Search results

The author of this chapter will explain how libraries define safe space through policies, procedures, and professional codes of ethics. The chapter will generate a history of the concept of libraries as safe space, will explain how libraries attempt to create safe spaces in physical and online environments, and will show how library practices both help and harm patrons in need of safe space.

This chapter provides a review of the literature that illustrates how libraries provide safe space – or not – for their patrons. The author will deconstruct the ALA Code of Ethics and Bill of Rights to demonstrate how libraries remain heteronormative institutions that do not recognize the existence of diverse patrons or employees, and how this phenomenon manifests in libraries.

Libraries, either through their physical construction or through policies and procedures, have become spaces for illegal activities and discrimination. Populations who would be most likely to use libraries often report barriers to access.

Libraries should revisit their policies and procedures, as well as assess their physical and online spaces, to determine whether or not they truly provide safe space for their patrons. While libraries can become safer spaces, they should clearly communicate what types of safety they actually provide.

This chapter offers a critique of libraries as safe spaces, which will challenge popular opinions of libraries, and compel the profession to improve.

The purpose of this chapter is to invite readers into a discussion of experiences with and perspectives on creating safer spaces in education. Dialog has been used to demonstrate analytical processes and meaning-making, as well as aspects of “space” in education research. This dialog represents a safe space to share and access insights, experiences, and reactions to the ways in which we can foster safer spaces in education for our students and ourselves.

This chapter discusses and interprets examples of safe spaces through the lenses provided in Chapters 2 and 3. Specifically, we discuss a few diverse examples of safe spaces for learning and development taken from children's literature, an art exhibit, a feature-length movie, and a professional development experience, detailing how each can be seen in terms of to what extent it offers a separate safe space, works with aspects of sameness/difference and intersectionality, and/or creates a space for democratic iterations that address one or more of the levels of inequity.

This chapter describes why safe spaces are needed in education settings for full inclusion of gendered identities as they intersect with categories such as race/ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and ability. This discussion briefly addresses varying and intersecting levels and domains of privilege or marginalization such as identity, inter-/intraaction, organization, society, and knowledge, and how safe spaces in education can support learning as it is entwined with gender, gendered biases, and power dynamics and structures.

Live music events have recently become more and more aware of the necessity to fight against gendered violence. In the meantime, research on gendered violence at live music events is also gaining a growing interest. Ladyfests and other punk-inspired queer and feminist do-it-yourself music festivals have often been presented as “safe spaces”, including in academic research. Yet, the exact goals and modalities of enactment of such safe spaces have mostly been overlooked. In this article, the author proposes to bridge this gap.

In this article, the author relies on two sources of information: the first one is documentary and the second is ethnographical. The author first considers the festivals archives (flyers, presentation texts, programs booklets, websites and so one) to analyze the identities and goals of the festivals (“who were are” and “what we aim to do”). Crossing these sources of information with ethnographical fieldwork in 10 Ladyfests that happened in France and Germany between 2017 and 2019, the author observed the measures taken to reach such goals (“how we do it”).

The author begins with detailing the functions of safer spaces policies and shows that the festivals position themselves as transformative forces toward a safer nightlife. Then, the author introduces the means established by the festivals to enact their safer space policies. The author specifically underpins the crucial role of developing bystander intervention as well as self-managed security teams. Finally, the author sheds light on the limits of the safer spaces policies and posits that creating a safer environment demands a constant hard work to keep patriarchal structures away.

Very few research studies have focused on live music, gendered violence and safe spaces. With this article, the author aims to contribute to the growing interest that these topics have gained in the last few years, by looking at an innovative feminist live music scene.

Multiple research studies show a positive correlation between library usage and student retention. At the same time, no formal research studies focusing on the effect of library usage on LGBT student persistence and retention exist. The purpose of this paper is to provide information about today’s LGBT undergraduates, their personal and academic needs, and how academic libraries may meet those needs.

The author will challenge the grand narrative perpetuated by LGBT librarians that “libraries save [LGBT] lives” through a review of existing research literature on LGBT undergraduates and their personal and academic needs, where libraries play a role in LGBT undergraduate life, and whether or not academic libraries actually meet those needs.

No formal research studies on how libraries play a role in the retention of LGBT undergraduates exist. While LGBT undergraduates share many similarities with their peers, they seek out resources and spaces that the library may be able to provide independently or through collaborations with other units on campus. The existence of campus LGBT resource centers may impact LGBT undergraduate use of libraries.

The author will provide suggestions for academic libraries to create appropriate resources, services, and spaces for LGBT undergraduates so that they persist at their institutions and graduate.

This is the first research paper to address the role that academic libraries play in LGBT student retention.

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.