Category: events

On February 9, 2026, the Emily Carr University Research Ethics Board (ECU-REB) hosted ‘Trauma-Informed Research Ethics’, a conversation featuring Dr. Charlotte Schallié (University of Victoria) and moderated by Dr. Alla Gadassik (Chair of the REB). The event brought together ECU faculty, students, researchers, and research ethics administrators from other regional institutions to discuss ethics of arts-based research involving survivors of trauma, violence, and historical injustice.

The event focused on the Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives (SCVN) Project and its Trauma-Informed Research resources which help participants manage emotional risk using arts-based methods and where survivors are active participants in the decision-making of how their experiences are portrayed. The project builds trust through community liaisons, keeps participants involved throughout, and promotes shared authorship. SCVN’s graphic narrative approach lets participants turn testimony into transformation, strengthen their agency, and share sensory and nonverbal aspects of their experience, making the research process visible through reflection.

In this discussion, Dr. Charlotte Schallié underscored the importance of meaningful collaboration with survivors, requiring researchers to “move at the speed of trust.” 

Finally, the event discussed institutional challenges. Trauma-informed work needs time and flexibility, but productivity metrics and strict timelines often get in the way. It urged universities and funders to adjust expectations and build trust between researchers, teams, and ethics officers. It also framed trauma-informed ethics as both a practice and a critique of extractive academic systems.

The following summary of the event was prepared by Dr. Alla Gadassik and illustrated by Hannah Strocel.

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Key Insights

• Trauma-informed research ethics are a relational practice that cannot neatly map onto conventional procedures and repeatable protocols.  
• Ethical research prioritizes shared authority with participants, community liaisons, and team members.
• Emotional risk cannot be eliminated; care involves supporting participants through complexity and shared commitment to the value of the project.
• Consent is an ongoing practice, not a single document.
• Arts-based methods can open ethical possibilities of working with survivors than those afforded by conventional research formats.
• Institutions must evolve if they wish to support genuine community-engaged and research.

Practicing Shared Authority

Trauma-informed research ethics respond to the imperative of “suspending damage,” as articulated by Indigenous scholar Eve Tuck. Humanitarian-driven research often focuses on documenting suffering in ways that – intentionally or not – reduce communities to trauma. In contrast, a “desire-based framework” seeks to recognize resilience, complexity, agency, and lived futures beyond harm. Arts-based methods can enable researchers to take a nuanced approach, in which damage and desire can co-exist as simultaneous and even irreconcilable facets of human experience. Projects like SCVN turn to creative methods like graphic storytelling to enable survivor participants to actively shape how their experiences will be shared and understood. This has implications for how research protocols are designed and implemented. Treating research participants not as subjects (informants/sources) but as collaborators is an important value in trauma-informed research ethics. 

In the Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives Project, survivors work alongside artists, researchers, and community partners throughout the entire creative process, practicing shared authority in the research. Examples of practices include: 

• participants maintain decision-making power throughout the entire process, reviewing and approving successive stages of writing and illustration.
• community liaisons play an important role in building trust, advocating for participants, and translating ideas or concerns throughout the research process.
• Research outcomes and creative outcomes have shared authorship wherever possible.

As Dr. Charlotte Schallié notes, meaningful collaboration requires researchers to “move at the speed of trust.” Shared authority requires rethinking principles of informed consent to enable ongoing consultation. Specific issues to consider include:

• conventional consent language can be confusing and alarming; for participants who have experienced institutional and state violence, lengthy boilerplate forms and clinical language can be ineffective or even counterproductive at upholding the principle of informed consent.
• the trajectory of how a project unfolds cannot be fully predetermined, since participants play a role in shaping the outcomes.
• protocols should view consent as gradual and open to change, rather than standard binary of acceptance or withdrawal.
• alternative consent processes or agreements should be considered and implemented with adequate documentation. 

Survivor-centred research challenges assumptions that trauma-informed protocols can fully anticipate and prevent emotional distress. Painful emotions will inevitably come up for participants, and the research process should make room for them. Care means supporting participants through difficult storytelling, not shielding them from engagement. Community liaisons play an important role in supporting participants through the project. Researchers should not make assumptions about what participants need, and participants should retain agency over when to pause or continue. Researchers should also recognize their responsibility to participants beyond the conclusion of a project, avoiding extractive relationships that abandon participants after a project’s outcomes are reached. Consent is not a one-time form but an ongoing conversation that evolves across the life of a project. 

An ethical framework should apply not only to survivors of trauma, but also project collaborators, such as artists, student research assistants, family members and research staff. Issues to consider may include:

• Providing training and support to artists and staff members brought into projects.
• Preparing student research assistants for the emotionally challenging nature of the research and allowing them to withdraw or be reassigned to other tasks without perceived penalty.
• Recognizing that projects can attract or recruit team members with direct personal or familial connection to the themes of the research; the expectations for their contributions should stay focused on the research and have clear boundaries and supports.

Benefits of the Graphic Narrative Approach

Survivors, who come forward to participate in public testimony events are often motivated by a desire to channel their experiences toward cultural and social transformation. Arts-based research methods that engage participants in graphic storytelling may:

• benefit participants by activating their sense of agency and authorship over their story, allowing for multilayered and complex experiences that are more difficult to achieve with oral and written testimony.
• slow down the research process, as participants and artists work together to arrive at representational images; the illustration process demands considered decisions about what would be included and what would be omitted. 
• represent memory and experience beyond language, allowing for sensory elements and gaps as they exist for the participant. 
• reveal the representational nature of the storytelling process and include the research method through self-reflective strategies.

Institutional Challenges

The tension between trauma-informed research and academic structures is a recurring topic for researchers working with survivors:

• ethical relational work requires time and flexibility
• institutional timelines and productivity metrics often conflict with care-based research
• meaningful change may require universities and funding bodies to rethink expectations
• research grounded in participant and community collaboration needs ways to establish trust between REB officers, researchers, and their teams, as conventional protocols and clinical conditions can run counter to the substance and benefits of this research.

In this sense, trauma-informed ethics becomes not only a research method but also a critique of extractive academic systems.

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Contributors

Dr. Alla Gadassik is an animation scholar and curator whose work focuses on media materiality, creative labour, and animation exhibition practices. She is Associate Professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where she founded and leads the Animate Materials Workshop, a research initiative examining the arts and science of animate materials. Gadassik has curated film programmes and exhibitions internationally, including Interlaced: Animation & Textiles (Len Lye Centre, 2024–25). She is the current Chair of Emily Carr University’s Research Ethics Board (2022- 2026). In this role, she has organized and chaired educational events Ethics of Storytelling as Research (2024) and Creative Method and Ethics of Accessibility in Research Design and Creative Practice (2025).

Hannah Stocel is an Emily Carr illustration student and an emerging Métis illustrator and storyteller born and raised around Vancouver, BC.

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