Christian Beighton and Zahid Naz explore how educational spaces are actively made rather than simply occupied.

The fear of cancel culture, linked as it is to questions of academic freedom, the university student experience, and even concerns about the future of democracy, continues to fuel debate in the sometimes rarefied world of higher education. 

Following free-speech controversy at the Oxford Union debating society, Oxford’s new chancellor, William Hague, recently felt the need to kill off the “safe space”, announcing that students can expect to “hear things that will upset and offend them” during their studies.

His argument, that universities should mirror an unsafe future, echoes a common view of the relationship between HE and wider social trends. In referring to safety in this way, Hague will surprise no-one by drawing attention to the destabilising, aleatory and downright unsafe nature of “risk society” as social theorists have long referred to it. The extent to which people like Hague may have exacerbated this precarity remains an area of scholarly and political debate.

In contrast to such emotive topics as “safety”, the issue of space raised by Hague’s comments is less obviously amenable to such discussion. Theorists and researchers have long debated the divers attributes of space and its minutiae: as the place(s) where literally everything takes place, much has been said about the complexity of the notion. This complexity has strongly influenced our own academic work, notably in a series of articles which scrutinise educational spaces from a range of standpoints.

Our aim has been to better understand not just what is going on, but where: not just how space is taken, but how it is made. Our observations about what specific factors lead to the creation of specific spaces focus on online, offline, safe or unsafe spaces. Most recently, in  The power of taste: Bourdieusian perspectives on the negotiation of policy, practice, and pedagogy, we analysed the experiences of teachers in Further Education. Looking at how practitioners navigate professional spaces, we show how the assessment of teaching, learning and professionalism acts not just as a technique of governance, or even surveillance, but also as a culturally pervasive system of distinctions based less on criteria, references or good practice than on more obscure matters of taste.  

Analysing data from the field and challenging some well-known ideas in education theory, we note how such systems’ claimed transparency implies a set of assumptions, categories and distinctions about what counts as good and bad – and highlights some quite distressing side effects too.  

In such spaces, what upsets and offends is perhaps not the words, attitudes, or claims made by others, but the way(s) in which, momentarily perhaps, they reveal something much more discomfiting about the complexities and conflicts within our own professional motivations. Our work shows that an interesting and useful public debate lies beyond the circulation of commonplaces about “safe spaces”. And for further work on the topic, watch this space.  

Christian Beighton is Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Work, Education and Teacher Education, and Zahid Naz is Senior Lecturer inAcademic and Professional Education at the Queen Mary University, London.