This dialogue between a first-year composition (FYC) instructor and administrator proposes listening-oriented curricula to cultivate actionable empathy in FYC: an attempt at understanding and acceptance when engaging across difference that results in naming how power shapes engagement. Actionable empathy can help students become introspective, flexible communicators and help instructors develop pedagogical agency.

Drawing on the 2017 Las Vegas Shooting as a potent example of trauma, this article investigates how classifying post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) (APA, 2013) shapes cultural understandings of traumatization and survival in an era of gun violence. “PTSD” reproduces colonizing arrangements of power, as elucidated by an activ¬ity theory analysis of the DSM-5, the global authority on psychiatric diagnoses, alongside both diagnostic protocols for PTSD and PTSD discourse in news cov¬erage of the Las Vegas Shooting. This rhetorical approach to the DSM-5 as a complex system of activity exposes conflicting effects: classifying post-traumatic stress as “mental disorder” qualifies traumatized survivors for medical treatment, while also pathologizing the debilitating, long-term trauma that mass shootings can cause. This potential conflict between alleviating and pathologizing suffering shores up an individual or biomedical model of health, in contrast to a public health model oriented around the health of populations, that may shame survivors and commodify their pain.