From Infantilizing to World Making: Safe Spaces and Trigger Warnings on Campus

• Author: Katie Byron
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/fare.12233
• Published date: 01 February 2017
• Date: 01 February 2017

K B Brown University

From Infantilizing to World Making: Safe Spaces

and Trigger Warnings on Campus

Student requests for trigger warnings and safe

spaces have emerged following widespread con-

cern over the mishandling of cases of sexual

violence on college campuses. Recent media

attention to such interventions has been criti-

cal, framing them as coddling students and fail-

ing to prepare them for the real world. These

criticisms conate the desire for safety with the

feeling of comfort or freedom from offense or

challenge. Student requests for trigger warnings

and safe spaces bring trauma into the public

sphere and create spaces in academic settings

for students to exist without expectations that

they are fully healed. This article examines stu-

dent requests for safe spaces or trigger warn-

ings in the United States in discussions about

trauma and healing in academia and shifts the

dialogue to provide a queer feminist theoretical

framework for understanding these requests as

world-making projects that provide an account

of public trauma and a sense of collective vul-

nerability.

Higher education is in trouble in the United

States. Or at least, that is how it may seem from

recent media accounts of student requests for

trigger warnings, safe spaces, and other inter-

ventions to make learning environments more

accessible for students who have experienced

trauma. Lukianoff and Haidt (2015) described

1354 Euclid St. NW, Washington, DC 20009 (kather-

ine_byron@alumni.brown.edu).

KeyWords: Education and academic achievement, emerging

adulthood, feminism, schools, trauma and PTSD.

a “movement” meant “to scrub campuses clean

of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause

discomfort and give offense” (para. 1). Conse-

quently, they describe the goal of the movement

as “turn[ing] campuses into ‘safe spaces’ where

young adults are shielded from words and ideas

that make some uncomfortable” and “to pun-

ish anyone who interferes with that aim, even

accidentally.” Similar accounts warn of a trend

toward “self-infantilization,” wherein students

are unable to process the discomfort of ideas that

counter their own and consequently are dismis-

sive of challenging ideas as triggering or harmful

(Shulevitz, 2015).

Rhetoric promoting that students are engag-

ing in self-infantilizing and censoring comes

from recent student requests for interventions

meant to help students who have experienced

trauma. In 2014, students at the University of

California, Santa Barbara, passed a resolution

through the student senate to urge instructors to

include trigger warnings on syllabi (Calderon

& Wakeeld, 2014). Ideally, trigger warnings

inform students of material that might cause

them to relive their trauma. At the same time,

critics worry that they designate certain kinds

of content or ideas as too harmful to be dis-

cussed or give traumatized students an excuse

to avoid engaging with material of which they

disapprove.

Although critics denounce trigger warnings

for turning campuses into safe spaces, the con-

cept of providing safe spaces for the processing

of trauma has become routine in many interven-

tion contexts. For example, in November 2014,

a student group at Brown University hosted a

116 Family Relations 66 (February 2017): 116–125

DOI:10.1111/fare.12233