Libraries as Safe Spaces/Brave Spaces

In a recent job talk at an interview, I talked about the need to develop the library as a safe space/brave space. I framed this broadly to include the idea that all students should feel comfortable and at home in the library, and also that the library should foster difficult conversations that challenge our boundaries, our understanding of ourselves and others, and our racist and cultural basis. Certainly, a big challenge.

A review of the literature and the popular press will show that “safe space” and “brave space” are concepts that have been both widely promoted and widely disparaged. In some cases, people are using the same terms differently and in others, they push back against the concepts because they raise issues that we do not want to confront.

Several years ago, John Jay Ellison, Dean of Students, at University of Chicago, sent a letter to the incoming class of students stating that the University of Chicago does “not support so-called “trigger warnings,” we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual “safe spaces” where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own”.

Around the same time, Northwestern University’s president, Morton Schapiro, noted that experts tell him “that students don’t fully embrace uncomfortable learning unless they are themselves comfortable. Safe spaces provide that comfort. The irony, it seems, is that the best hope we have of creating an inclusive community is to first create spaces where members of each group feel safe.”

These two examples show “safe space” being used somewhat differently. I believe that John Jay Ellison is stating that coming to university is to enter a “brave space”; a space where one encounters ideas and people different from themselves, and navigating that space and growing culturally, intellectually, and socially is a type of bravery.

Safe spaces and brave spaces are terms that have been used in a variety of ways, specifically in Western countries. Safe spaces in the US grew out of the women’s movement and was later adapted and widely used in LGBTQ circles. In both cases the idea of safe space was to provide a space of intellectual and emotional safety; a place for individuals who were members of these communities can be themselves. First used in 2013 in a publication by Brian Arao and Kristi Clemens brave space was described as safely having difficulty and challenging dialogues in the classroom. I want to expand that idea from the classroom to the academic library.

When I speak of the idea of “Library as a safe space”,  I am not thinking of the library as an intellectual hiatus or intellectual milquetoast. Rather I’m thinking of the library as providing a space where individuals can be their own true selves. This would mean that Chinese or Hispanic students would feel free to speak their own language without castigation or language shaming. Muslim women would proudly wear an hijab and Muslim students would feel comfortable rolling out a prayer rug. Jewish students would comfortably wear a yarmulke or kippah. African American students would not hear racial slurs or be subject to any number of microaggressions. Native Americans, Asians, gay, lesbian, and trans students would feel accepted as equal members of the community. International students would feel welcome.

While “Library as safe space” may seem outside the realm of possibility, it is an ideal which we strive towards.

In order to get past the all too real racism, exclusion, privilege and cultural normativity that is Western society we must find ways to create dialogue and understanding and move beyond lip service to diversity and inclusion. I think the Library is perfectly poised to serve as a “brave space”; a space where difficult conversations around intellectually and culturally challenging ideas can happen. This will take the work of the community; not white people telling the story or concerns of the other but allowing those who have been marginalized and discriminated against to teach all of us. “We must build a community where “we really do need each other”.

If the library is truly to be this type of hub on campus then it must also wrestle with its own culpability in promoting a white heteronormative view of the world to the detriment of the many. The Library must be both a safe space and a brave space.