatment, while also pathologizing the debilitating, long-term trauma that mass shootings can cause. This potential conflict between alleviating and pathologizing suffering shores up an individual or biomedical model of health, in contrast to a public health model oriented around the health of populations, that may shame survivors and commodify their pain.

Research paper thumbnail of Methodology & Accountability: Tracking Our Movements as Feminist Pedagogues

Johnston considers negotiating boundaries as a form of feminist activism: a dynamic process of ar... more Johnston considers negotiating boundaries as a form of feminist activism: a dynamic process of articulating the ethics of our research practices.

Research paper thumbnail of Playing Well with Others: Demystifying the Workshop Process

Workshop, or peer-review, is part of writing in many genres. We cannot escape it. It should be be... more Workshop, or peer-review, is part of writing in many genres. We cannot escape it. It should be beneficial for us as writers, but more often than not, it isn’t. In this article, the author describes how as writers, we fluctuate between the view that we suck and that our peers suck as writers which ultimately shuts down the productive potential of workshops. Sharing from her own experience in a creative writing workshop, the author describes how she learned to see the peer-review process differently after encountering “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named” (the often inevitable “jackass” in workshops) who scribbles three meager words of useless judgment on deeply personal poems. At first, the author wants to run for the hills and never look back at writing again. Fortunately, her professor helps her see the value of workshop which the author passes along to us, here.

Research paper thumbnail of Trauma Theory as Activist Pedagogy: Engaging Students As Reader-Witnesses of Colonial Trauma in Once Were Warriors

This paper conducts a close-reading of Alan Duff's Once Were Warriors, a novel about one Mäori co... more This paper conducts a close-reading of Alan Duff's Once Were Warriors, a novel about one Mäori community living in an allegedly "postcolonial" New Zealand, to discuss how the teaching and learning of traumatic literature is activist work. In designing literature courses that embody trauma's paradox, between denying and telling, I argue that teaching postcolonial literature through the lens of trauma theory teaches students to approach reading as a collective act of bearing witness.

Research paper thumbnail of Women's Studies in Communication

In this review of The Hunting Ground (Dick & Ziering, 2015), a feature-length documentary on camp... more In this review of The Hunting Ground (Dick & Ziering, 2015), a feature-length documentary on campus sexual assault, I discuss how the film exposes rape as an "epidemic" on U.S. college campuses, as well as how institutions screening the film can address its dearth of intersectional analysis.

Research paper thumbnail of Pathologizing the Wounded?: Interrogating the Efficacy of 'Post-traumatic Stress Disorder' in An Era of Gun Violence

Rhetoric of Health and Medicine

Drawing on the 2017 Las Vegas Shooting as a potent example of trauma, this article investigates h... more Drawing on the 2017 Las Vegas Shooting as a potent example of trauma, this article investigates how classifying post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) (APA, 2013) shapes cultural understandings of traumatization and survival in an era of gun violence. “PTSD” reproduces colonizing arrangements of power, as elucidated by an activ¬ity theory analysis of the DSM-5, the global authority on psychiatric diagnoses, alongside both diagnostic protocols for PTSD and PTSD discourse in news cov¬erage of the Las Vegas Shooting. This rhetorical approach to the DSM-5 as a complex system of activity exposes conflicting effects: classifying post-traumatic stress as “mental disorder” qualifies traumatized survivors for medical treatment, while also pathologizing the debilitating, long-term trauma that mass shootings can cause. This potential conflict between alleviating and pathologizing suffering shores up an individual or biomedical...

Research paper thumbnail of Sharing Lessons Learned

Research paper thumbnail of Chapter 3. Methodology and Accountability: Tracking Our Movements as Feminist Pedagogues

Composing Feminist Interventions: Activism, Engagement, Praxis, 2018

Research paper thumbnail of Dick, Kirby (Director), & Ziering, Amy (Producer). The Hunting Ground

Women's Studies in Communication, 2017

Research paper thumbnail of Trauma Theory as Activist Pedagogy: Engaging Students as Reader-Witnesses of Colonial Trauma in <em>Once Were Warriors</em>

Antipodes, 2014

A trauma is a wound-psychic, emotional, physical, spiritual-and the state or condition brought ab... more A trauma is a wound-psychic, emotional, physical, spiritual-and the state or condition brought about by that wound. Trauma produces excess. Overwhelmed by external stimuli, the traumatized mind cannot process what is happening while it is happening. Trauma's story, then, is not a cohesive narrative of events, but its aftermath of perpetual conflict between denial and telling. The traumatized can never say what happened, yet they never stop trying to say. As traumatologist Judith Herman, M.D.1 explains, trauma "surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom" that at once signals "the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect[s] attention from it" (Trauma and Recovery 1). Trauma sets in motion a vicious cycle that never resolves: trauma erases the possibility of witnessing; yet validating the very occurrence of trauma requires witnessing. In interviewing Holocaust survivors, Dori Laub2 found that "the very circumstance of being inside the event [. . .] made unthinkable the very notion that a witness could exist." No one, neither Nazis nor those they imprisoned, could observe the Holocaust from the outside. There was no outside of its "coercively totalitarian and dehumanizing framework." Indeed, Laub concludes, "one might say that there was, thus, historically no witness to the Holocaust" (Laub 66).While Laub speaks to the impossibility of witnessing the Holocaust from the inside, his claim resonates with other historical traumas as well. For example, European colonial expansion across the globe-its settlements, missionaries, and policies of forced assimilation-also rendered witnessing from the inside "unthinkable" through its "totalitarian and dehumanizing framework" of genocide in the name of civilizing barbarian nations. If traumatic events effectively erase themselves, as Laub suggests, then witnesses exist only outside the events, such as post-event generations carrying the passed-down testimonies of those who survived. Witnessing the witness, that is, may be the only way to tell trauma. Reading traumatic literature is a form of witnessing the (outsider) witness. Even as outsider witnesses (i.e., writers of traumatic literature) and those witnessing them (i.e., readers of traumatic literature) can never get inside of what happened, literature represents trauma as it contends with "the vexed intersection of facts and meaning, events and narratives" (Roth 93).3Colonial trauma and Once Were WarriorsOnce Were Warriors, Alan Duff's controversial, bestselling novel about colonial trauma in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand4 contends with the "vexed intersection" of facts (Aotearoa New Zealand's history of Maori subjection to European rule)5 and meaning (what those events signify in a postcolonial nation). As the back cover states, Duff's novel provides "a harrowing vision of his country's indigenous people two hundred years after the English conquest." Set in the fictional Pine Block-a slum on the outskirts of Auckland, New Zealand's largest and most heavily populated metropolitan area-Once Were Warriors depicts the "harrowing vision" of one Maori community on the verge of extinction by poverty, abuse, and alcoholism. In portraying trauma's simultaneous past and present presence, the novel offers readers an opportunity to bear witness to post-event generations dwelling both outside and inside of colonial trauma.A prolonged, chronic trauma like colonization involves "a history of subjection to totalitarian control" informed by and resulting in genocide (Herman, Trauma and Recovery 121). According to the United Nations, genocide is "any act committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, national, ethnic, racial or religious groups" and can include killing, physically harming, and "inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction of the group in whole or in part" (emphasis added, "Genocide"). Traumatic life conditions such as poverty imprison, "shatter[ing] the attachments of family, friendship, love, and community" (Herman, Trauma and Recovery 70). …

Research paper thumbnail of Split Wounds: Diverging Formations of Trauma in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders V, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, And the Rat Laughed, and Once Were Warriors

Research paper thumbnail of Pathologizing the Wounded?: Post-traumatic Stress Disorder in an Era of Gun Violence

Rhetoric of Health & Medicine, 2020

Drawing on the 2017 Las Vegas Shooting as a potent example of trauma, this article investigates h... more Drawing on the 2017 Las Vegas Shooting as a potent example of trauma, this article investigates how classifying post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) (APA, 2013) shapes cultural understandings of traumatization and survival in an era of gun violence. "PTSD" reproduces colonizing arrangements of power, as elucidated by an activity theory analysis of the DSM-5, the global authority on psychiatric diagnoses, alongside both diagnostic protocols for PTSD and PTSD discourse in news coverage of the Las Vegas Shooting. This rhetorical approach to the DSM-5 as a complex system of activity exposes conflicting effects: classifying post-traumatic stress as "mental disorder" qualifies traumatized survivors for medical treatment, while also pathologizing the debilitating, long-term trauma that mass shootings can cause. This potential conflict between alleviating and pathologizing suffering shores up an individual or biomedical model of health, in contrast to a public health model oriented around the health of populations, that may shame survivors and commodify their pain.

Research paper thumbnail of Methodology & Accountability: Tracking Our Movements as Feminist Pedagogues

Johnston considers negotiating boundaries as a form of feminist activism: a dynamic process of ar... more Johnston considers negotiating boundaries as a form of feminist activism: a dynamic process of articulating the ethics of our research practices.

Research paper thumbnail of Playing Well with Others: Demystifying the Workshop Process

Workshop, or peer-review, is part of writing in many genres. We cannot escape it. It should be be... more Workshop, or peer-review, is part of writing in many genres. We cannot escape it. It should be beneficial for us as writers, but more often than not, it isn’t. In this article, the author describes how as writers, we fluctuate between the view that we suck and that our peers suck as writers which ultimately shuts down the productive potential of workshops. Sharing from her own experience in a creative writing workshop, the author describes how she learned to see the peer-review process differently after encountering “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named” (the often inevitable “jackass” in workshops) who scribbles three meager words of useless judgment on deeply personal poems. At first, the author wants to run for the hills and never look back at writing again. Fortunately, her professor helps her see the value of workshop which the author passes along to us, here.

Research paper thumbnail of Trauma Theory as Activist Pedagogy: Engaging Students As Reader-Witnesses of Colonial Trauma in Once Were Warriors

This paper conducts a close-reading of Alan Duff's Once Were Warriors, a novel about one Mäori co... more This paper conducts a close-reading of Alan Duff's Once Were Warriors, a novel about one Mäori community living in an allegedly "postcolonial" New Zealand, to discuss how the teaching and learning of traumatic literature is activist work. In designing literature courses that embody trauma's paradox, between denying and telling, I argue that teaching postcolonial literature through the lens of trauma theory teaches students to approach reading as a collective act of bearing witness.