Bradford Scholars -how to deposit your paper Overview Copyright check• Check if your publisher allows submission to a repository.• Use the Sherpa RoMEO database if you are not sure about your publisher's position or email openaccess@bradford.ac.uk.

The psychological cost of exposure to traumatic events is receiving greater recognition in recent years, especially in terms of its impact in helping professions and emergency services. However, the costs to researchers remain relatively unexplored. In this article, we will discuss the nature and impact of vicarious trauma using two criminological research projects as case studies: one a qualitative project engaging with survivors of childhood sexual abuse, and the other, a quantitative analysis of police hate crime reports. In addition to considering the trauma elicited in fieldwork such as interviews, we interrogate the costs imposed on researchers during the coding and analysing processes. We suggest that the cost is potentially greater when the researcher has a personal connection with the issues being researched, but that this personal experience also provides the researcher with important skills for responding to new or compounded trauma. The costs of engagement with trauma may be compensated by the productive outputs and impact on policy and practice that this type of research may elicit. Understanding the impact and costs of engaging with close analyses of trauma is critical in developing more robust and ethical research processes to ensure that this trauma is appropriately managed so as to avert the long-term damage this work can inflict on researchers and participants.

No abstract

It is well established that violence and oppression towards vulnerable and marginalised communities are intensified and compounded during times of social upheaval, and the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated disablist and ableist violence against disabled people. During the first year of the pandemic, we have been confronted with instances of violence meted out to disabled subjects. In this article, we provide a theorisation of such violence. Based on an assemblage of our collective readings of Butler, Campbell and Young, as well as our own observations and experiences, we suggest that added anxieties currently confronting people’s fragile corporeal embodiment are licensing abled subjects to violate disabled subjects to put them back in their place. Through an excavation of ‘Norms, Binaries, and Anxieties’, ‘Abjection, Substitutability, and Disavowal’, and ‘Ableism and (Un)grievability’, we trace the social contours of disablist and ableist violence, both within and beyond the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, and provide a way of imagining otherwise to resist this violence.