Embodied Campus Geographies

Abstract

The heightened use of “safe space” in educational settings has been the subject of polarizing contemporary controversy and protested by conservative and progressive camps alike, raising concerns about whether “safe space” remains an educationally viable concept. In response to claims that safety is conflated with “coddling” students, censoring unpopular speech, or reinforcing privilege, this dissertation argues that safe spaces signify enduring pursuits of diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education that are too important to be abandoned. Instead, this interdisciplinary, mixed methods project considers how safe spaces can be rehabilitated to best serve subaltern undergraduate students. Informed by the experiences of six of my former students, I investigate how predominantly White institutions (PWI), like Boston College, can be rehabilitated as places where risky, transformative education is possible. By integrating situated educational philosophy and participatory design research (PDR) that features artistic and embodied methods of relationality (self-portraits, walks, and interactive workshops), I offer a spatial turn in the safe space debates that reveals the ideologically laden ‘normative geography’ of university campuses. Attuning to safe space controversies as spatial struggles uncovers who and what is positioned as “in place” or “out of place” on campus, as well as subaltern students’ transgressive acts of place-making—the quotidian tactics of making a hostile place more habitable for themselves. My dissertation therefore culminates by proposing a risky model of higher education, inspired by Judith Butler’s proposal of ethical formation, that insists on a collective responsibility for inclusive campus place-making. In this iterative framework, safety serves not as a barrier to risk, but as a crucial, co-constructed threshold condition that makes educative risk-taking possible for all students.