KNOTS: A Land-based Pedagogy on Pain, Trauma, Healing, and Research

Abstract

Grounded in a land-based and healing-centered approach to scholarship, this creative article showcases how a state violence scholar and survivor grapples with the pain and secondary trauma that occurs when conducting interviews with people who have also been directly impacted by state violence. Namely, the author offers radically vulnerable reflections on her process of witnessing and writing about the violence that is enacted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

This essay is bilingual, multi-media, and combines poetry, (meta)physics, ancestral wisdom, and autoethnography to contextualize pain, trauma, and the healing process from state violence and experiences of collective wounding.

CHICANA/LATINA STUDIES 21:2 SPRING 2022