Brave Spaces

Have you ever been in a situation where you felt unsafe or unheard? Navigating these environments can be difficult, especially when one feels unwelcomed or excluded. The concept of Brave Spaces can help address disparities in belonging and inclusion and create an environment of acceptance, open communication, and active engagement.  

So, what is a Brave Space and what does it entail? 

You’ve probably heard about the term “safe spaces”. The term safe space has been used in various contexts, with a focus on increasing the safety and visibility of marginalized or oppressed community members. Contrary to what the phrase implies, a safe space is never actually safe. In fact, safety might be misconstrued as making things comfortable for everyone, which can sacrifice honest dialogue in the pursuit of comfort.  

While the terms “safe space” and “brave space” have often been used interchangeably, the term “brave space” has been reconceptualized in a slightly different way. Brian Arao and Kristi Clemens (2013) outlined five elements that create a brave space: 

1. Controversy with Civility: Which allows varying opinions to be accepted in a space 
2. Owning Intentions and Impacts: Where students acknowledge and discuss instances where certain dialogues have affected the well-being of another person
3. Challenge by Choice: Where students have the option to step in and out of challenging conversations 
4. Respect: Where students demonstrate respect for one another 
5. No Attacks: Where students agree not to intentionally inflict harm on one another 

Overall, the concept of a brave space encompasses all of what was previously described as a safe space, but clarifies that these environments are challenging and that students are expected to participate within it. Administrators, faculty, and staff can replace use of the term safe space with brave space. 

Brave Spaces in Academic Settings 

Brave spaces can occur in various places including academic settings. There are universal tenets that create brave spaces, which include: 

1. Diversity: recognizing and respecting the intersectionality that everyone brings to the setting  
2. Expectations and Ground Rules: establishing a set of mutually agreed upon rules prior to engaging in the setting 
3. Connecting on a Personal Level: going deeper to learn about others more intimately 
4. Maintaining Empathy: having compassion throughout conversations 

While these tenets can apply to numerous settings, one place that brave spaces can be fostered in is academia. For example, brave spaces can be established between student-supervisor/professor relationships. In addition to the principles listed above, the student-supervisor relationship highlights two additional elements, including the creation of the brave space itself and the emergence of counter spaces.  

A paper by Cook-Sather (2016) explored how the concept of a brave space can inform our thinking about student-supervisor relationships. Students were asked to provide essays outlining how brave spaces were created and maintained with their supervisor or other faculty members. Two main themes were extracted from the essays.  

One common theme was the creation of the brave space itself, which allowed the members to feel courageous enough to risk, explore, experiment, assert, learn, and change, knowing that they would be supported in those destabilizing and unpredictable processes. The students described how the explicit discussion about a shared desire to create a brave space fostered disclosure and collaboration between students and faculty members.  

The second theme was the creation of “counter-spaces”, which are pockets of collective resistance embedded within larger structural contexts that allow individuals from marginalized groups to engage in collective disruption of the larger narrative. These counter-spaces can occur at multiple levels, but Cook-Sather (2016) mentioned that it is most effective at the broader student-supervisory level. These counter-spaces provided opportunities where deficit notions of people of colour could be challenged and where a positive ethno-racial climate could be established and maintained. The creation of a counter-space requires genuine engagement in the form of attention, affirmation, and willingness to change. One student wrote that it provided a “seat at the proverbial table” allowing the student the “courage to speak up for what they believed and wanted to see”. 

When brave spaces are afforded in academic settings, students whose voices are often not heard speak in ways that enact a form of bravery and support the creation of brave spaces for and by their faculty partners. 

References 

Arao, B., & Clemens, K. (2013). From safe spaces to brave spaces. The art of effective facilitation: Reflections from social justice educators, 135, 150. 

Cook-Sather, A. (2016). Creating brave spaces within and through student-faculty pedagogical partnerships. Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education, 1(18), 1.