In Search Of Safe Brave Spaces

In this visionary book, Greg Smith draws on a lifetime of experience as an executive, coach, business consultant, and volunteer to explore a new and exciting approach to personal and professional development-what he calls the gift of Safe Brave Spaces. We are able to best reach our full potential when we are given room both to be safe and to be brave-a truth that applies not only to individuals but to one-on-one relationships and to larger communities and organizations. The creation of Safe Brave Spaces leads to the discovery and release of individual and collective potential, allowing us to more fully connect with others as well as to better understand our gifts and talents and align them with our overarching goals in life. The author breaks down the journey toward establishing Safe Brave Spaces into four key elements: Knowing, Growing, Letting Go, and Showing Up. Readers are first guided through a series of steps to help them more effectively "Know and Grow ME," cultivating their innate talents and abilities and also learning when it is necessary to Let Go of impediments in order to Show Up as one's truest, fullest self. Later, these same techniques and lessons are applied to one-on-one relationships ("Knowing and Growing YOU & ME") and, finally, to broader communities ("Knowing and Growing WE"). In the end, the creation and cultivation of Safe Brave Spaces represents not a destination but a journey-a journey characterized by energy, passion, engagement, and love. Greg Smith is the ideal guide for that journey, setting a challenge that, if embraced, will lead not simply to greater professional and workplace success, but to enhanced meaning in all the manifold dimensions of human life.

How the essential democratic values of diversity and free expression can coexist on campus. Safe spaces, trigger warnings, microaggressions, the disinvitation of speakers, demands to rename campus landmarks—debate over these issues began in lecture halls and on college quads but ended up on op-ed pages in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, on cable news, and on social media. Some of these critiques had merit, but others took a series of cheap shots at “crybullies” who needed to be coddled and protected from the real world. Few questioned the assumption that colleges must choose between free expression and diversity. In Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces, John Palfrey argues that the essential democratic values of diversity and free expression can, and should, coexist on campus. Palfrey, currently Head of School at Phillips Academy, Andover, and formerly Professor and Vice Dean at Harvard Law School, writes that free expression and diversity are more compatible than opposed. Free expression can serve everyone—even if it has at times been dominated by white, male, Christian, heterosexual, able-bodied citizens. Diversity is about self-expression, learning from one another, and working together across differences; it can encompass academic freedom without condoning hate speech. Palfrey proposes an innovative way to support both diversity and free expression on campus: creating safe spaces and brave spaces. In safe spaces, students can explore ideas and express themselves with without feeling marginalized. In brave spaces—classrooms, lecture halls, public forums—the search for knowledge is paramount, even if some discussions may make certain students uncomfortable. The strength of our democracy, says Palfrey, depends on a commitment to upholding both diversity and free expression, especially when it is hardest to do so.

This book broadens the idea of a safe space that is traditionally discussed in feminist studies, to include gendered identities intersecting with class, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, and ability within multiple aspects of education. This collection showcases work supporting access to education of persistently marginalized individuals.

This book is the second edition of the highly successful Handbook of Urban Educational Leadership. This book examines the uniqueness of the urban school and those in leadership roles that affect urban students and schools. It examines community, district, school, and teacher leadership influencing urban schools. This edition examines conceptualizations of urban ecologies as well as other critical geographies and how these shape understandings in educational contexts. Contributions for this edition focused on areas that examined social, technological, international and other processes with intersections of issues of race, class, and gender, power, politics, and capital and how they influence urban educational leadership. We also included place and space-based theories and discourses that influence urban realities, which include (but were not limited to): networks, assemblages, safe/brave space, placemaking, flow, thirdspace, homeplace, and urbanormativity.

Protests against racial injustice and anti-Blackness have swept across elite colleges and universities in recent years, exposing systemic racism and raising questions about what it means for Black students to belong at these institutions. In Black Space, Sherry L. Deckman takes us into the lives of the members of the Kuumba Singers, a Black student organization at Harvard with racially diverse members, and a self-proclaimed safe space for anyone but particularly Black students. Uniquely focusing on Black students in an elite space where they are the majority, Deckman provides a case study in how colleges and universities might reimagine safe spaces. Through rich description and sharing moments in students’ everyday lives, Deckman demonstrates the possibilities and challenges Black students face as they navigate campus culture and the refuge they find in this organization. This work illuminates ways administrators, faculty, student affairs staff, and indeed, students themselves, might productively address issues of difference and anti-Blackness for the purpose of fostering critically inclusive campus environments.

"When safe spaces are no longer safe enough, what does it take to be brave? Marginalized voices from the intersections of gender, sexuality, and race provide some insights, tips, and tricks for facilitation of and participation in diverse courageous spaces"--

Frustrated with the flood of news articles and opinion pieces that were skeptical of minority students' "imagined" campus microaggressions, Micere Keels, a professor of comparative human development, set out to provide a detailed account of how racial-ethnic identity structures Black and Latinx students' college transition experiences. Tracking a cohort of more than five hundred Black and Latinx students since they enrolled at five historically white colleges and universities in the fall of 2013 Campus Counterspaces finds that these students were not asking to be protected from new ideas. Instead, they relished exposure to new ideas, wanted to be intellectually challenged, and wanted to grow. However, Keels argues, they were asking for access to counterspaces—safe spaces that enable radical growth. They wanted counterspaces where they could go beyond basic conversations about whether racism and discrimination still exist. They wanted time in counterspaces with likeminded others where they could simultaneously validate and challenge stereotypical representations of their marginalized identities and develop new counter narratives of those identities. In this critique of how universities have responded to the challenges these students face, Keels offers a way forward that goes beyond making diversity statements to taking diversity actions.

This book explores a particular genre of intervention into cultural difference, used across the globe. Organised cultural encounters is an umbrella concept referring to face-to-face encounters that are organised across a wide variety of social arenas in order to manage and/or transform problems perceived to stem from cultural difference. The authors base their focus on empirical contexts either located in Denmark or related to a Danish organisation, investigating interfaith work, training sessions in diversity management, volunteer tourism, a youth diversity project called the Cultural Encounters Ambassadors, and a community dance project. Through different theoretical approaches, and careful analyses of the micro-level practices occurring within the time-space of specific encounters, Galal and Hvenegård-Lassen demonstrate how both the interactions and their outcomes are considerably more complex – and contradictory – than evaluative and instrumental accounts of success or failure may capture. This book will provide a valuable resource for practitioners and scholars of intercultural relations working in the fields of cultural geography, anthropology, cultural studies, and migration studies.