Creating safer spaces in higher education: failure and discomfort in spacing for difference

Abstract

This article critically engages with the concept of safer spaces within higher education institutions, which serve as prime examples of young people's institutional spaces. We build the argument by using John Horton and Peter Kraftl's (2006) idea of space as a verb and discuss how failure may be a catalyst for spacing processes. While acknowledging and valuing recent steps towards the creation of institutionalized safer spaces, we question the sufficiency of representational measures and worry about tokenization in safer space guidelines. We argue that safer spaces must be built with an atmosphere of openness, which often exceeds the limits of representational disclosures. We, therefore, probe failure and discomfort as affectual states that may have the potential to create fractures in taken-for-granted ways of thinking/being. Mobilizing Ben Anderson's (2009) concept of affective atmosphere, we emphasize the importance of hesitation and experimentation in opening space for difference. In particular, we focus on the neurodiversity spectrum, understood as a non-fixed continuum (Yergeau, 2018) by exploring situations of vulnerability and discomfort, often linked to failure, through two vignettes: an experience of a neurodivergent academic in the university cafeteria and a classroom experiment of ‘thinking under the table’ with young students.