Beyond Trigger Warnings

Abstract

This roundtable asks what queer studies might offer to an analysis of debates on campus safety. New approaches in queer studies take as their object of study not only sex and gender but also the cultural politics of liberalism; in turn, scholarship on the geopolitics of injury demonstrates the situatedness of both identity and economic forms. Brought together, these scholarly approaches provide an important lens on many of the contradictions of contemporary college campuses. Rendering classrooms and other places on campus as intrinsically embedded in global relations of militarization, securitization, dispossession, and risk management, “safe space” is elaborated in this roundtable in material, administrative, and pragmatic terms: from the conceptualization of alert systems to the racialized fears driving insurance calculations for international study programs to the struggles over academic freedom and student organizing.