Journal of Political Science Education

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Not So Scary: Using and Defusing Content

Warnings in the Classroom

Sofia Fenner

To cite this article: Sofia Fenner (2018) Not So Scary: Using and Defusing Content
Warnings in the Classroom, Journal of Political Science Education, 14:1, 86-96, DOI:
10.1080/15512169.2017.1359095

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/15512169.2017.1359095

Published online: 23 Oct 2017.

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JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE EDUCATION
2018, VOL. 14, NO. 1, 86–96
https://doi.org/10.1080/15512169.2017.1359095

none defined

Not So Scary: Using and Defusing Content Warnings in the

Classroom
Sofia Fenner
Bryn Mawr College

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Content warnings — notices to students that class material may evoke Content warnings; disability;
their past traumas — have become entangled in (over)heated debates inclusivity; posttraumatic
about the role of free speech on campus. Critics denounce content stress; trigger warnings
warnings as silencing tools intended to promote censorship, preclude
discussion of difficult topics or punish professors who hold unpopular
views. Supporters too often conflate content warnings with broader
demands for classroom “safe space” that fail to recognize the distinct
features of posttraumatic stress as a form of mental illness. In this
article, I reconceptualize content warnings as a way to facilitate access
to course material for students with posttraumatic stress disorder
(PTSD). I then offer a set of concrete strategies for employing content
warnings in political science courses. These strategies aim not only to
support students struggling with trauma but also to de-escalate the
controversy around content warnings by emphasizing how such
warnings work to encourage engagement, access, and discussion.

Introduction
Important discussions about inclusivity, academic freedom, and systemic oppression are
taking place with increasing frequency on campuses across the country. All too often,
however, these discussions are either overshadowed by dramatic confrontations or
appropriated by off-campus actors whose interest in productive intellectual discourse is
questionable at best. Content warnings (or “trigger warnings,” though I do not use this
term) have become entangled in these ongoing debates, decried as threats to academic
freedom and, on that basis, often denied to students who need them. In this article, I argue
that we should separate content warnings from broader conversations about freedom
of speech and safe spaces. Instead, I propose that we reconceptualize content warnings
as a form of disability accommodation: a way to facilitate access to material, student
engagement, and the discussion of difficult topics.
The article proceeds in four parts. First, I survey the state of the debate around content
warnings through the lens of the American Association of University Professors’ (AAUP)
2014 statement recommending against their “required or expected” use (AAUP 2014,
paragraph 8). Second, I suggest that, pace both “sides” of this debate, content warnings
are best understood by returning to their roots as tools to facilitate access to challenging
material, rather than excuses to avoid it. I then offer four concrete strategies for incorpor-
ating content warnings into political science courses and for keeping the resultant debates

CONTACT Sofia Fenner sfenner@brynmawr.edu Department of Political Science, Bryn Mawr College, Dalton Hall,
101 N. Merion Avenue, Bryn Mawr, PA 19010, USA.
© 2017 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
 JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE EDUCATION 87

both civil and productive. I conclude by briefly returning to the (often essential) work that
content warnings cannot do.

The current debate

In a 2014 statement recommending against the use of “trigger warnings,” the American
Association of University Professors (AAUP) argued that such warnings present a “threat
to academic freedom” and can create a “repressive, ‘chilly climate’ for critical thinking in
the classroom.” (AAUP 2014, paragraphs 1, 3). The statement defines content warnings far
too broadly, as advance notice of any material that “might trigger difficult emotional
responses in students” and suggests that using such warnings (even voluntarily) will
encourage students and faculty to avoid challenging material altogether. In the worst-case
scenario, a professor who fears being held responsible for failing to anticipate the need for a
trigger warning may prefer to teach only innocuous materials rather than risk controversy;
students who hear that difficult material is coming may use trigger warnings as an excuse
to “tap out” of conversations or to skip readings. Indeed, the AUUP statement argues that
the call for content warnings “follows from earlier calls not to offend students’ sensibilities
by introducing material that challenges their values.” (AAUP 2014, paragraph 1).
Ironically, some of the most strident advocates of content warnings might agree with the
AAUP’s description. Calls for content warnings are often nested inside (or metonymically
assumed to represent) broader demands for diversity, inclusivity, and justice in the
classroom or on campus in general. This is, as I will argue in the following section,
“mission creep”1; content warnings were never intended to do such expansive work. Yet,
for students to whom the conceptual vocabulary of social justice activism is often new,
content warnings may seem to resonate with a wider menu of demands. Here, I remain
agnostic on these broader demands and on whether they represent threats to open
discourse. My central point is that content warnings are neither a censorship tool nor a
way to address systemic injustices, and, therefore, they need to be separated from these
important but distinct conversations. Scholars who vehemently disagree about how student
protesters should respond to unpopular speakers or whether curricula should be reformed
to include more diverse voices should nevertheless be able to agree about implementing
content warnings in the classroom.
It is to emphasize content warnings as a distinct issue that I avoid the term “trigger
warning” in this piece. The word “triggering” is now commonly used precisely as the
AAUP uses it: to indicate any provocation of a strong emotion. Ordinary language does
not distinguish between desirable affective engagement with course material, on the one
hand, and paralyzing trauma responses on the other — both are often described as “being
triggered.” Content warnings, as I conceptualize them, aim to prevent only disabling
trauma responses, not all strong emotional reactions.

Returning to the roots of content warnings

Content warnings are generally understood to have emerged in online feminist spaces,
where they were an act of human decency directed at survivors who might need to steel
themselves before reading an explicit account of rape or sexual assault. These warnings
were originally invented not by sinister silencing forces but by people who wanted to talk
88 S. FENNER

about rape and rape culture, often in graphic detail. Brief warnings worked to introduce
and lay the groundwork for difficult discussions, not shut them down. It is the idea of
content warnings as the beginning rather than the end of a conversation2 that I aim to
recover here.
I propose that we conceptualize content warnings not as a “censor’s tool,” as the AAUP
statement puts it, (AAUP 2014, paragraph 4) but as a metaphorical curb cut or as a way to
facilitate access to class material for a specific subset of students. That subset is not all
students who come from marginalized backgrounds; it is not even all students who have experi-
enced trauma. The students who need content warnings in order to access valuable material are
those who have posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or related trauma-induced mental-health
issues.3 Like a curb cut — intended for wheelchairs but also useful for strollers — there may be
spillover benefits to content warnings. Students with undiagnosed or unusually presenting
trauma disorders, for example, are likely to benefit from a system that does not require formal
accommodation through slow (and often expensive) campus accessibility processes.
Nevertheless, the population directly assisted by content warnings is a limited one — but even
small populations deserve the best possible access to classroom material.
In part because of its historical connection to war, posttraumatic stress disorder has been
the subject of considerable debate and discussion within both psychology, and anthropology.
As (re)defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition
(DSM-5) in 2013, PTSD involves exposure to trauma followed by reexperiencing (“intrusive”
thoughts, flashbacks, etc.), avoidance of “trauma-related reminders,” negative thought
patterns, and “trauma-related arousal and reactivity” (National Center for PTSD 2017,
paragraphs 3-7).4 While PTSD’s cross-cultural validity has been debated (e.g., Hinton and
Lewis-Fernández 2011) and its political implications critiqued (e.g., Young 1995), more
recent work has taken care to specify that whatever PTSD’s sociocultural genealogy, its
consequences are real (Good and Hinton 2016, p. 4). Students with PTSD may respond to
a trauma stressor (“trigger”) not just mentally or emotionally but physiologically with
symptoms that resemble those commonly associated with panic attacks.
Content warnings empower students who struggle with trauma to make their own
decisions about how they can most effectively access class material. When a student knows
in advance that a text, film, or class discussion may provoke a trauma response, he or she
has the opportunity to put in place a set of coping mechanisms to minimize the impact of
the coming stressor: an extra visit to the student counseling center, a dose of antianxiety
medication, a phone call home the night before class, or a lunch with friends scheduled
immediately after class. Providing students with advance warning also gives them an
opportunity to work with mental-health professionals to design and explore new strategies
that will allow them to do what students without PTSD do: complete the readings, come to
class and participate in discussions with their peers.
Surprising students with trauma-related content, by contrast — which is what refusing to
provide content warnings does — risks precisely the silencing and avoidance that critics of
content warnings fear. If a student with PTSD is unexpectedly confronted with such
material, he or she may shut down, unable to finish the text or discuss it in class. As
one anonymous blogger explains:
[A]s someone who negotiates a strong set of triggers, having these [content] warnings has
never led me to disengage from the material — what it does is allow me to prepare for the
 JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE EDUCATION 89

way the material will affect me, so I can function in class. The thing that makes me disengage is
when I don’t have any preparation and am blinded by flashbacks in the middle of class, and at
those times my silence is not a protest against the material’s inclusion, but simply the best way
to separate my private experience of the trigger from the work that is happening in the class-
room. (Feminist Hulk 2014, paragraph 2)

Some critics of content warnings have argued that, since exposure to trauma stressors is
a part of some PTSD treatment, classroom exposure should be encouraged as a way of
treating the disorder.5 Setting aside the fact that college classes are not therapy, this
argument fundamentally misunderstands the logic of prolonged exposure therapy (PET),
the “gold standard” of PTSD treatment (Rauch, Eftekhari, and Ruzek 2012). Patients
undertake PET knowingly, under the supervision of a mental-health professional, and
within a structure that also supports them through any subsequent trauma response (for
exposure therapy guidelines, see Foa, Keane, and Friedman 2009). Exposure therapy is
not predicated on surprise.6 Moreover, the difference between exposure therapy
and retraumatizing exposure has a great deal to do with the context in which that
exposure takes place. A one-time or brief exposure that does not leave time or space for
desensitization or emotional processing is likely to do more harm than good (Bronéus
2008, pp. 62–63).
As scholars of outdoor and experiential learning have repeatedly noted, while students
should be encouraged to move beyond their “comfort zones” in order to learn and grow,
pushing them too far — into a “panic zone” — in fact precludes learning (see, for example,
Brown 2008). PTSD responses are physical and can be dramatic; a student who has been
thrown into an active panic attack cannot effectively engage with readings or discussion.
Moreover, the extra energy required to deal with an unexpected trauma response may leave
a student unable to participate in other activities or too physically drained to come to class
at all. The reality is that there are students with PTSD in our classrooms, just as there are
students with low vision, brain tumors, or hearing problems. Our job as instructors is not
to treat them, but we are obligated — if not always legally,7 then ethically — to think
creatively about how to help them access material alongside their peers. It is in that spirit
that content warnings should be incorporated into the classroom.

Concrete strategies for implementing content warnings without causing an

uproar
Though I differ with the AAUP’s overly broad definition of content warnings, I concur
with the more moderate tone that emerges toward the end of their statement. After using
words like “censor” in its early paragraphs, the statement notes that some students with
PTSD may indeed be entitled to “reasonable accommodation” under the Americans with
Disabilities Act (ADA) (AAUP 2014, paragraphs 4, 9). “Faculty,” the statement continues,
“should, of course, be sensitive to that such [trauma] reactions may occur in their
classrooms” (AAUP 2014, paragraph 9). But it offers no guidance about what those
accommodations might look like, how faculty might operationalize “be[ing] sensitive,”
or how to provide accommodations “without affecting other students’ exposure to
material” (AAUP 2014, paragraph 9).8 In what follows, I address these logistical questions
by offering four concrete strategies for implementing content warnings in the classroom.
90 S. FENNER

While I have developed these strategies in small, discussion-based settings, I note

throughout how they might be adapted to larger lecture courses.

One: Ask students what they need

Skeptics of content warnings often invoke slippery-slope arguments: Nearly everything
could be triggering to someone, so how could professors ever anticipate every possible
stressor in their curricula? It is certainly true that traumatic experiences can be evoked
by seemingly innocuous images, sounds, or situations; it would indeed be impossible for
anyone to identify every possible trauma stressor in a given text or discussion. Implement-
ing content warnings, however, does not require us to provide advance warning to the
population as a whole — we are only responsible for the students we actually have in class.
Students, in turn, have a responsibility to know their own needs, and instructors should
collect that information privately as early as possible in a course. During the first week
of class, I ask students to fill out an index card that asks for a range of relevant personal
information: name, preferred pronouns, major, learning style, any personal issues they
wish to share, and which (if any) content warnings they need because of past trauma. In
a large class, this could be done electronically (through a Google form or course Web site)
or delegated to teaching assistants to do in their discussion sections or with the students for
whom they are responsible. In a class of 30 to 35 students, I usually receive between two
and five requests for content warnings. The vast majority of these requests are related to
graphic descriptions of rape and sexual assault.9
Collecting this information furthers three important goals. First, it transfers the
responsibility for recognizing and diagnosing trauma onto students and their mental-
health-care professionals. Critics often ask “Who decides what counts as a trigger?” as if
there were no possible answer to that question. There is, however, an answer: To
paraphrase van der Kolk (1994), “the body keeps the score.” PTSD responses are physical
experiences, and, as such, the people best positioned to know what counts as a stressor are
the people who inhabit traumatized bodies. To be sure, not every student coping with
trauma will have the self-awareness to fully understand themselves and their needs. Nor
will all students have had access to mental-health care prior to coming to campus. Speaking
openly about the issue, however, encourages all students to reflect upon and attempt to
articulate their needs as best they can.
Second, asking students to share warning requests early in the course sets a cooperative
tone for the rest of the term. Creating a classroom norm of communication, mutual
respect, and transparency early on makes it easier to defuse misunderstandings, unexpected
trauma responses, and other conflicts later. I have found that students tend to be forgiving,
flexible, and prepared to shoulder the burden of dealing with their own trauma when I
position myself from the outset as someone who is attuned to such issues.
Finally, asking the question in terms of “What content warnings, if any, do you need”
and making explicit reference to posttraumatic stress helps reinforce for students that
content warnings are tools for dealing with a serious illness — not weapons with which
to fight larger battles over noninclusive pedagogies, curricula, or campuses. Students
coming to college are exposed to new vocabularies of scholarship, discourse, and resistance
and may take years to grow into full sovereignty over those vocabularies. A student who
asks for content warnings may be saying that he or she feels marginalized or bullied in
 JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE EDUCATION 91

classroom discussion; that he or she finds the syllabus biased or lacking important voices;
or that he or she feels physically unsafe on campus. Content warnings cannot solve these
problems, but; speaking explicitly about content warnings as an accommodation to trauma
survivors10 contributes to the specificity, granularity, and conceptual clarity of campus
discussions around all manner of sensitive topics.

Two: Content warnings for assigned material

Instructors often struggle with the basic logistics of content warnings: Should they go on
the syllabus? Should they be mentioned in class? How often? When professors fear that
even the words “content warnings” might provoke a backlash, the stakes of these logistical
questions are high. Repeatedly providing warnings in class can irritate students who
disagree with the entire premise of content warnings, continually exacerbating classroom
tension. Asking for content-warning requests in advance, as I have suggested above,
provides a way out of this dilemma. Rather than offering warnings in class, I provide them
privately and directly (usually by e-mail) to the students who need them. Sending content
warnings via e-mail both minimizes disruption to other students and promotes a norm of
communication by allowing me to acknowledge that I have read and recognized a student’s
request. Again, in a larger course, this task could be delegated to teaching assistants or be
done by sending one e-mail that blind carbon copies (bcc) all the students who have
requested a particular content warning.
At the least, a content-warning e-mail should include a notice about any upcoming
assigned materials that include the student’s self-reported trauma stressors. For texts, I
generally provide students the page numbers of potentially problematic passages; for audio
or visual material, I provide timestamps. Students are then free to choose whether to flip
past those pages (knowing there was a rape, say, but not needing to know the specific
details), to ask a classmate to summarize the passage for them, or to take those particular
pages to read with a therapist or trusted friend. While having a handful of students skip a
passage is not ideal, it is far better than having those students avoid the text entirely, be
unable to read past a particular section, or avoid future texts out of fear of similar surprises.
Moreover, while knowing a rape is coming may disrupt an individual student’s “natural”
experience of a narrative arc (more of a concern in the humanities than the social sciences),
it is important to remember that the goal of disability accommodation is not to provide
disabled students with exactly the same experience as their classmates. Instead, it is to
provide the fullest possible experience. A student with low vision who studies art history
through touch, for example, will not have the same experience as his or her better-sighted
peers. PTSD is a serious disorder and it has serious consequences. The goal of content
warnings is to minimize the disorder’s impact on a student’s learning experience.

Three: Pedagogical transparency about included and excluded materials

We all aspire to assign readings and other materials intentionally, with a specific pedagogical
purpose in mind. Attentiveness to — and openness about — this seemingly basic principle is
a crucial foundation for the successful (and noncontroversial) use of content warnings
(for more on pedagogical transparency, see Cook-Sather 2011). Having a clear account of
the value of assigned materials leaves instructors better equipped (a) to respond to and
92 S. FENNER

de-escalate larger conflicts about curricular material posed in the language of “content
warnings” and (b) to address the concerns of those students who are a priori hostile to the
very idea of content warnings.
There are often persuasive pedagogical reasons to include graphic descriptions of
violence, torture, rape, or suicide in a course.11 Many political science classes need to
acknowledge the existence of these phenomena,12 but sometimes we also have good
reason to analyze such actions in all their horrific detail. As an undergraduate, I took
a political science course on violence in which students were required to read several
graphic, firsthand narratives written by perpetrators of genocide and other atrocities.
As American college students, our professor explained, we were unlikely to have
personally participated in such violence; reading these narratives gave us essential
information about how people bring themselves to commit such acts. With this
justification in mind, the readings — while certainly difficult and emotionally affecting —
felt neither cruel nor voyeuristic. Had a student with violence-related PTSD wanted to
take the course, that student would have had fair warning from the first day that the
material was likely to include repeated trauma stressors and that, given the class’s learn-
ing goals, avoiding those stressors would severely limit his or her participation in the
course. Again, PTSD is a serious illness with serious consequences: Not all students will
be able to take all classes all the time. Students with other disabilities are sometimes
unable to take classes because accessible reading materials cannot be arranged in time
or note-takers cannot fit a given course into their schedule. That individuals might
occasionally need to make such difficult choices does not, in and of itself, mean that
colleges have failed to foster free speech or the exchange of ideas.
It is equally important to recognize when diving into the details of rape, torture, police
brutality, and other similar topics is not pedagogically necessary. Graphic descriptions and
images may increase students’ engagement — or at least keep them awake — but they do
not always contribute meaningfully to a curriculum. A class on democratization, for
example, might not need to explore the specific torture techniques used by different
authoritarian regimes; for most learning goals, simply acknowledging that torture
was widespread would be sufficient. No matter what choices are ultimately appropriate
for a given course, having a ready answer to the question “Why do we have to look at this?”
— a question that is often not motivated by trauma — decreases the risk that the instructor
will freeze or respond in an overly defensive way.
Pedagogical choices about potentially retraumatizing material can even be incorporated
into the classroom as a learning exercise. When I teach a unit on graphic images in the
Arab uprisings, I provide each student with a packet of printed images rather than display-
ing them in a PowerPoint presentation. Students are asked to make their own decisions
about which images at which they wish to look and to reflect in writing after class about
why they made the choice they did and whether they would make the same choice in
the future. I also assign the Syrian film collective Abounaddara’s manifesto, “A Right to
the Image.” In that text, the members of Abounaddara argue against trafficking in
gruesome images of Syrian death and victimhood, no matter how effective such images
might be at cultivating sympathy or turning public opinion against the Asad regime. Each
person, Abounaddara claims, has an inherent right to his or her own image and to consent
to that image’s use. For example, Alan Kurdi, the 3-year-old who was photographed dead
on a Turkish beach in 2015, did not consent to any use of his image, and thus that image
 JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE EDUCATION 93

should not be shown for any political purpose, no matter how high-minded or
humanitarian. Students need not agree with this perspective, of course, but assigning the
manifesto brings conversations about depiction, consent, and the power of images into
the classroom — thus surfacing some of the broader issues of power and brutality about
which students are often trying to talk when they bring up “trigger warnings.”
A clear philosophy regarding graphic matters better equips instructors to respond to
those students who raise concerns about censorship at the first mention of content
warnings. I do not assign ISIS beheading videos in my Middle East politics class for two
reasons: First, there are ongoing debates about whether watching such videos disrespects
victims or constitutes complicity in violent acts13 and, second, the specific aesthetics of
the murders are not essential to understanding, say, the organization’s spread since the
beginning of Syria’s civil war. For some discussions about the iconography of justice or
moral distinctions among different kinds of death, those aesthetics would be germane,
and I would weigh the value of the discussion against the cost of making a political decision
(to watch) on behalf of my students. But for my current syllabus, there is no pedagogical
need for students to watch the actual videos. Recently, a student approached me concerned
that important material — like beheading videos — had been “excluded for sensitivity
reasons.” I was able to respond by explaining my ethical position and pedagogical
justification. I also reminded the student that such videos are still widely available on
the Internet to the curious; choosing not to use my position of authority to ask students
to watch material is not equivalent to removing it from public view or calling for its
censorship. Again, opening lines of communication about these issues early in a course
makes it significantly easier to respond to concerns later.

Four: Content warnings in discussion?

The question of whether to use content warnings in discussion dramatizes the fundamental
problem with holding professors responsible for creating “safe space” in a classroom: We
never have full control over what our students say. This is especially true in small,
discussion-based classes, where the professor’s voice is not dominant. I cannot know in
advance whether a student will say something that provokes a trauma response in a peer;
again, the purpose of content warnings is to minimize the damage PTSD does to learning.
Erasing that damage entirely is, for better or worse, impossible. If I anticipate that an
upcoming discussion will touch on an issue that is traumatic for one of my students, I will
notify that student — again, privately — in advance. I will also make it clear that I am
willing to strategize about how to approach both the topic and his or her participation,
including making arrangements for alternative work (a response essay, perhaps, or a
discussion in office hours) if actively participating in class is impossible. This is
undoubtedly a controversial choice, but the stakes are not quite so high as the furor over
content warnings would suggest. Again, the goal of “reasonable accommodation” under the
ADA is not to provide disabled students with exactly the same experience as their peers —
an impossible aspiration — but to provide the fullest possible experience.
A survivor of sexual assault who cannot participate in a discussion about rape in my
classroom is not necessarily “avoiding challenging material” as a matter of general
principle. He or she may simply be unable to talk about sexual assault in that particular
room, on that particular day. His or her assailant may be in that room. When we worry
94 S. FENNER

that content warnings shut down discussion of challenging topics, we too often conceptua-
lize our classrooms as the only spaces on campus where learning takes place. A student
who is unable to talk about rape in one particular classroom may still be talking about rape
in other classes, with friends, a therapist, extracurricular organizations, and/or a support
group. Events like Take Back the Night, student open mics, presidential debates, muted
television screens, distracted Facebook scrolling, and even casual dining hall
conversations are opportunities for students to be exposed to both different perspectives
and graphic images. Moreover, at the risk of stating the obvious, a student with PTSD
by definition has already been exposed to a particular form of trauma. Content warnings
help such students get as close to valuable material as they can.

Conclusion: The work that content warnings cannot do

Throughout, I have argued that content warnings should be separated from broader
debates about inclusion, freedom of expression, and “safe spaces” on campus. Content
warnings are a necessary and important accommodation to a small minority of our
students, not a tool with which to redress larger issues related to systemic oppression
and the underrepresentation of minority and female voices in academia. Students, to whom
the relevant concepts are often new, may not automatically grasp this distinction. Indeed,
when content warnings become a flashpoint in the classroom, it is often because of
broader, campus-wide issues that have little to do with posttraumatic stress specifically.
Content warnings cannot make campus environments more tolerant, stop sexual assault
or add more diverse voices to syllabi. That is not to say, as the AAUP seems to, that all
attempts to redress sociopolitical issues in the classroom are necessarily misplaced14; only
that content warnings will not do the work that some of their most ardent supporters wish
to see. What they will do, however, is no less important: like text-to-speech software and
wheelchair ramps, content warnings — done right — allow a broader range of voices to
participate fully in class.

Notes
1. For an account of “mission creep,” see Volk (2015).
2. Several authors have noted the fact that content warnings are by definition used to signal that
one is about to talk about something. See Willis (2016).
3. Not all people who experience trauma will develop PTSD, and there are disabling trauma
responses that do not technically fit the DSM-V definition of the PTSD (see Nguyen 2011,
pp. 33–38).
4. DSM-5 criteria for PTSD are available publicly through the National Center for PTSD, a project
of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, at: http://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/PTSD-overview/
dsm5_criteria_ptsd.asp.
5. For an example of this argument in the media, see Richard J. McNally (2014).
6. As therapeutic practice, exposure therapy also has important contraindications, among them
suicidal or homicidal ideation (see van Minnen et al. 2012).
7. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) does not classify specific diseases as
“counting” as disabilities, but EEOC sources note that “[m]ental health conditions like major
depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and obsess-
ive compulsive disorder (OCD) should easily qualify” as disabilities under the Americans with
Disabilities Act and thus entail a legal right to accommodation (EEOC, no date, emphasis in
 JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE EDUCATION 95

original). The EEOC provides examples of such accommodations in the workplace, all of which
go well beyond the kind of advance notice supplied by content warnings: “altered break and
work schedules … quiet office space or devices that create a quiet work environment, changes
in supervisory methods (e.g., written instructions from a supervisor who usually does not
provide them), specific shift assignments, and permission to work at home” (EEOC, no date).
While many college students may not have completed the exhaustive process of formally
requesting disability accommodation under the ADA and not all countries have legislation
parallel to the ADA, the ethical obligation still applies.
8. I remain agnostic on the question of whether content warnings negatively affect the learning
experience of students who do not need them. There may be no inherent problem with
providing content warnings to all students through syllabi or by mentioning them in class.
However, in the current political environment, faculty have a strong incentive to avoid
unnecessary controversy.
9. According to the Department of Veterans’ Affairs Web site, approximately 6.8% of Americans
will suffer from PTSD during their lifetimes. While the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have
brought male veterans suffering from PTSD into the national spotlight, 10.4% of women will
have PTSD during their lifetimes, compared to just 5% of men (Gradus, 2012). Thus, providing
accommodations for PTSD is a question not only of disability rights but also of gender equity.
10. Again, it is important to keep in mind that not all trauma survivors suffer from PTSD.
11. While I focus on human-caused traumas here, students may also have PTSD responses because
of car accidents, fires, natural disasters, or other experiences without a direct human cause.
Thus, not all content warnings are necessarily connected to issues of sexism, racism, or injustice.
12. That acknowledgment is not, in itself, likely to provoke a trauma response. A student who
cannot hear or read even the word “torture” or “rape” without a flight-fright-freeze-fawn
response is a student in crisis who needs immediate mental health support. It is explicit
descriptions that usually set off trauma responses and, therefore, merit content warnings.
13. For examples of such debate, see Nesrine Malik (2015) and Lulu Chang (2014).
14. The statement argues that such measures are simply “displacing the problem, locating its
solution in the classroom rather than in administrative attention” (AAUP 2014, paragraph 10).

Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Alison Cook-Sather, Rachel Plattus, Emily Coyle, Eric Hundman,
and participants in the 2017 APSA Teaching and Learning Conference Inclusive Classroom track
for comments on earlier versions of this article.

Notes on contributor
Sofia Fenner is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Bryn Mawr College. Her research explores
the politics of opposition and co-optation in authoritarian regimes with a regional focus on the
Middle East and North Africa.

ORCID
Sofia Fenner http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4721-5490

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