"The search for comfort or challenge?": An auto-ethnographic interrogation of desires for a safe space in higher education

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Monday II)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Examining decolonization, spatialities of race, and safe space

Proposal

It seems to be crucial to create and maintain a safe space for students’ “education for sustainability and development” regardless of their ages, gender/sexuality, race/ethnicity, dis/ability, and/or religion. However, the notions of “safety” and the possibility of a safe space have long been the main concern in feminist and queer scholarship (Helen, 2013; Quinan, 2016). Along with the question of what counts as “safe,” dichotomous lines of discussions centering around a safe space as “attainable” (Mayo, 2010; Conteh & Brock, 2011; Callan, 2016) or “ideal” spaces (Berlant, 2008; Macdonald, 2014; Sadowski, 2017) also resonated with us, as women of Color who have sought out a safe space in the context of higher education, which has led to collaboration. Built upon our respective lived experiences as a visiting scholar and an international doctoral student in a prestigious graduate school in the U.S. this work of two auto-ethnographic narratives stems from our (self-)contradictory questions. In the position of an instructor, whose past work experience also included college-level teaching in Korea, I wondered if it is feasible to claim my desire for “safety” in teaching within multi-linguistic/racial/cultural classrooms without “minoritizing” my privileges, and, if so, how. As a second year doctoral student with eight years of experience teaching in the elementary schools in Korea, my coworker also questioned herself as to how and why she perceived the U.S. classroom—seemingly filled with others’ care, consideration, or tolerance for her, despite any mistakes she could make, (as an international student here in the U.S.) as being an “unsafe” space where her desires for academic challenges are hardly met.

Drawing on poststructuralist theories, and particularly the Deleuzian concept of desire (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987), and utilizing auto-ethnographic methods, this collaborative work has two major goals, organized into two parts. First, in focusing on two women’s narratives of transnational experiences of teaching and learning, this collaboration aims to rethink the notions and practices of “safety” through interrogating desires for safe learning and teaching in the context of higher education. Liberated from a lack of individual and/or sexualized desires based on the Lacanian or Freudian concept (Parr, 2005), the productive and relational natures of desires in a Deleuzio-Guattarian sense are apt for illuminating the complexity of how desires for safety are not generated from a lack of emotional and physical comfort, but work as forces to encourage critical reflexivity. Second, through an attempt to connect private narratives from two “I”s (Ettorre, 2017) in different academic stages and teaching backgrounds, this auto-ethnographic project will highlight how a posthumanist concept of desires straddles anthropocentric notions and processes of reflexivity as an integral part in desires for safety. Through this “experiment” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) of investigating “safe spaces” in terms of desires, our collaboration can provide implications for teachable and learnable spaces and moments in classrooms while pushing the boundaries of discussion regarding safety.

Authors

• EunKyoung CHUNG, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Yeonghwi Ryu, Teachers College, Columbia University