Katherine McKittrick on the classroom and the idea of safe space

In this 2013 interview with Peter James Hudson, scholar and Antipode editor Katherine McKittrick explores the myth of the classroom as a safe space. She explains:

But the classroom is, as I see it, a colonial site that was, and always has been, engendered by and through violent exclusion! Remember Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy?! How wretched are those daffodils!?! I am not suggesting that the classroom be a location that welcomes violence and hatefulness and racism; I am suggesting that learning and teaching and classrooms are, already, sites of pain.

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