By Britt Munro
Last night as I was asleep in New York, Israeli forces opened fire on Palestinians waiting to collect aid from UN trucks in Nabulsi square, Northern Gaza. At least 112 people were killed on the spot and more than 760 seriously wounded in what has since become infamously known as the “bread massacre.” In an official statement reported by Haaretz, the Israeli army claimed that soldiers had opened fire because the starving Palestinians had made them feel “unsafe.”[1]
The logic whereby Palestinian lives are sacrificed to zionist feelings of unsafety is as old as the state of Israel itself. And yet expressions of the pathological settler-colonial imaginary through which Palestinians are transfigured into threats to Israeli life for merely daring to exist do not cease to stun with their sheer bravado. “Such an imaginary,” Randa Abdel-Fattah writes, “inverses the relational power dynamic such that the oppressor becomes the hapless victim, even as they drop weapons of mass destruction, destroy all semblance of civic life, and exact the lethal might of the Western military machine on unarmed men, women, and children.”[2]
While the claim that IDF soldiers felt “unsafe” is clearly functioning here as a cynical attempt to justify the unjustifiable––the murder of civilians gathered to receive life-saving food aid after weeks of enforced mass starvation––the logic that it calls upon is worth examining. This is a logic that expects Western readers to see, in the body of the starving Palestinian, a legitimate object of fear. In other words, it relies upon the tendency of fear to “stick” to the Palestinian body within a dominant Western imaginary in a way that it does not “stick” to the body of the Israeli. Sara Ahmed explains that because the emotion of fear––like all emotions––is inscribed within and works to reproduce a broader cultural imaginary, some bodies will more readily come to appear as objects of fear than others. Similarly, some will be more comfortable demanding that others move, or disappear entirely, to accommodate their fear. “Fear,” Ahmed concludes, is not simply reactive; instead, it is a political tool that “works to secure relationship(s) between…bodies.”[3]
This is a logic that expects Western readers to see, in the body of the starving Palestinian, a legitimate object of fear.
In recent months, echoes of this discourse of fear and unsafety have begun to show up in our classrooms.
Last semester, a student was told by her professor not to wear her keffiyeh to class, on the grounds that it risked creating an “unsafe environment” in the classroom and could be ‘intimidating’ to other students.
Radical Pedagogy Runs Through CUNY. “Tucker Pamella Farley’s Women and Literature Class,” CUNY Digital History Archive, https://cdha.cuny.edu/items/show/5332.
Last month, an adjunct instructor was called in to the chair’s office after she received an email stating that, by teaching about Israeli state violence in a course on structural violence, she was making Jewish students feel “unsafe.”
Recently, a panel I was set to moderate at an anti-racist writing conference was shut down after a student objected that the title made them feel unsafe (it included the word “Intifada”), sparking zionist outrage online[4]. The program and university released a public apology in the aftermath of the cancellation, claiming that they had never intended “to cause harm or make students feel unsafe.”
But before engaging in a knee-jerk reaction to the claim that a student feels “unsafe” in our classroom, we should stop to consider what “safety” actually means to us as teachers.
When the language of fear and unsafety shows up, then, it is often in the form of a demand: cancel this, ban this, remove this. But before engaging in a knee-jerk reaction to the claim that a student feels “unsafe” in our classroom, we should stop to consider what “safety” actually means to us as teachers. What (if any) is the relationship between safety and learning? Do students need to feel (emotionally? psychologically? physically?) safe to learn? Might the demand for safety ever get in the way of learning? Is there a difference between feeling unsafe (feeling fear) and being unsafe (being in danger)? Finally, how might we respond, as instructors, when a student tells us they feel unsafe in our classroom? What follows is my attempt to sketch out some initial thoughts-in-progress on these questions, in the hopes that doing so may lay the grounds for further discussion and reflection.
“Safety” as trauma-informed practice
While the discussion of “safety” as a pedagogical ideal has long precedents in feminist and anti-racist theory, I first became aware of the language of “safety” in the classroom during the Covid-19 pandemic. At the time, a relatively new body of work on trauma-informed pedagogy was exploding in popularity, with many teachers searching for ways to respond to the acute levels of stress and hardship they were witnessing in their students and/or experiencing themselves. Trauma-informed teaching draws on the insights of trauma psychology to suggest teaching strategies aimed at creating stability for students exhibiting symptoms of trauma in the classroom, while mitigating the potential for retraumatization. Because a brain in “fight or flight” mode cannot effectively digest or retain information, Trauma-informed pedagogy argues that ensuring that students feel safe enough to learn must be a fundamental priority of any classroom teacher.[5] Janice Carello, whose work has been fundamental to the field, explains that the first principle of trauma-informed teaching and learning is thus to ensure the “Physical, Social, Emotional and Academic Safety”[6] of all those in the classroom. In a trauma-informed classroom effort must be made “to create an atmosphere that is respectful of the need for safety, respect, and acceptance for all students, faculty, and staff in both individual and group interpersonal interactions.”[7]
However, now with a bit of distance I can see that there are serious questions to be asked of [the Trauma-informed] approach.
When I first read these lines they resonated as a truism. Of course we should want our students to feel safe in our classrooms! Of course we should do all that we can to help them feel secure enough to learn! At a time when many of us (not least of all instructors) were experiencing acute levels of instability and hardship, this approach seemed to offer evidence-based backing to a basic level of empathy and understanding that many of us craved.
However, now with a bit of distance I can see that there are serious questions to be asked of this approach. Nowhere, for example, does Carello convincingly define what “social, emotional and academic” safety actually mean. She notes that “social safety” involves “feeling safe “not only as individuals but as part of the various groups in which (members of the classroom) engage.”[8] But what if that group is an incel community? A white nationalist clan? What, exactly, does it mean to ensure a student’s sense of social safety as a member of that group, and why as educators would we hold ourselves accountable to doing so? Regarding academic safety, Carello suggests that this involves the “safety to make and learn from mistakes.”[9] But here we risk collapsing safety with what would more properly described as comfort. We must ask ourselves: where exactly does discomfort (I am experiencing negative affect) cross over into unsafety (I am in danger), and how do we measure this line? Because “trauma” today is widely recognized as a serious form of harm, the language of trauma seems to insinuate that teachers are dealing with the latter––real forms of danger in the classroom. However, there is a notable slipperiness in the trauma-informed literature between “stress” and “trauma,” with research on the effects of PTSD on brain function extended to the impacts of acute stress, inferring that stress itself is traumatic. In order to claim that trauma is pervasive in the regular classroom, Carello and others draw on the conclusion of Frazier et. al[10] that 66-85% of college students in the US will have experienced one “Lifetime Traumatic Event” such as threatened death or sexual violence before arriving at college. But the literature on trauma teaches us that such potentially traumatic events do not in the majority of cases translate into trauma,[11] which does not itself inhere in any particular event, but is rather located in “lasting adverse effects”[12] produced by the way an event interacts with the psychology of the person experiencing it. What might be shattering for one person may leave little trace on another. Similarly, “unsafety” and fear are subjective in ways that we must pay attention to when considering how to respond to claims of “unsafety” in our classrooms.
On the politics of fear
When a student expresses that something is making them feel unsafe, what are they telling us? They are telling us that they feel afraid, perhaps that they perceive themselves to be in some form of danger. But by this point a lot of work has already been done. Sara Ahmed explains that before we arrive at the point of identifying something as “fear,” we experience it first as affect. Affect––which, contra emotion, is spontaneous and pre-reflective––may appear in the form of discomfort, nervous excitement, or unease. In order to be narrated as “fear,” that affect needs to be attached to an object––to a “something” that is producing that fear. In attaching itself to an object, fear produces that object as a thing-to-be-feared. At the same time, in locating fear within an external object it also reinscribes the other to that object––that which feels safe, that feels like home. Thus, Ahmed explains, fear is ‘‘crucial to the very constitution of the psychic and the social as objects.”[13]
When we respond in a way that confirms a student’s affect as fear, then, we are at the same time participating in the reproduction of the object of that fear. But what kinds of objects are likely to be construed as objects of fear? Ahmed explains that in order to articulate an affect as emotion––in this case fear––we draw upon long histories of association and broader narratives of causality. These narratives are what delineate “insiders” and “outsiders”; those to be feared and those worthy of our trust. When we confirm and validate a student’s affective response to a keffiyeh, a Palestinian flag or the word “intifada” as fear, then, we must ask ourselves: what kinds of narratives of causality are we reproducing, and who bears the brunt of those narratives? In a climate in which the mass media, politicians and public figures are working overtime to demonize Palestinian anticolonial resistance and to erase Palestinian humanity, the answer to this question is not hard to find. In examining the long histories of dominant groups using the language of “fear” to justify violence against those they wield power over (we might think of the weaponization of white women’s “fear” of Black men in the Jim Crow US south) we begin to see fear as a political tool, one that calls upon dominant cultural narratives and is thus more easily employed by some than others. Marginalized people, Stengell explains, are often “unable to rhetorically express their own discomfort as fear or unsafety because the affect associated with fear does not ‘stick’ to dominant bodies and signs in the same way”[14]. In some ways, then, those in a position to articulate that something is making them feel unsafe and to demand that something be done about it are likely to be among the most, and not the least, empowered of our students.
When we confirm and validate a student’s affective response to a keffiyeh, a Palestinian flag or the word “intifada” as fear, then, we must ask ourselves: what kinds of narratives of causality are we reproducing, and who bears the brunt of those narratives?
Ultimately, recognizing the deeply relational nature of constructions of safety and fear must lead us to the realization that “it is impossible to generalize what constitutes safe space.”[15] Even if a student claims to have been made unsafe on the basis of a particular facet of their identity, we cannot assume that every student who shares that identity will experience the same affect or translate that affect as “unsafety” in the same way. To offer a concrete example, I cannot assume that because one Jewish student claims to have been made unsafe as a Jew by critical analysis of Israeli state violence any of my other Jewish students will feel that same way. This is not least because our students exist as whole people, not two-dimensional categories, and we cannot know in advance the personal and socio-cultural histories framing their experiences of safety and harm. In light of this, I would argue that important pedagogical interventions that have at times been framed in the language of student safety––for example, challenging the whiteness of standardized English and systematic denigration of Black English in the writing classroom––would be better framed in the language of a commitment to critical thinking and/or anti-racism.
Responding to ‘unsafety’ in the classroom
The impossibility of creating an educational space in which everyone can feel safe all of the time[16] does not, of course, mean that as educators we shouldn’t care about our students’ safety––a basic level of physical safety, and safety from emotional abuse or personal attack, should be a given in any classroom or workplace. It also does not mean that we should be dismissive of students’ claims that they are feeling unsafe. Quite the opposite: it means that we should approach these claims with much more rigor and curiosity. Rather than, for example, immediately changing the title of an event in response to a student’s claim that they find the word “intifada” threatening, we could attempt to meet with the student and talk through what they are feeling with curiosity. While the former response treats the student’s reaction as an institutional liability and approaches it from a perspective of damage control, the latter response approaches the student’s reaction from an open, pedagogical perspective.
It also does not mean that we should be dismissive of students’ claims that they are feeling unsafe. Quite the opposite: it means that we should approach these claims with much more rigor and curiosity.
By delaying the conversion of affect into fear, we can create a productive opening between whatever discomfort the student may be feeling and the broader discourses they may be inclined to draw on to frame that feeling. Within that opening we can begin to ask questions such as: “What are the taken-for-granted assumptions or narratives operating to frame this affect as ‘fear’, and what other possibilities may be available to us?”; “What relevant relations are at play here between the person expressing fear and the person or thing construed as the object of fear?”; “Who, if anyone, does the attribution of fear benefit? Who does it seek to control? Who gains or loses space or safety by invoking fear?”[17] Rather than immediately validating the claim of “fear” and thus containing the affect within a particular object, such an approach helps guide the student towards critically interrogating the “infinity of (social, cultural, historical) traces” guiding their own habitual responses. In other words, it teaches the student to practice critical self-reflexivity. Whether or not the student’s experience warrants practical intervention can be discussed, but only once the context of that experience has been more deeply interrogated and understood.
Discomfort as a tool for learning?
Finally, it is worth keeping in mind that feelings of unsafety, unsettledness and discomfort may at times actually be productive for learning. In their refusal of the classroom as a “safe space” (an ideal they associate with bourgeois white feminism), Kishimoto and Mwangi explain that “to imagine that learning only occurs in a place of ‘calm’ is to miss the ways in which contradictions, ambiguities, anger, pain, and struggle can be sources of energy to facilitate critical consciousness necessary for individual and social change.”[18] Building on the work of Marvin Lynn in critical race theory, Leonardo and Porter have also argued that “critical race pedagogy is inherently risky, uncomfortable and fundamentally unsafe, particularly for whites.”[19] This is not the same as creating a hostile situation, the authors explain, but simply means that pedagogies that critically interrogate racial and colonial power will produce discomfort in those who benefit from that power. I would question both the idea that the pedagogy Leonardo and Porter describe is actually unsafe for white students (versus uncomfortable), and the idea that “safety” is something we can generalize to identity categories (see above discussion). However, it is clear that engaging critically with racial hegemony in the classroom threatens narratives of white supremacy which some students may be deeply invested in, and that we must bear this in mind when accounting for student responses to such pedagogy. As a middle class white woman I can attest that some of my most transformative experiences of learning and growth have been accompanied by intense discomfort and at times anxiety, as what I was learning presented a challenge to deeply held (often unconscious) psychic investments. Discomfort was not only part of my learning, but necessary for it. Gaining the critical tools over time to reframe my reaction, not as ‘unsafety‘ in the sense of being attacked by something from the outside, but rather as resistance emanating from my own unconscious psychological investments, was another important part of that learning. But before I could get there I did need to feel unsafe.
As a middle class white woman I can attest that some of my most transformative experiences of learning and growth have been accompanied by intense discomfort and at times anxiety, […] Discomfort was not only part of my learning, but necessary for it.
Toni Cade Bambara recognized this when she advocated for what she called the “unsafe classroom,” a classroom in which students’ fundamental investments and assumptions would be challenged, and in which the secure hegemony of dominant knowledge formations would not be allowed to remain in place. “The aim of my stumble trial and error approach,” Bambara wrote, “is to make the classroom unsafe, to bomb the hiding student out of his corner, to blast the insulating walls down, to nimbly take the most rash and contradictory positions so that students do not feel they have to preach the party line to pass the course…”[20] In her call to ‘blast the insulating walls down’ Bambara recognizes the ways in which the classroom can function to erase and neutralize forms of real danger operating beyond its walls. She refuses to be complicit in such an erasure, even in the name of ‘safety,’ as she holds herself accountable both to the community within the classroom and to a broader world beyond it.
What world are we building?
Barbara S. Stengel writes that “by rendering some persons and things as objects of fear, we co-construct a collective world and align ourselves with it.”[21] In considering how to respond to our student’s claims of “fear” and unsafety in this moment, I want to suggest that we consider what kind of collective world we are constructing through those responses. Are we constructing a world in which we engage with our students as learners or as liabilities? A world in which calls for the liberation of some are cast as legitimate objects of fear, or one in which we recognize liberation as the inalienable right of all peoples? Are we reproducing narratives that render the wellbeing of some of our students’ dependent on the oppression of others, or are we guiding our students to reflect critically on all narratives, even––perhaps especially––those that conjure intense personal affect? Of course, as precarious faculty we exist at the mercy of forces that will continue to treat our students as liabilities, and to validate narratives of safety that cater to the powerful (or more pertinently: to those who fund the university). But as educators, we do not have to simply fall into line with this approach. In approaching this moment I urge each of us to keep three things in mind: firstly, our duty to our students as learners; secondly, our commitment to critical self-reflexivity and to critical thinking in the classroom; and finally, the very real and urgent danger faced by the people of Gaza, who are being starved, massacred, and mutilated by a genocidal force propped up by narratives of Zionist “unsafety” and fear. May we refuse–on the basis of both ethical and intellectual commitments–any definition of “safety” that does not include them, too.
[1] “Hungry Palestinians looking for food made Israeli soldiers feels unsafe, says army,” Middle East Eye, 29th February, 2024. https://www.middleeasteye.net/live-blog/live-blog-update/hungry-palestinians-looking-food-made-israeli-soldiers-feels-unsafe-says
[2] Abdel-Fattah, Randa. “On Zionist Feelings,” Mondoweiss, 27 December 2023. https://mondoweiss.net/2023/12/on-zionist-feelings/.
[3] Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh University Press, 2014, p. 63.
[4] Munro, Britt, Conor Tomás Reed and Lucien Baskin, “Love, but not for the colonized: responding to the repression of Palestine solidarity at CUNY,” Mondoweiss, February 7 2024 https://mondoweiss.net/2024/02/love-but-not-for- the-colonized-responding-to-repression-of-palestine-solidarity-at-cuny/.
[5] Imad, Mays. “How to make mental health a top priority this fall and beyond,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 25, 2021. https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-to-make-mental-health-a-top-priority-this-fall-and-beyond
[6] Carello, Janice “Trauma-informed Teaching and Learning Principles,” n.d. https://traumainformedteachingblog.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/titl-general-principles-3.20.pdf
[7] Carello, Janice “Trauma-informed Teaching and Learning Principles,” n.d. https://traumainformedteachingblog.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/titl-general-principles-3.20.pdf
[8] Carello, Janice, “Rationale for Trauma-informed definition principles objective,” n.d. https://socialwork.buffalo.edu/content/dam/socialwork/home/teaching-resources/1-1-Carello-rationale-for-TI-definition-principles-objectives.pdf
[9] Ibid.
[10] Frazier, Patricia, Samantha Anders, Sulani Perera, Patricia Tomich, Howard Tennen, Crystal Park and Tashiro Ty. “Traumatic Events Among Undergraduate Students: Prevalence and Associated Symptoms.” Journal of Counseling Psychology, vol 56 no. 3, 2009, pp. 450–60.
[11] Frazier et. al also offer evidence for this conclusion, explaining that only 6% of lifetime traumatic events will probably produce PTSD (2009, 457).
[12] Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration Services (SAMHSA) “What is Trauma?,” n.d., https://www.samhsa.gov/trauma-violence
[13] Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh University Press, 2014, p. 10.
[14] Stengel, Barbara S. “The Complex Case of Fear and Safe Space” Studies in Philosophy and Education, 2010, vol. 29 no. 1, pp. 523–540, p. 532.
[15] Ibid. 533
[16] A claim echoed by Annette Henry in her article ‘There are no Safe Places: Pedagogy as powerful and dangerous terrain’ Action in Teacher Education, vol 15, no. 4, pp. 1-4.
[17] Stengel, Barbara S. “The Complex Case of Fear and Safe Space” Studies in Philosophy and Education, 2010, vol. 29 no. 1, p. 533.
[18] Kishimoto, Kyoko and Mumbi Mwangi, “Critiquing the Rhetoric of “Safety” in Feminist Pedagogy: Women of Color Offering an Account of Ourselves” Feminist Teacher, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 87-102, 2009 p. 98.
[19] Leonardo, Zeus and Ronald K. Porter, “Pedagogy of fear: toward a Fanonian theory of ‘safety’ in race dialogue,” Race, Ethnicity and Education, vol. no. 2, pp.139–157, 2010 p. 139.
[20] Bambara, Toni Cade, “Report on the Summer Seminar, Pre-Baccalaureate Program, City College,” Adrienne Rich Papers, series 4, folder 385, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe.
[21] Stengel, Barbara S. “The Complex Case of Fear and Safe Space” Studies in Philosophy and Education, 2010, vol. 29 no. 1, p. 532.
