Safety, Risk, and Place Making: Rehabilitating “Safe Space” as a Threshold Condition for Transformative Higher Education (Poster 3)

• In Event: AERA Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

"Safe space" is a contemporary educational controversy, characterized by exceedingly polarizing stances for or against the term. However, “safe space” is more than just a provocative hot-button issue. Instead, this dissertation contextualizes demands for safe space as part of the broader, enduring movement toward diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education, which must remain an educational priority. This hybridized inquiry brings together traditions of situated educational philosophy and participatory design research to rehabilitate how educational stakeholders should operationalize safe space, attuning to the interplay between safety, risk, and place-making as essential resources. In partnership with six undergraduate students whose marginality spans race, socioeconomic class, gender, and sexuality, I advance the argument that the current conceptualization and application of safe space stops short of subaltern student flourishing and ignores the role of spatiality. On the side of safety, I propose a conceptualization of safety, not as antithetical to risk, but as a threshold condition of risk-taking vis-à-vis transformative liberal education. On the side of spatiality, I draw upon critical geography, phenomenology of space and place, and rich place-based testimonies to propose a thick definition of place that provides a more holistic approach toward supporting subaltern students in hostile campus environments and recognizing the place-making practices that those students already enact. It is the hope that as a result, students, educators, and administrators will be able to apply these thick guidelines about place-making toward safety in their efforts to redesign campus places to be conducive to subaltern students’ transformative liberal learning.

Author

• Samantha Ha DiMuzio, Boston College