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This chapter provides foundations of differentiating the sophisticated and various theoretical approaches towards safe spaces demonstrated in this book. For the purpose of framing the examples provided in this collection, we offer three broad ways of thinking about safe spaces: safe learning spaces as separate, counterhegemonic, or third spaces; safe learning spaces of difference, sameness, and intersecting identities; and deliberative and democratic learning spaces. It needs to be noted, however, that these are not mutually exclusive but different aspects to consider and that they each operate within and across, and are therefore influenced by, the five levels of inequity discussed in Chapter 2. That said, not all levels of inequity are necessarily addressed by any given space, regardless of the frame used to interpret it. This discussion respects the multiple paradoxes in education, especially the one of pluralism and sameness, offering approaches to modes and learning settings of inclusion and exclusion and how they create different, yet “safe,” spaces.

This chapter introduces the purpose and structure of this edited volume, including why safe spaces are needed in educational settings, how to think about what makes a space safe for different individuals or groups, and aspects to consider in creating and maintaining safe spaces. It describes the two broad sections, the first of which comprises chapters that introduce the problem, context, need for safe spaces (Chapter 2), the broad conceptual frames supporting them (Chapter 3), and detail and deconstruct examples of various safe spaces created in diverse educational settings (Chapter 4). Chapters in Section II include aspects of the conceptual foundations and details about the purpose, development, and implementation processes, and outcomes of various efforts to create and/or maintain a safe space for education.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the notion of decolonizing interpretive research in ways that respect and integrate the qualitative sensibilities of subaltern voices in the knowledge production of anti-colonial possibilities.

The paper draws from the decolonizing and post-colonial theoretical tradition, with a specific reference to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s contribution to this analysis.

Through a critical discussion of decolonizing concerns tied to qualitative interpretive interrogations, the paper points to the key assumptions that support and reinforce the sensibilities of subaltern voices in efforts to move western research approaches toward anti-colonial possibilities. In the process, this discussion supports the emergence of an itinerant epistemological lens that opens the field to decolonizing inquiry.

Its practical implications are tied to discursive transformations, which can impact social and material transformations within the context of research and society.

Moreover, the paper provides an innovative rethinking of interpretive research, in an effort to extend the analysis of decolonizing methodology to the construction of subaltern inspired intellectual labor.

The chapter questions the low demand for scholarly (scientific research) competence of civil servants through identifying practical and transformative uses of scientific knowledge in professionals’ practice, thus arguing for a particular type of scholarly competence in professional degree programs.

The chapter conceptually develops a theory of practitioners’ knowing in action that reframes use of scientific knowledge as part of practical inquiry.

The chapter formulates the notion of extended ‘scientific temper’ to open up spaces for reflection in the context of everyday professional practice and avoid the pitfalls of technical rationality. It argues for an ontological – as opposed to mere epistemological – dimension of knowing in action. It suggests that changes in practitioners’ stance in line with the extended ‘scientific temper’ enable specific uses of scientific knowledge and help achieve aims of emancipation and transformation.

The chapter sketches a list of scholarly competencies and principles of didactics of training scholarly competence of civil servants in line with the notion of extended ‘scientific temper’ and post-structuralist paradigms in science.

The chapter’s value lies in reconceptualising the use of scientific knowledge in relation to everyday professional practice in public administration.

The purpose of the study is to look at memory making and the documenting of memories, as a part of the document and information experience of women belonging to the Indian diaspora in a leisure context.

A qualitative research approach was inspired by institutional ethnography, and data are collected through semi-structured interviews and by collecting comments posted on five fan fiction blogs.

Early observations show that memory making and documenting of those memories is a part of the document experience of the research participants. It also points to the role of social interactions in that experience as well as the recording of one's document experience in the making or deriving of document meaning.

This study aims to contribute toward conceptual growth in the area of information and document experience. It also aims to address a gap in the literature that looks at cultural memory evocation and how it is documented, as well as looking at the interplay between affordances of new media, memory making and documentary practices especially with respect to virtual communities. And when looked at through the prism of migration and leisure, it can be even more interesting.

Latin America offers a unique opportunity to reimagine educational leadership through its complex and intersectional frameworks where rematriation movements and liberatory pedagogies are the driving forces for “postponing the end of the world,” as proposed by Ailton Krenak (2020). While currently Latin American democracies are less than ideal as environmental and Indigenous initiatives have been directly attacked by ultraconservative politics, there are consistent foundations that deepen in each context by leading the way to a hopeful future. These foundations are the loud voices in the Latin American continent and they are multilingually expressed in Quechua, Guarani, Aymara, and more, as is also immersed in critical literacies; in processes of conscientização; experienced in the arts and the theater of the Oppressed; and loudly coming from the slums and the lungs of women like Mercedes Sosa, and many more. These are the absolute breakthroughs of hope we will continue to listen, follow, work with, and feel. Such breakthroughs are the pedagogies and the educational leadership of hope across Latin America, a region which has pushed to center on Indigenous mobilization and guidance.

According to Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci, whose best-known contribution to critical thought is his theory regarding hegemony, education “serves a directly important function in maintaining hegemony…[for] [i]t is a vehicle by which consensus is maintained and the knowledge of the ruling bloc (the majority ruling class) is legitimated” (Gross, 2011, p. 66). Although Gramsci's theoretical work was initially situated within the Fascist-dominated Italian legislature in which he aimed to understand how the ruling class maintained power over the proletariat (oppressed groups), his concept offers a lens through which social critics have been able to understand the prevailing superstructures of power in Western capitalist societies. This chapter, therefore, relies on Gramsci's theories to develop an argument (and writing pedagogy) regarding the democratic ability of the historically Black college and university (HBCU), for I contend the HBCU, particularly its first-year composition classroom, is a space where students can practice and propel democracy, thus countering the hegemony that insists on oppressing Black and Brown people.

While the HBCU, as defined by the 1965 Higher Education Act, is a by-product of the superstructure and is thusly grounded upon and legitimated by what bell hooks terms “the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” therefore functioning as institutionalized spaces for constructing and maintaining hegemony, HBCUs, explains Eddie S. Glaude Jr. in his 2016 Democracy in Black, are “institutions that both cultivated their (Black folks') civic capacities and served as a space to transmit values that opposed the value gap” (p. 125). In other words, Black folks have had to create “safe spaces” like the HBCU, to exist in their full humanity within an oppressive America whose white citizens devalued their being, and therefore, their American citizenship. Although the HBCU is legitimated by the hegemony, the HBCU, I argue, remains a space where the democracy America has yet to realize can be learned and practiced, especially if teachers, particularly within first-year composition programs, employ counterhegemonic curriculums and practices like the AfriWomanist approach to teaching I offer here.

Feminist legal activists in law schools developed what we call critical community tactics beginning in the late 1960s to bring about important cultural change in the legal educational arena. These feminist activists challenged the male-dominant culture and succeeded in making law schools and legal scholarship more gender inclusive. Here, we develop the critical community tactics concept and show how these tactics produce cultural products which ultimately, as they are integrated into the broader culture, change the cultural landscape. Our work then is a study of how social movement activists can bring about cultural change. The feminist legal activists’ cultural products and the integration of them into the legal academy provide evidence of feminist legal activist success in shifting the legal institutional culture. We conclude that critical community tactics provide an important means for social movement activists to bring about cultural change, and scholars examining social movement efforts in other institutional settings may benefit from considering the role of critical community tactics.

The greatest danger for radical social theory in an age of empire is not its own hidden imperial ambitions – though these are never to be discounted – but rather its search for consolation in reactivity, that is, in efforts to escape from the hegemony of imperial discourses. Long accustomed to reign, these discourses suck up all available light, leaving as openings only the will to darkness. Such contrariness has led to the self-medicating backwater of post-modern ahistoricism and anti-narrativism, the end of meaning, the celebration of discord and disenchantment, of trauma and tear, where “noise too has its pleasures” and we can wonder “what Empire?” For those unable to bear this metasilence, there is a further flight to theory, any theory, that would cushion the trauma, quiet the questioning, in particular the dark wisdoms of Freud, Augustine, Leo Strauss, Thucydides. Too often, even the Frankfurt School – note the incomplete label “Critical Theory” – has been conjoined to counterhegemonic enterprises, and to what in its analysis of alienation and reification could too easily result in the resolution to bear the agonies of empire in an inevitably fallen world.

Ethics for Indigenous peoples come from ancestral knowledge, from the ways we exist in creation and the ways that we are urged to respond to the whole of creation. As people grown from ancestors who we believe are always with us, we look to our own teachings to strengthen our ethics of living, being and undertaking research. These teachings still speak to us through chants, songs, stories and many other forms of belief. This chapter outlines Māori beliefs and the power of Māori belief by examining how ancestors continue to inform and speak. Research ethics are assumed to reside within a living human world, but Māori ethics includes both the seen and unseen worlds. These beliefs create a powerful challenge to the notion of sovereignty and offer powerful counterhegemonic views to racism and exploitative regimes of power. They also inform the ways that we understand ethical approaches to all our relations in the world.