Holding It, Together: Beyond Bearing Witness and Burning Out

ABSTRACT Concepts like vicarious trauma, burnout, compassion fatigue, and moral injury do important work in making suffering legible and enabling claims to recognition, acknowledgement, and care. Nonetheless, these conceptualizations have little to say about the nature of the suffering, the varied and ambiguous ways it is experienced, or the social, affective, political conditions that give rise to it. In this article I argue for taking up response‐ability as a lens for examining, understanding, and addressing the particular kinds of suffering experienced when registering and resisting violence, particularly in the face of complicity. Drawing on ethnographic work with activist volunteers in refugee camps, I explore what response‐ability, with its relational ontology, allows us to see, feel, understand about suffering that is otherwise out of view, obscured, or rendered unsayable, or even unfeelable. I discuss the ways in which response‐ability assumes complicity and requires grief/mourning and explore how these characteristics alter the possibilities and obligations for collective care and containment when intervening in crises and conflicts.