Hypervigilance And The Problem With Meaningless "This is a Safe Space" Statements

My name is Ann and I don't feel safe. There I said it. I really don't feel safe and today I realized there is only one place I feel safe right now and that is on the deck outside when the weather is nice enough to be outside. I have always been hypervigilant because of my queer woman positionality (but I learned this even from early days, being a minority English speaker where the majority French kids would harass us, often violently, for speaking English in public), but with COVID, something super icky that happened around the holiday season on social media, and now another thing that happened this week in the place I rent, my hypervigilance is on high and I don't feel safe. 

This week I started noticing small things missing from my unit. Like food and other things. I started doubting myself; thinking I just misplaced things. But I would not misplace food. So now there's something afoot where I am living and I need to move, like yesterday. Add to this 3 fire alarms this week, where anosmic Ann has no way of knowing if the house is actually on fire or if my neighbour has forgotten something on the stove, the one place that I should feel safe feels really not safe. I share this because this could be very easily be a situation that any one of your students or colleagues is going through right now and you don't know. 

Then there's that other big thing which is having a billionaire buy a space which has been a community and connection space for over a decade. A space where, though always hypervigilant, I could find people and have deep and meaningful conversations on so many important topics such as pedagogy, disability, accessibility, educational technology, and sensory studies. However, it has never completely been a safe space. Around the holiday season I had to block a bunch of folk because they don't know how to social media, and their privilege in many spaces means they do not have to stop to think about the difference of intent and impact in their actions. Not everyone navigates the world with a presumption of safety and sometimes you need to block those people who do because the cognitive load needed to educate them through their lack of humility is just too much. 

A comment framed so flippantly in some places by instructors, by workshop facilitators is "this is a safe space". But you have to demonstrate this. You can't just say "this is a safe place" and expect this to be so. "This is a safe space" is not a performative speech act. Trust needs to be embedded in the classroom, in the workshop, in communications. When there is no trust, or where a sense of trust is broken, that triggers hypervigilance. In those instances, the students who may have participated in class will stop participating. The open lines of communication you may have had will cease. This is what happens when folk don't take the time to be meaningful; this is what happens when people do not reflect on how incredibly complex safety and trust is in the classroom and on social media. Classrooms and social media are both innately spaces of hypervigilance depending on folks' positionality.

Fact: Lack of meaningful and mindful guidance on how to navigate places of hypervigilance causes even more harm

Fact: Places of community can also be places of hypervigilance

I go to campus once a week and take a shuttle to get there. When I get back on the shuttle I then walk home which is an hour walk which I do because I can (and I acknowledge my privilege here) and I do because I am trying to avoid confined spaces where folk will be unmasked. For the last few weeks these walks have made me realize how much I need to move out of the city because my feeling of unsafe has increased. It is incredible the disregard for other people's wellness that is further compounded the more people you have in a space. And then it takes me a few days to come down from that state of hypervigilance from going to campus, walking home, and now being in an unsafe space where things go missing while I am gone. Saturdays are usually the day when all of that tension gets processed. None of these things are taken into account when folk say "back to normal," or think it's okay to just navigate the city like we did pre-pandemic. These are things that are happening and students are navigating these same aspects, though hopefully not living in a space where their stuff goes missing when they leave the house. 

I guess the thing to reflect on here is that you can never guarantee a space is safe, and that there is so much to consider when navigating social media and people could learn so much from #DisabilityTwitter, #NativeTwitter, #QueerTwitter about how to be in community here and support each other through ableist, racist, and homophobic attacks. This is a space of hypervigilance and not acknowledging that and not working from that framework first means more people will be hurt.