Month: May 2025

It has become increasingly clear to me this year that the tensions of our contemporary political climate are entering into the classroom. Teaching in an arts institution has previously allowed conversation in my taught seminars and classrooms to unfold without much controversy, sometimes seemingly like an echo chamber of liberal leftist ideas, in this year I have witnessed more conflict – varied opinions that brought more heated debate, and worst into the classroom. Yet, the solution is not to quash these conversations from occurring as they exist in the world, but it would be useful to develop strategies for brave spaces, where we could hold oppositional views in a co-existing space, to unpack and develop our understanding of these viewpoints with empathy. This intervention begins with a workshop about facilitating brave spaces for teaching staff. 

‘Safe spaces’ have been co-opted by dominance and privilege, to in many ways, deny accountability for social justice or quiet discomforting conversations and feelings. Arao and Clemens describe how White privilege can use the framing of safety to mitigate how issues of race and racism should be talked about. ‘People of color are then expected to constrain their participation and interactions to conform to White expectations of safety – itself an act of racism and White resistance and denial’ (Wise, 2004 in Arao and Clemens, 2013, p. 140). It is necessary to recognise that conversations about privilege and accountability may cause discomfort, thus ‘brave spaces’ have defined a newer framework of social justice in learning that may cause discomfort. My intervention includes introducing a workshop for facilitators to explore how to implement these practices in classroom, particularly strategies of how to mitigate and moderate difficult conversations. 

Works Cited

Arao, B. and Clemens, K. (2013) ‘From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces: A New Way to Frame Dialogue Around Diversity and Social Justice’ in From The Art of Effective Facilitation. Ed. by Lisa M. Landreman. Abingdon: Routledge. pp. 135-150.

Additional Sources

Center for Research on Learning & Teaching, University of Michigan. Hot Moments. https://crlt.umich.edu/taxonomy/term/113 (Accessed on: 27 May 2025)

Palfrey, J. (2017) Safe Saces, Brave Spaces: Diversity and Free Expression in Education. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: MIT Press.

In our previous module, our class read The Charismatic Lecturer in session, which was about two lecturers, Stephanie and Max. The latter was framed as a ‘charismatic lecturer’, versus the description of Stephanie which referenced her engagement with the Church of England (or something similar) (Macfarlane 2004). An interesting discussion unfolded about our own implicit biases, but there seemed to be a class preference for Max. One colleague described Stephanie’s penchant for religion as undermining her credentials. Of course, this thinking is supposed to be unacceptable under the Equity Act, but yet Higher Education (HE) and its foundational principles of rationality are underpinned by secularism. This concept is complicated. In decolonial and critical race theory, secularism and rationality was not devoid of religion, but rather, its introduction through modernity and the Enlightenment was shaped by Christianity. Appiah makes mention of this, citing Columbus and how the history of Christianity is the history of people killing each other (Appiah 2014). Perhaps less explicit in that video was that Christianity served as a justifying moral principle to propel colonialism, and moreover, that our concept of Man and humanity overrepresents an Anglo-European version of personhood that was built from displacing a relation between God and Man onto Self and (Racialised) Other (see Wynter 2003). Equality and human rights, in my cynical purview, were always precarious principles, although I am terrified to see how fragile they actually were/are. 

I was frustrated to watch the video from Trinity University where the interview subject described how he had to laugh and display images of his daughter to prove that he was normal. I noticed that the YouTube video did not even include a name for the interviewee (Trinty University 2016). I’m so sick of not being enraged, of controlling my behaviour, because dehumanising people is a violent act, so why wouldn’t it be met with reactions that identified and mirrored that? `             

Back to the introductory point: secularism is what underpins the university, and this was evidenced in Rekis’s research about epistemic injustice/exclusion. It was an illuminating essay that made me think deeply about my own assumptions of religious testimony in the classroom, and made me recall a seminar experience where two students began to debate issues around gender, sex, and sexuality through religion: specifically, Christianity and Islam. I tried to steer the conversation away from religion, as I reminded the students this was not a theology class, but Rekis maps out how religious experience has been excluded in the academy as a form of epistemic injustice, so now I’m wondering whether religious approaches should be legitimised in Cultural Studies as decoloniality also acknowledges other worldviews. No clear answers on my end, just more questions though (Rekis 2023).

Works Cited

Appiah, K.A. (2014) ‘Is religion good or bad? (This is a trick question). YouTube [Online] 16 June 2014. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2et2KO8gcY. [Accessed 12 May 2025]

Macfarlane, B. (2004) Teaching with Integrity: The Ethics of Higher Education Practice. New York: Routledge Falmer.

Rekis, J. (2023) ‘Religious Identity and Epistemic Injustice: An Intersectional Account’, Hypatia 38: pp. 779-800.

Trinty University (2016) ‘Challenging Race, Religion, and Stereotypes in the Classroom’, YouTube [Online]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CAOKTo_DOk [Accessed on 12 May 2025]

Wynter, S. (2003) ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument’, CR: The New Centennial Review 3, 3: pp. 257-337.