In September 2022, Rackham student Aya Waller-Bey, a doctoral candidate in the U-M Department of Sociology, discussed trauma narratives at the TEDxDetroit conference. Titled “Is My Pain Your Gain?”, Waller-Bey’s talk leaned heavily on her experience sharing her own trauma narrative as part of a college admissions essay, serving as a case study around which she addressed the reasons stories of trauma and hardship are glorified.
Waller-Bey’s scholarship on trauma narratives has been widely recognized, including with a 2020 Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship awarded by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine and a 2021 National Center for Institutional Diversity Anti-Racism Summer Research Grant.
Watch the presentation on YouTube.