The pedagogy of (un)safe spaces and therapeutic speech: Containing the permeable subject in contemporary Britain

Fiona Wright

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Abstract / Description of output

Recent demands for “safe spaces” in the UK have provoked debates between those who view such practices as restricting free speech, and those who view them as tools for addressing inequalities in institutions such as universities. The polarized nature of these debates point to apparently irreconcilable conceptualizations of the nature and role of harm in public speech. Reflecting on ethnographic material from a different domain - the therapeutic - I argue that these debates hinge on tensions in late liberalism that emerge from co-existing and contradictory ideas of the speaking subject. Specifically, I trace how, in a novel approach to mental health care in the UK, embodied and affective experiences of the (un)safety of therapeutic speech unfold with reference to metaphors of “permeability” and “containment”. Bringing these two spheres into conversation with one another, I develop the notion of “therapeutic pedagogy” to describe how late liberal ideas of the relationship between language and affect centre a dualistic mode of subjectivity in which the self is both bounded interiority and radically open to material-affective relations with others. This tension in ideas of the speaking subject in turn gives rise to contested approaches to the presence of harm in public speech.
Original languageEnglish
JournalCurrent Anthropology
Publication statusAccepted/In press - 2 Dec 2021

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