Creating Safer Spaces: The Disjuncture Between Feminist and Liberal

Individualist ApproachesMelanie Carroll

mcarroll@ucalgary.ca

Melanie Carroll

Safer Space Research

• VAW - safe space for women who are victims/survivors of violence

• LGBT safe space

• safety from anti-LGBT violence and harassment

• feel comfortable being out as LGBT

• promote acceptance/challenge homophobia

Melanie Carroll

Safer Space Research

• Analysis and critiques

• Intersectionality

• Identity politics limits who feels welcome in a space.

• How to correct this but still be identifiable as a space for marginalized people.

• Politics of declaration

• Safe space stickers, “Ally” as an identity

• Being of a marginalized identity exempts one from confronting their privilege.

Melanie Carroll

Safer Space Research• Safer space politics and practice must contend

with:

• problems/limitations of identity politics

• Who is the safer space for?

• balance between sometimes contradictory aims for comfort/safety and challenging beliefs/assumptions

• How does one articulate and practice safer space when the people within have different understandings and institutions have greater interest in some models over others?

Melanie Carroll

In what practical ways do these problems play out in safer spaces and in how safer spaces can work within larger institutions?

Melanie Carroll

A Campus Women’s Centre

• Researching the Women’s Resource Centre at a time when its safer space practices were under threat.

• Disjuncture between volunteer and staff understanding of their work in providing safer space, and the University administration’s understanding of the core aspects of the Centre’s work.

Melanie Carroll

• two key moments where disjuncture apparent

• safe space relegated to crisis peer support

• Respect Guidelines enacted to silence marginalized voices to avoid discomfort of other marginalized people.

Disjuncture

Melanie Carroll

Doing Safer Space - Campus Women’s Centre

• Everyday welcoming practices made explicit and procedural

• Training across identity/social justice issues

• Workshops/Awareness Raising

• affecting public/private discourses

• Managing Conflict - Respect Guidelines

• honouring each individual’s experience

• encouraging all genders to work towards gender equality

• peer model: each individual is an equal and all individuals responsible for atmosphere of space

Melanie Carroll

Misunderstanding Safe Space

• a space where all people are free from violence and discomfort/feeling unwelcome

• harm is something that happens outside of the space and support in the form of peer support “treats it”

Melanie Carroll

Liberal Approach

• individualizes problems both:

• in framing of how problems occur

• victims and “bad apples”

• in framing of how problems “are treated” • medicalizing and criminalizing • peer support risks falling into this

Melanie Carroll

Feminist Approach• structural problems as enacted by

institutions and individuals

• raise consciousness of structural problems

• challenge institutions and larger culture

• existing as an alternative space

• take personal responsibility, challenging ourselves, being challenged by others

• conflict management

Melanie Carroll

• Creating Safer Spaces

• structural --------------------- individual

• transformational ------------ comfortable

• inclusive --------------- exclusive (safety)

• Who is the space for? What are the aims? How might these create conflict? How will you manage conflict?

Melanie Carroll