Thinking with new materialism about ‘safe-un-safe’ campus space for LGBTTIQA+ students

Some LGBTTIQA+ students maintain campus is a safe space despite also detailing significant discriminatory practices they have witnessed or experienced there. This article explores this paradox drawing insights from new materialism and geographical research. Predominantly theoretical in orientation, it takes the notion of ‘dwelling with’ from Noora Pyyry’s posthuman work in geography and thinks with it, in relation to participants’ experiences of being LGBTTIQA+ on campus. These moments offer openings for undertaking a reconceptualization of campus space as neither inherently safe, nor unsafe. Thinking with new materialism enables an understanding of campus space as relational, ongoing and actively engaged in how students experience it. From this perspective, campus safety is not simply secured by the actions of individuals and presence of institutional equity policy. We argue shifting constellations of bodies, objects, and their entanglements create campus space as paradoxically safe-un-safe, potentially engendering a new politics of campus safety. This new politics recognises the issue of campus safety as more expansive than a problem of individuals or structural discrimination. Encompassing a new materialist understanding of space, campus safety is reconceptualised as contingent upon intra-active human-non-human entanglements.