The personal, the political, and the academic in applied linguistics: a feminist autoethnography of doing trauma research as a survivor

Applied linguistics has increasingly turned toward trauma, yet traumatized individuals typically enter research as those to be known rather than those who know. What if the researcher studying trauma is herself a survivor? In this feminist autoethnography, I examine how my lived experience of gender-based violence propelled me toward research on language and violence and shaped the questions I asked, the meanings I perceived, and the knowledge I produced. As I trace how silence, dissociation, helplessness, and anger became entangled with my research trajectory, I show how they became epistemically productive rather than disruptive: my affective proximity to violence and trauma sensitized me to forms of agency under constraint, the linguistic construction of harm and resistance, and the embodied force of language in ways that might otherwise remain less perceptible. Research, in turn, became a site of meaning-making, agency, and healing. Bringing feminist epistemologies into current applied linguistic discussions of autoethnography, epistemic injustice, and decolonial knowledge production, I argue for feminist autoethnography as an embodied and affective mode of inquiry through which survivor-researchers can become not merely objects of knowledge but legitimate producers of knowledge.