Can curricular materials charged with violence in educational practices guarantee safety?

Sexual violence prevention curricula is difficult knowledge for many people. Politically expedient approaches to difficult knowledge about sexual violence have included educational practices that create conditions for ‘safe’ spaces, such as announcing content in advance, trigger warnings and other pedagogical practices that make care allowable and smooth out the sharp edges of violence that can knowingly invoke trauma. This paper is about the power of curricular materials charged with violence in educational practices that cannot guarantee safety. The starting point is that pedagogies of affectively charged encounters in education produce relations of danger and repair with important implications for victims’ and survivors’ knowledge, memory, and trauma.