By Christina B. Hanhardt and Jasbir K. Puar, with Neel Ahuja, Paul Amar, Aniruddha Dutta, Fatima El-Tayeb, Kwame Holmes, and Sherene Seikaly.
Some interesting snippets from a roundtable published in Social Text (2020) 38 (4 (145)): 49–76. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-8680438.
Neel Ahuja:
[...] Because “antiradicalization” programs like CVE are promoted by liberals as an alternative to traditional warfare, their racialized and militarized forms of surveillance and their extraction of the unpaid labor of students are usually ignored by journalists. The overlap between Obama CVE programs, university communication and public health department, and antibullying discourse is particularly salient. CVE programs targeting Muslim youth work on the assumption that the racism and resulting bullying, alienation, and susceptibility to radicalization they purportedly experience is inevitable and individual (rather than produced by geopolitical conditions). Producing digital space as safe space guarded by morally virtuous undergraduate mentors, supervised by liberal faculty, is the proposed solution [...]
Kwame Holmes:
[...] After decades of reactionary, often evangelical attacks on feminist interventions against rape culture, research universities were, by the mid-1990s, the last large institutions to employ and support feminist activisms. Higher ed cities like Columbus, San Francisco, and Austin were also home to more radical feminist formations like the Lesbian Avengers and Cunt Revolt, groups that often collaborated with undergraduates in women and gender studies. On and campus-adjacent feminisms combined calls for women’s physical safety with the need for cultural transformation through shared public emotional processing, informed by a range of psychotherapeutic techniques. These included confrontational street activism, reading groups, poetry slams, healing circles, and more. For campus feminism, affect was not a by-product of activism but a primary subject of intervention. Automatic alerts undercut feminist authority by simplifying the terms of safety, leaving us safe from the more complicated discomfort we experience when asked to interrogate our personal relationship to rape culture. [...] To confront rape culture, to teach affirmative consent, or even to raise the possibility that course content may retraumatize students is to ask campus communities to sit in emotional ambiguities that feel nothing like the “safety” provided by alert systems. [...]
Fatima El-Tayeb:
[...] A number of them [activists] are current or former UCSD students, working until exhaustion, while also fluent in the language of self-care and trigger warnings. In my experience, the latter are often a shorthand for students’ attempts to make sense of their shifting position in the world; that is, this is not necessarily about specific issues or images they are exposed to but about larger fears and stresses. Calls for trigger warn - ings, safe spaces, and especially self-care tend to activate my Grumpy Old Man Fatima persona, but I acknowledge that I come from a not very productive “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” background, which is enhanced by being an immigrant into a culture that performs emotion in ways that are still sometimes baffling to me (and I do worry about the many immigrant students from similar cultural backgrounds who might not be helped but, rather, further alienated by this shift in campus culture). In classes, I try to work with community agreements instead, which means we proactively and collectively take ownership of the class room experience, focusing less on avoiding triggers than on strategies to deal with the anger, trauma, and sadness that invariably surface when addressing the experiences of communities of color under racial capitalism [...]
Sherene Seikaly:
[...] To me, coming back to teach in the United States after a decade in Europe and later at the American University of Cairo, trigger warnings looked like another weapon to contain and police. On the first day of my modern Middle East history class, I gave a blanket trigger warning: everything in this course will trigger you. There will be blood. You have to deal. The regime of trigger warnings had placed a barrier between me and my students. It did not take long to wake up. I quickly learned to appreciate and be empathetic to my students, who in the public system often navigate two, sometimes three jobs and face a future of debt, uncertainty, and insecurity. It took me a while, but I came to learn that the language of trigger warnings, as Fatima suggests above, was “often a shorthand for students’ attempts to make sense of their shifting position in the world.” Dismantling the trigger warning as a barrier required two steps. The first was to invite students to search for commonalities in addition to differ ences among the Iraqis, Egyptians, Palestinians, Turks, Kurds, Algerians, Iranians, Israelis, and others they were learning about. The second was to explain that we were not just learning about these other people; we were also learning about ourselves. The tactics and strategies of historical actors are an abundant resource for confronting our realities. Students in the United States today are subject to the ravages of neoliberalism; they understand what it might mean for people in other places. Many students are increas - ingly denied the promises of security and safety. They live the reality that things can always get worse; we do not have to teach them this lesson. The task at hand is to dismantle and repurpose trigger warnings in a way that models radical empathy and provides students with tools to enact it. [...]
Aniruddha Dutta:
[...] I pointed out routine cases of workplace exploitation within nonprofits where trans feminine kothi-hijra staff from working-class and Dalit (oppressed caste) backgrounds cannot even raise allegations without risking their livelihood — thus the exceptionalist attention to sexual assault would result in a safe space only for select middle-class activists who could afford to raise such allegations. Another participant proposed that the collective should be conceptualized as an enabling space rather than a safe space, where complainants would be enabled to share their stories and seek legal help, but the collective would not pronounce judgments or take punitive action. In this context, the imperative of preventing miscarriage of collective justice takes precedence over “safe space,” which emerges as less of a valued ideal relative to many similar spaces within the United States [...]
Aniruddha Dutta:
[...] Safety and safe space thus gather contrasting valences —an aspira - tional tool for equalizing higher education, a neoliberal ruse that tokenizes diversity, a feared capitulation to hegemonic morality — rather than functioning as a coherent logic or discourse, neoliberal or otherwise [...]
Paul Amar:
[...] UCSB is the home of the UC Education Abroad Program; my global studies department has the highest proportion of students in international study opportunities in the entire UC system. Despite their high profile, these programs have been choked by securitization. For example, students were ordered to leave Egypt during the Arab Spring. Subsequently, insurance companies and politicalrisk consultants have refused to authorize the reopening of study abroad in the country. This has had real economic effects on youth in the Middle East, since it led to the near bankruptcy of our partner school, the American University in Cairo. AUC is one of the most important educational institutions in the Middle East, which depends on international student tuition to be able to offer scholarships for less privileged Arab students. And this process has been repeated in a number of sites. The security or risk rating for a site seems to be shaped by generalized notions of cultural otherness, by Eurocentrism, and by political risk experts rather than by dialogue with knowledgeable educators on the ground, much less with youth and student movements in those world regions targeted as at risk. Programs in Paris, Rome, or London are never closed, although students frequently become injured or even arrested during study abroad in Europe. [...]
Kwame Holmes:
[...] Perhaps the most devastating moment in the experiential and narrative arc of the campus safety response is when, inevitably, the dean or university president announces that the event is over. Often this arrives as a notification indicating that “all is clear.” But is it? There are unreported micro- and macroaggressions on a daily basis. It is impossible for them to know that “all is clear” on their campus. Yet provided campus alert systems allow administrators to create a virtual record of safety, they can avoid accountability for their institutions inability to provide comprehensive safety all members of the campus community [...]
Sherene Seikaly:
[...] Several strategies can facilitate collaborative intentions and outcomes. First, it is crucial to delink safety from discomfort, to embrace risk and diffi - culty as rich opportunities for learning, and to aim for fostering brave rather than safe spaces. Here, too, I am following the leads of Aniruddha, who discusses above enabling as opposed to safe spaces, and Kwame, who sug - gests above that confronting the challenges of our times requires “campus communities to sit in emotional ambiguities.” [...]
Sherene Seikaly:
[...] A third strategy is to insist on antiracism as a shared goal. This insistence infuses the room with a mutual accountability to name, own, and tackle Orientalism, Islamophobia, antiblackness, and antisemitism. Students and scholars of Palestine who are invested in the Palestinian demand for freedom can shy away from engaging antisemitism because of how it has been weaponized to silence critique. This is not a viable strategy, neither pedagogically nor politically. The history and present of antisemitism are crucial to understanding the history of Palestine. Antisemitism is inextricable from historical and contemporary iterations and experiences of race. [...]
Fatima El-Tayeb:
[On 2010 Black Student Union’s declaration of a state of emergency at UCSD.] [...] pressure came not only from the administration but also from nominally radical male faculty taking on leadership roles. Unsurprisingly, this led to the increasing marginalization of female and queer activists who had done much of the exhausting and unglamorous work that had made the movement possible. The end result of this pragmatism was a superficial diversity that could be used by the administration, while hiring and retention of faculty of color, especially Black and Native, remains abysmal and there are consistently low numbers of Black and Native students and a growing hostility toward identity politics and political correctness (also known as anything that would empower people of color). In retrospect, I am still deeply impressed with the students’ commitment, political insights, and strategic smarts and utterly disheartened not so much by the administration’s reaction, which was as expected, but by the failure of progressive faculty of color to support the students’ radical vision, instead using their supposed expertise and power to force them back into a system beyond whose limits most of us seem incapable of seeing, even while it is imploding. If nothing else, this serves as a reminder that the current, seemingly individualized understanding of safe spaces is in part a reaction to a failure of imagination not of a new generation of apolitical students but of our generation of faculty.
Aniruddha Dutta:
The lure of diversity and safety discourse as a bait for free speech trolling, on one hand, and as a mechanism for articulating white/conservative victimhood, on the other, might serve to undo the dichotomy of liberal freedoms versus political correctness that the right-wing machinery relies on. The very slipperiness of safety/diversity politics that permits its uptake by the Right might also frustrate conservative deployments of these terms. Such ambivalence demonstrates the lack of any singular socioeconomic logic behind safety/ diversity discourse seen in my previous response, and its inability to guar - antee a liberatory or reactionary politics by itself.
Kwame Holmes:
Indeed, we too easily forget that the political movements that pro - duced Black studies, women and gender studies, and various iterations of queer inquiry were themselves in a generative (though often uneasy) relationship with psychoanalytic therapeutic methods. Well, to be fair, the we I am referring to here are my fellow historians. Yet as history expands its purview from telling the stories of queer subjects to incorporating queer theory as method, modern Americanists will need to return to the emotive origins of the social movements we study. What happens to our studies of Black Power, when we take seriously Fanon’s career as a practicing analyst? How can we better narrate the conflict between white and Black feminisms if we don’t take seriously Hortense Spillers’s discussions of the impossible subject position of Black women in the West? Can we make sense of the origins of modern homonormativity without always keeping in mind gay liberation’s preoccupation with shame? I guess I’m saying, no, we can’t.
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