ABSTRACT
As an educator, I have spent a good deal of time in faculty meetings discussing the need to create safe spaces for our students. We wanted these safe spaces to foster students’ learning as they develop into actualized individuals. Some schools go to great lengths to secure safety—metal detectors, police in schools, separate schools for marginalized or otherwise “problematic” students, and so on. The recent U.S. hyperawareness of bullying, and its, sometimes, dire implications, have reinvigorated efforts to ensure both physical and psychological safety within schools. In this chapter, I interrogate the notion of safe space as it is used within educational practice, particularly in regard to queer youth. In order to do this I examine what is meant by safety, especially as it intersects with ideological mechanisms of regulation. Through this analysis, safe space emerges as a problematic concept warranting reevaluation.
