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Cultivating the art of safe space
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Performance-making and peace-building are processes predicated on the production of safe space. But what is ‘safe space’? In performance-making, what is it that makes space safe without losing the creative potential of tension? What role is there for risk? And, once achieved, how does safe space become meaningful beyond its immediate community of participants?This paper examines the value of the concept of ‘safe space’ in performance, suggesting that for applied theatre practitioners it is more than just a precursor for the art-making processes it supports. Here, safe space is considered as a processual act of ever-becoming: a space of messy negotiations that allow individual and group actions of representation to occur, as well as opportunities for ‘utopian performatives’.Contact Inc's Peace Project is profiled as a performance-based program that grounds these issues and offers insight into the ways in which ‘safe space’ might function beyond its conventional connotations of protection and guardedness to be mobilised in a broader grassroots agenda for social change.
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... Our approach is to create an emotionally safe space in the classroom and to transcend that into the industry. This complements with diversity themes as we support and encourage the students to lead discussions about filmmaker's role in critiquing race, gender, sexuality, and difference in the classroom (Hunter 2008). Film sets and film related events such as festivals are increasingly stressing the need for regulation in creating emotionally safe spaces. ...
Couscous is a staple dish that became recognized and registered as an immaterial cultural heritage by UNESCO, simultaneously for Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Mauritania (UNESCO, Knowledge, know-how and practices pertaining to the production and consumption of couscous, 2020). It represents a mixture of love, heritage, and innovation, which links identity, originality, and modernization. The dish is eligible for two of the five broad domains in which intangible cultural heritage is manifested: social practices, rituals, and festive events. Once a fiction film represents this gastronomic heritage, it reflects the filmmaker's culture and identity during its international distribution. This study aims to compare the couscous dish’s illustrations in Tunisian fiction films such as Halfaouine, Under the Rain of Autumn, and The Secret of the Grain; to prove how fiction movies be considered as an identity card for any filmmaker’s homeland by reflecting the culinary cultural heritage of their homeland, or even a tourism promotion for his nation; and most of all to evince that a fiction movie could become a reference for researchers, in tandem with scientific articles and books.
... Our approach is to create an emotionally safe space in the classroom and to transcend that into the industry. This complements with diversity themes as we support and encourage the students to lead discussions about filmmaker's role in critiquing race, gender, sexuality, and difference in the classroom (Hunter 2008). Film sets and film related events such as festivals are increasingly stressing the need for regulation in creating emotionally safe spaces. ...
This article is an exploration of leadership in media education and some of its identifying features. As lecturers in media studies and production, our teaching philosophy weaves through these themes: active learning (Budhai 2021), learning by doing (Schank et al 2013), peer and self-assessment (Iglesias Pérez, Vidal-Puga, and Pino Juste 2022) and constructive alignment (Loughlin, Lygo-Baker and Lindberg-Sand 2021).
... Bibliotheken streben unabhängig von ihrem Bibliothekstyp an, zugängliche und si- Begriff des Safe Space zunächst bewusst noch nicht auf den passenderen Begriff des Safe(r) Space eingeschränkt war, um den Diskussionen einen möglichst freien Raum zu geben, auch wenn klar bleibt: "Wir können Orte nicht sicher, nur sicherer gestalten" (Minkov 2021). Ein Safe Space kann und sollte laut Mary Ann Hunter mehrere Dimensionen haben (Hunter 2008 ...
Zusammenfassung Dieser Artikel fasst die ursprünglichen Erwartungen und die am Ende tatsächlich entwickelten Ergebnisse des Hands-on Labs "Mehr Glitzer? How to LGBTQIA+ Safe Space für Bibliotheken" auf der BiblioCon 2024 zusammen. Neben der Konzept-entwicklung wird auch auf die Entstehung des Themenwunschs eingegangen. Am Ende steht ein Fazit, welches die hohe Resonanz für den Workshop, die Diskussions-tiefe sowie die Ergebnisse in den Kontext zukünftiger Entwicklungen in der Biblio-thekswelt setzt.
This study explores how individuals from diverse backgrounds contribute to creating safe environments for constructive intergroup dialogue on divisive issues in community settings. Through an analysis of unique recordings from four real-life conversations, the research reveals how participants’ individual behaviors—personal engagement (such as self-disclosure and risk-taking) and interpersonal engagement (like validating others)—along with group dynamics, foster a positive climate that enables free expression and sustained engagement, even when safety is challenged. The findings offer valuable insights into the processes and dynamics of intergroup dialogue, highlighting participants’ active roles in fostering safe and brave spaces in polarized communities.
This essay looks at the role and application of art, with a focus on performance and representational sculpture, in the context of depicting trauma. It explores our understanding of ‘safe spaces’, the relationship between art, artist and trauma, and why it matters. It argues that whilst designated safe spaces are intended to protect those within them from harm, this is a paradoxical idea as the fear and violence from which they protect lives within the individual themselves. No space is truly safe. Trauma exists within all of us, by drawing out experiences via metaphorical representation a new form of safe space can be cultivated. These works, in which an acceptance of the inherent lack of external safety is laid bare, allow both the audience and the artist to share in a feeling of safety that comes from being heard, seen and understood. The creation of this new internal shared safety (or metaphorical safe space) can be a catalyst for social change and recovery.
Abstract
Abstract Nigeria has been dealing with protracted fratricidal and intractable communal conflicts, leaving its citizens dwelling in harsh deprivation, helplessness, and hopelessness in its wake. This is further exaggerated by poor leadership and economic insolvency, which has placed the country at a precipice of unprecedented poverty and insecurity. At the center of all this pathetic condition is poor leadership, which has affected provision of basic infrastructures like education, health, power, housing, water, sanitation, and hygiene. It also accounts for high levels of unemployment, with millions of idle minds available to mischief and notorious practices. The effect of poor or good leadership cannot be hidden, and this is manifested in the health of the ecosystem where it is occurring. This means that leadership is not static, it is dynamic, and its dynamism is locked in everyday practices. Several extant leadership literatures theorize that Nigeria is lacking in the exercise of leadership that meets the complexities and lived realities of our time. Leadership is not something you pick off the shelf and administer like a template or blueprint, and this has not served the country overtime. However, a crop of scholars and practitioners are evoking a practice turn, that elevates the need to look inwards, and be endogenously creative. These folks are engaging context driven consideration in approaching leadership, prioritizing cultural practices, the lived realities of the people, with cognizance of the ever-evolving face of peace and conflicts. This study sought to understand how context influences emergent local leadership practices in extremities. The research site is a conflict-ridden area which has experienced sporadic communal conflicts for over 23 years; highly patriarchal, with rigid gender and social hierarchy; and particularly under-resourced. This is a qualitative study, and leaned on the theoretical framework of adaptive leadership, leadership-as-practice, and everyday peace. A twining of constructivist approach and case study methodology was utilized to understand the phenomenon, through co-construction of meanings with the co-researchers. Eight women leading peace building engaged in this study, through in-depth semi-structured interviews using mediated mediums (Zoom and Phone calls). Data was analyzed using an abductive thematic analysis which surfaced eleven themes and compressed as three main themes: (1) Leadership requires authority(or authorizing self), inclusion and should be nimble; (2) Community groups working on peace building should consider communication, collaboration, supportive culture, and leading by example as essential practices; (3) Groups may be motivated to engage in peace building because of experiences of exclusion & marginalization, hardships & loss, the gendered impacts of conflicts, and empowerments from trainings. The synthesis of these themes informed the overarching theme that: Context has a mediating and moderating influence in the emergence and practice of peace leadership. The findings suggest that both intangible and tangible elements provide context to leadership. Leadership does not happen in a vacuum but requires a container that holds space for different elements to interact. The occupiers of this container serve as moderating or mediating factors that provokes progress of not. This includes the combination of the people (identities, reasoning) the culture and traditions (practice, artifacts), social norms, language, policies, and laws, lived experiences, and the environment. This study recommends that both peace leadership researchers and practitioners continue to expand the prism of theorizing and praxis to identify and center the varied and evolving elements within specific context as areas of inquiry. Finally, further research may consider how power structures (intergroup and intragroup) in extreme context are established, deconstructed, and dismantled in situatedness.
Existing research on digital safe spaces has concentrated predominantly on the challenges associated with designing and setting up these spaces and the tactics employed to oversee participant conduct and safeness. However, there is a gap in our understanding of the process involved in cultivating these spaces to ensure participants’ perceived safety and safeness. This research investigates the cultivation process of such a digital space designed as an event for minority groups and women interested in video game development. We found three main phases in cultivating digital spaces. We refer to these as preparing, fostering, and fallowing. While preparing and fostering have been identified in previous research, fallowing—defined as a temporal resting period—has received little prior recognition in research. We develop a process model explaining the three phases of cultivation and their respective characteristics and develop implications for research on marginalization and digital safe spaces.
Issues of equality, diversity, and inclusion are under increasing scrutiny in Higher Education. This poses an opportunity for educators involved in the delivery of psychology courses to reflect on the inclusivity of their curricula. Though psychology as a discipline has contributed to reproducing social inequalities, it has also brought them to the forefront, and has the potential to improve the landscape for minoritised people. To honour our commitment to building a more inclusive curriculum that could contribute to these efforts, we codesigned with students a final year undergraduate module, Psychology of Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion. The module employed inclusive pedagogies to explore how a range of EDI issues affect particular groups of people, sustaining an intersectional perspective throughout. Positive feedback from students indicated that they left the module with the confidence to speak about and take action on the inequalities and injustices they see around them, and experience themselves.
This book poses the question, "How do we transcend the cycles of violence that bewitch our human community while still living in them?" Peacebuilding, in the view of this book, is both a learned skill and an art. Finding this art, this book says, requires a worldview shift. Conflict professionals must envision their work as a creative act - an exercise of what the book terms the "moral imagination." This imagination must, however, emerge from and speak to the hard realities of human affairs. The peacebuilder must have one foot in what is and one foot beyond what exists. The book is organized around four guiding stories that point to the moral imagination but are incomplete. The book seeks to understand what happened in these individual cases and how they are relevant to large-scale change. The purpose is not to propose a grand new theory; instead it wishes to stay close to the "messiness" of real processes and change, and to recognize the serendipitous nature of the discoveries and insights that emerge along the way. Like most professional peacemakers, the author of this book sees his work as a religious vocation.
This paper looks at a familiar, though largely undiscussed, figure of educational discourse - 'safe space'. Through an examination of four instances of usage, the paper shows 'safe space' to be an emerging metaphor for classroom life. The metaphor offers a hopeful response to pervasive concerns about individual isolation in an increasingly stressful and pluralistic world, but it also unintentionally undermines critical thinking.
Theatre and performance are art forms that play intensively with space and place. Central to each is the live presence of performers and spectators, which means that space becomes a vital factor in the performance experience. because it is the performance space that makes this co-presence possible. The nature of the theatre building and its location within the civic space of the community are significant elements in the performance experience for spectators, and theatre historians and semioticians have produced an impressive body of scholarly work exploring the ways in which theatre buildings can be seen to manifest prevailing philosophies of representation 'and to reflect the functions fulfilled by theatrical performance in the society in question. In the second half of the twentieth century, theatre practitioners all over the western world engaged in an enormous amount of exploration and experimentation with the material realities of the performance space.
The arts offer peacebuilders unique tools for transforming intractable interpersonal, intercommunal, national, and global conflicts—tools that are not currently prevalent or available within the peacebuilding field. The task for peacebuilding practitioners is to find strategic ways of incorporating the arts into the work of peacebuilding and to create a space where people in conflict can express themselves, heal themselves, and reconcile themselves through the arts. There is very little solid theory, research, or evaluation of arts-based peacebuilding. This article seeks to move beyond a simplistic approach that asserts the “arts are powerful” to a richer articulation of how they function in peacebuilding, when to use them, what they can do, and how to evaluate their usage. This article provides examples of and the conceptual frameworks behind strategic arts-based peacebuilding.