To study emotions like fear and feeling safe requires that we attend to processes of movement and attachment of the objects of fearfulness and security, but also to attend to the “past histories of association” that caused these affects to be attached to particular objects. (Stengel, current issue)
Abstract
In this article, I discuss how the space of the classroom is a contested object that is constituted by historical, cultural, political, social, psychological, and discursive practices (Lefebvre in The production of space, Blackwell, Oxford, UK, 1991). I then employ Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “assemblage” to characterize the ways in which educational spaces cohere “content and affect” quoted in Puar (Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times, Duke University Press, Durham, 2007, 193) into discursive figures of the heteronormative and racialized national “family.” Finally, I argue that in order to advance contemporary theorizing on safe space we might consider shifting the metaphor of the classroom (and/or schooling) as a situation of home (in loco parentis) to that of a metaphor of camp. As a discursive practice, “camp” is like “home” in that it has multiple associations of past histories. However, the advantage of the metaphor of classroom as camp allows for a more capacious range of past histories of association, from recreation to temporary inhabitation to forced relocation, thus foregrounding the innate political implications of theorizing space. Moreover, the metaphor of camp implies transience (whether real or imaginary) while keeping in mind the partial and situated nature of particular places and spaces. Foregrounding the transient component/feature of safe space allows us to make visible and explore the possibilities and limitations of conceptualizing relations of power as circuitous, contested and performative through competing claims to particular places as objects of safety.
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Notes
As I will explain in more depth in the following section, I make the distinction between place and space. In its most basic form, the term place typically designates a particular geographic or material location, whereas the term space typically connotes an abstract concept or phenomena. Central to my argument is a desire to playfully problematize the distinctions, tensions and slippages between the terms place and space in the educational theory.
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Weems, L. From “Home” to “Camp”: Theorizing the Space of Safety. Stud Philos Educ 29, 557–568 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-010-9199-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-010-9199-2