From Infantilizing to World Making: Safe Spaces and Trigger Warnings on Campus

Abstract

Student requests for trigger warnings and safe spaces have emerged following widespread concern over the mishandling of cases of sexual violence on college campuses. Recent media attention to such interventions has been critical, framing them as coddling students and failing to prepare them for the real world. These criticisms conflate the desire for safety with the feeling of comfort or freedom from offense or challenge. Student requests for trigger warnings and safe spaces bring trauma into the public sphere and create spaces in academic settings for students to exist without expectations that they are fully healed. This article examines student requests for safe spaces or trigger warnings in the United States in discussions about trauma and healing in academia and shifts the dialogue to provide a queer feminist theoretical framework for understanding these requests as world‐making projects that provide an account of public trauma and a sense of collective vulnerability.

Engaging F‐words to create change: Rape, representation, and performance

“…Following the ideas of Katie Byron (2017) when she was an undergraduate at Brown, we try to operate with the idea that there are students in our class who have been victimized by sexualized violence, and to consider them the norm, as opposed to the exception. This way, we attempt always to: Provide physical and intellectual space to people commonly perceived as other than the assumed norm of nontraumatized students. Shift the burden of absorbing violence and being preoccupied with it from those victimized to the collective, with an insistence that the collective can no longer “remain indifferent to the legacies of violence that are playing out all around them” (Byron 2017, 120). Bring trauma and vulnerability out of the private spaces to which they have been relegated and into the public sphere of the university, because whether we see them or not, they are variables in our world‐making exercises …”

“…Shift the burden of absorbing violence and being preoccupied with it from those victimized to the collective, with an insistence that the collective can no longer “remain indifferent to the legacies of violence that are playing out all around them” (Byron 2017, 120).…”

“…As Byron (2017, 122) states,

Under neoliberalism, vulnerability is a failure to demonstrate personal responsibility, which also highlights a way in which systems fail people. Publicizing trauma turns victimization into a social phenomenon rather than a private struggle.

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Life has no #TriggerWarnings: reflections on triggering in contexts of violence

“…Those advocating for the use of trigger warnings online and in classroom settings typically identify as feminist; calling for their use more especially for the protection of womxn who have experienced sexual violence (Carter, 2015). Byron (2017) points out that sexual violence is considered to be the most common and most triggering cause of trauma amongst students. My own observations of trigger warnings on social media give me reason to believe the same to be true in the South African context, as the vast majority of posts containing trigger notes, or the hashtags #TriggerWarning, #Trigger and #TriggerAlert, are related to issues of sexual violence.…”

The Green Zone Initiative: Combining Virtual and Face-to-Face Training to Support Veterans in Higher Education

“…According to critics of these spaces, they allow students to avoid exposure to information with which they disagree. This shallow interpretation of the concept of "safe spaces" provides students a way to claim discomfort as trauma, and claim trauma as an excuse to avoid critical thinking (Byron, 2017). This notion of intellectual safety is neither beneficial to the academy, nor to the students who are its patrons.…”