The Dynamics of the Protected Space: Spatial concepts and women students

This article draws on qualitative research with diverse women students in the UK, illustrating how spatial concepts can be applied to the higher education context and to women's experience within it. The students researched create the university as an imagined space: a refuge from various forms of external threat. This is integral to associations they make between studying and selfhood. Constructing 'belonging' in the face of events and processes that seem to point to their marginalisation reveals the university not as a transparently understandable space, but as a space constructed by and from their own desires: emotional and conceptual, rather than rational and objectively measurable. However, the university is a temporary refuge rather than a permanent liberation. The imagined space repeatedly comes up against material limits, and is always under threat from the encroachments of others.