“It can be very easy to feel uncomfortable”: Socio-spatial constructions of campus safety among university students and administrators

Abstract

Research about campus safety focuses primarily on identifying problematic student behaviours (i.e., toxic partying, sexual violence) and institutional infrastructure (i.e., lighting, emergency services), to the exclusion of how safety, as an idea and embodied experience, is constructed. Using qualitive interview data from a participatory action research study conducted at Western University, this article uses a critical feminist lens to examine how undergraduate students (n = 23) and administrators (n = 7) spoke about campus safety as well as spatial vulnerability. Study participants shed compelling light on the “uncomfortable” feelings that pervade their movement across and within the university campus. Often presumed to be a spatially distinct place of privilege for all who work and attend classes within its reach, this is not always the case. Participants experienced this space as one of precarious privilege that reflects, reproduces, and sometimes protects hegemonic systems of white, male, cis-gender institutional power. This glimpse into the emotional geography of the campus sheds new light on safety culture and allied feminist research, specifically that which relates to the interplay between contested notions of safety as well as spatial vulnerability for two stakeholder communities in the neoliberal university.