Of Safe Spaces and Sanctuaries: Dialogue as a Structure of Care
When the world around us is increasingly unsafe, how can our dialogue spaces provide sanctuary? How does creating refuge help us confront reality?
There is ongoing debate in the dialogue world around to what extent we as facilitators should be striving to create or promise “safe spaces” for dialogue participants. Early calls to center “safety” in the dialogue environment as a necessary precondition in order for participants to be “able to participate and honestly struggle with challenging issues” (Lynn Holley and Sue Steiner, “Safe Space,” 2005) have been challenged by scholar/practitioners like Brian Arao and Kristi Clemens who reject the very concept of “safety” as a meaningful framework for dialogic engagement (or even a possible condition within a dialogue environment). Arao and Clemens, and many others, advocate instead for a “brave spaces” framework for dialogue that “emphasize[s] the need for courage rather than the illusion of safety” so that participants are encouraged to embrace the inevitable discomfort that arises in conversation across difference (see their widely-cited chapter “From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces” in The Art of Effective Facilitation, 2013). And others, like the great feminist disability scholar Alison Kafer, have pushed back again against the rejection of safe spaces, reframing safety practices like content warnings as accessibility measures that facilitate rather than dampen courageous engagement with complex, challenging topics (and people) (see Kafer’s “Un/Safe Disclosures,” 2016).
Long before my professional role was “Dialogue Director” and I became familiar with this discourse around “safe spaces” in dialogue work, I have been interested in rhetorics of safety, security, vulnerability, victimhood, and survival more generally. I wrote a dissertation in Comparative Literature that was (partially) about the lived impact on children of the weaponization of “security” as a construct in post-9/11 U.S. political, media, and advertising discourse. I (and many others) have spent a lot of time reading, thinking, and writing about how often and how effectively in the 21st century we (Americans, though not only Americans) are made to feel unsafe in order to get us to vote for the people and buy the things that promise to make us and our home(land)s safer – and reject and dehumanize the people who are configured as threatening to “our” and “our children’s” safety, especially immigrants, Muslims, people of color, and gender-nonconforming people.
“Safety,” for me, thus feels like such a loaded and such a frequently exploited concept (and such a transparently flexible and flimsy construct) in the broader social/political/cultural landscape that I have hesitated to even engage with it as a dialogue concept. I generally avoid the language of “safe spaces” for dialogue, focusing instead on adjacent, related concepts that, while undeniably still abstract and open to exploitation, feel a bit less charged, a little more specific, and a lot more practically achievable, like belonging, trust, community, and emotional space.
But I’m called (back) to this conversation around safety in dialogue in a moment in which many people in the U.S. (and around the world), of a wide range of identities, are again/still feeling intensely unsafe in myriad ways, at school, at work, at home, on the street, online, and elsewhere. It’s not coincidental that the conversations about safety in dialogue that I cited above have played out within that very same post-9/11 context of deep anxiety around national or “homeland” security (note the publication dates: 2005, 2013, 2016). The macro reverberates through the micro: what we are doing in our little dialogue circles responds to these larger discourses and developments not only substantively (in terms of what we talk about) but also structurally (in terms of how we talk, or try to construct the dialogue environment, and what we promise will be possible, or warn should not be expected, within that environment, i.e., safety).
So, in a moment when students, staff, and faculty alike are reporting that they feel unsafe on campus due to their ethnoracial, religious, or gender identity, their political activism and speech acts, and their immigration status, it is not just appropriate but necessary to consider: How might our dialogue spaces offer sanctuary?
The debates I referenced in the opening paragraph all invoke “safety” as a precondition for dialogic engagement – something participants need to feel first in order to then fully participate (or, in the rejection of safety, something participants should not expect to feel before or during dialogue; something that is incongruous by definition with the purpose of dialogue across difference, which carries inevitable risk and vulnerability). They do not seem to consider that a sense of safety or security might be created through a dialogic process – not just safety in dialogue, in the context of engaging with whatever the conversation topic at hand is, but safety in a more holistic, embodied way; something that ameliorates or provides some temporary respite from the lack of safety people feel outside the dialogue space. This is what I want to try to think through: How might a dialogue space help create safety to be, not just safety to talk, among participants?
What does it even mean to be safe? Are we unsafe or just made to feel that way? Who’s allowed to make that assessment, and for whom? Psychologist Kurt Gray, in his recent book Outraged (2025), writes, “Today society is safer than ever. . . .Our modern world would be unrecognizable to our prehistoric ancestors, and even to human civilizations from just a few thousand years ago. . . . Ancient hominids feared getting eaten alive, and our more recent ancestors worried about being killed by other people. Thankfully, almost no one today is concerned with getting eaten, and relatively few people are at risk of murder, and yet we still panic about threats and become outraged over immorality. Some of these targets of panic and outrage–like authoritarianism and war–would make sense to our ancestors, but some would seem incomprehensible, like social media controversies” (12; 86). Gray cites statistics to argue that even obvious threats like the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change do not really merit the panic they produce, since medieval epidemics like the bubonic plague, or weather disasters of years past, produced far higher death rates than contemporary incidents.
There is much to take issue with even in this very brief snippet of Gray’s analysis, its U.S.-centrism and its one-dimensional understanding of “safety” as protectedness from purely physical harm perhaps being the two most major issues. But even if we accept that it is objectively true that humans on the whole are at least materially safer now than we have ever been, this does not erase the reality that (as Gray explores at length throughout the book) feeling safe is very different from being safe, and many, many of us seem to feel unsafe on a consistent basis. We could just dismiss this reality, or we could take it seriously and ask:
Why does everyone feel so unsafe? What’s the difference between being safe and feeling safe? Is “safety” even possible?
To be “safe” is to be “free from harm or risk.” Safety, meanwhile, is interestingly defined as “the condition of being safe from undergoing or causing hurt, injury, or loss” (emphasis added). There is something relational about safety: it is not just freedom from our own experience of harm, risk, or loss but also the assurance that we are not causing harm, risk, or loss to others.
And how could we ever be safe either from being hurt or causing hurt? As a childhood studies scholar I think a lot in terms of the home, both literally and metaphorically. The family home we are raised in is the first ecosystem, school, community, society, and government we experience. What we experience within that first home shapes how we understand our position and how we behave and respond within those larger structures, and vice versa. And we are living in a moment in which everyone’s home feels threatened.
Nothing I am about to say below is new or original, so if you are very aware of the fear and anxiety you are personally feeling and where it comes from, and/or you do not need to be convinced that fear and anxiety are widespread among those you work and live with, please feel free to skip over the next few paragraphs.
But in very brief: Our home on earth and within our smaller ecosystems feels threatened as our physical environments and their demographics shift rapidly (and we worry about the way our own actions or lack of action are contributing to destruction). Our home in our countries feels threatened as wars proliferate and drive people out of their homelands, as those of us from countries complicit in or directly perpetrating war and human rights violations watch in horror, knowing we are contributing to others’ unsafety. For those of us living in the U.S., our home is currently and increasingly threatened by immigration raids and revoked visas; travel bans; politically motivated violence across the spectrum; detention of dissidents; new rulings and reversals that rewrite policies related to gender, race, and executive governmental power; and more. (I acknowledge that others might say our national home is threatened by different things; regardless, fear, anxiety, and dread over “the way things are going” seem widespread across the ideological spectrum.)
On smaller scales – in our more localized homes – it continues to be a fact that many, many people have experienced both the threat of harm, injury, or loss and its reality, in a way that has affected their sense of basic bodily integrity and security in either the short or long term. Safety from the large predators or constant intergroup warfare that threatened our imagined ancestors of long ago – or longer lifespans, less infant death, and overall lower rates of poverty than even 100 years ago – does not mean that people do not still die, experience neglect and deprivation, and abuse each other in myriad ways, even in the richest country in the world. In 2018’s The Deepest Well, physician Nadine Burke Harris, whose research focuses on the long-term health impacts of childhood adversity, uses the metaphor of a forest full of bears to talk about the disproportionate dangers faced by folks who live in poverty or in particularly vulnerable bodies. All of us live in a forest that has bears in it, Harris says: no human life is free of risk from illness, or abuse, or loss. Anybody can experience harm, at any time. But some people live in forests that have a lot more bears roaming around; it’s not guaranteed that they will necessarily experience more attacks, but it’s vastly more likely.
And we (especially young people) occupy a media landscape, especially online, that constantly emphasizes (and often exaggerates, to Kurt Gray’s point) both our capacity and likelihood to be harmed (physically, emotionally, financially, spiritually) and our complicity in others’ harm or our likelihood to cause harm, based on our positionality within that forest. (I am afraid I am contributing to that media landscape right now, and I’m not sure how not to. The question of how to confront and dwell within our inherent vulnerability as humans without fetishizing or weaponizing either victimhood or resilience is the core tension of my ongoing thinking and work, both within dialogue work and beyond it, and I have not resolved it yet.)
Our home in our own bodies and spirits is thus also compromised and threatened; we often cannot feel safe even in ourselves, as long as we are participating in public life of any kind and to any extent, whether online or in the classroom. As we explored at length in an earlier DiaLogic post, we live in a discursive culture that operates, unsubtly, according to the logic of warfare. We are reminded over and over that whatever social status or belonging we might have can be taken away with one wrong move. In such a context, personal disclosure of ideas, experiences, and feelings in a communal space, including admitting to fear and insecurity, feels like surrender, feels like shame, feels like harm, feels like danger. Equally horrifying for so many of us, personal disclosure risks unintentionally producing shame and harm for others. (“I’m so afraid of saying the wrong thing” is something we hear over and over again in dialogue work.)
This lack of safety (or better said, this lack of feeling safe, regardless of the actual, physical threats present in the room at any given time) is traumatic. In Writing History, Writing Trauma (2014), Dominick LaCapra distinguishes between structural trauma and historical trauma. Historical trauma denotes events that have happened – incidents with a timestamp, as it were: contained in space and time. But structural trauma refers to “not an event but an anxiety-producing condition of possibility related to the potential for historical traumatization” (82). Knowing or suspecting (or being reminded, relentlessly) that the forest is full of bears – whether those bears are given the face of immigrants or ICE agents; Democratic politicians or pharmaceutical CEOs; transgender athletes or meddling university donors; social justice warrior classmates or privileged white male classmates – this produces the widespread, constant, low-grade anxiety around the possibility of real, direct harm that is structural trauma. Again, some of the bears are real and some are holograms projected by rhetoric; the effect is the same. People are scared to take a walk in the woods.
I believe we underestimate, or fail to even consider, the number of people present, in any given dialogue gathering, who have experienced historical trauma and who are affected by that trauma in their ability to be present and participatory in the ways we commonly believe people “should” be. I think we are too quick to imagine that high-performing students at an elite university are not affected by their wounds (or should not be, given the social privilege they have and are rapidly accruing). But even if no one present has experienced historical trauma, I believe that nearly everyone in any given dialogue space has experienced structural trauma to some degree as a result of our contemporary political, advertising, and (social) media landscape. That is to say, regardless of identity, belief system, or voting record, we are all living in the same abusive and unstable home, in which our belonging and our safety are (or feel) constantly precarious, in which we feel constantly surveilled, monitored, judged, and disciplined. That manifests in different ways for different people, which facilitators might recognize from their dialogue spaces – it might be hypervigilance around perceived threats, aggression, emotional shutdown, reactivity, approval-seeking or “fawning” behaviors, or any combination of these.
Safety, then, is not a stable, objective condition dictated by statistical risk assessments, but rather a relational, contingent, and constantly shifting sense. Within a dialogue space, safety cannot be promised by announcing upfront that this is a “safe space” or insisting that no one “should” feel afraid to engage in conversation based on an objective lack of threat. Safety cannot be a precondition for anything. It has to be something that is actively and collectively co-created and re-created, moment to moment, something alive and responsive and constantly restored. We cannot be “safe” in an absolute sense, but we can be, and come to feel, safer – safe enough to begin to shed our defensiveness and become more willing to embrace and work through discomfort, pain, and risk, even to heal from and repair harm. A sense of safety is less about the assurance that any and all harm can be avoided and more about what we can be reasonably sure will happen after harm has occurred.
Of course: we can (and often do, because we are encouraged to) try to feel safer through coping mechanisms that are harmful, exploitative, or just silly. The flimsy bars on the windows in my street-level West Philadelphia apartment are, to my mind, an obviously silly placebo measure – I don’t think my home is meaningfully harder to break into, but (obstructed view aside) the bars are probably harmless. Getting people to pay a lot of money for advanced home security systems, or Army-grade vehicles like Hummers, in the name of safety, one might argue, is exploitative, with the potential for perpetrating harm. And deporting immigrants or arresting nonviolent protestors is an actively, deeply harmful way to try to feel safer. And as the dictionary definition reminds us, “safety” is also about not causing harm.
But what if there are ways to feel safer that also help create more actual safety, through practices and interactions that build trust, community, belonging, and a sense of deep mutuality and interconnectedness? This is where I think dialogue can help.
What can dialogue do to make us (feel) safer? How can or should dialogue, and the dialogue space, offer sanctuary?
A dialogue space is an opportunity to create what Priya Parker calls “a temporary alternative world” (The Art of Gathering, 2018) – a space that operates according to different logics and different rules than the wider world. That it is an alternative world, in my view, does not mean it should exist as radically separate from the “outside” world – a dialogue space should not be an ivory tower. On the contrary, the dialogue space exists in relationship to that larger world.
This is where sanctuary is a helpful framework for thinking about how, and why, to construct the dialogue space as a temporary alternative world. A sanctuary, for humans and other animals, is a “place of refuge and protection . . . where predators are controlled and hunting is illegal.” A sanctuary does not deny the existence of predators and danger; it exists because of predators and danger (the bears in the woods). Not every space can or should be a sanctuary; by definition, a sanctuary is a consecrated place, a place deemed sacred in relation to the quotidianity (or even the desecration) that surrounds it.
A sanctuary, then, is a space on purpose: a site invested intentionally and consciously with a regard for the sanctity of the life within it and the right of that life to protection and safety. And dialogue is communication you do on purpose: a way of engaging and interacting that is done consciously, integrating deep reflection towards greater self- and other-awareness. Dialogue as a communication practice is in itself a “temporary alternative space” – a language that operates according to a different grammar than the dominant one.
That grammar is one of connection and community forged through humility, curiosity, collaboration and vulnerability, in explicit resistance to (as refuge from) the grammar of competition, power, and control. Increasingly, as I think about how to define “dialogue” in a way that is true without being overly narrow or prescriptive, I think it comes down to communication practiced within intentional structures of care. Rather than protecting participants from the pain and vulnerability of personal sharing, difficult realizations, or deeply challenging ideas, the dialogue space protects participants from carelessness around pain and vulnerability. Rather than promise safety, the dialogue space promises care. And rather than a paternalistic, top-down assurance on the part of the facilitator that they, the almighty dialogue deity, will protect participants, those structures of care are collaboratively built and maintained by all present. Together, we build the sanctuary – a home in the woods.
How do structures of care get created? What are practices that support the creation of dialogue-as-sanctuary?
Jacqueline Woodson’s 2018 novel Harbor Me is about a group of six 5th- and 6th-grade students in Brooklyn who gather every Friday afternoon for the last hour of the school day in what they call the ARTT room – “A Room to Talk.” With no teacher present, and no instructions for what to do besides talk to one another, the kids have to together determine what shape their gathering will take. Over the course of the school year, they coalesce into a community that exists to confront the real differences that exist between them (racial, religious, socioeconomic, and more), to name and process the various vulnerabilities, pains, and dangers they each face, and to give comfort to one another. These different functions exist simultaneously and in relation to one another; the ARTT room is not an escape from the real world, but rather a refuge that allows them to reflect on and confront the real world. It is a harbor – a shelter from rougher waters that is nonetheless still in those waters – a home they build together that is a safer home than their larger school (where they’ve all been marginalized and dismissed due to learning disabilities) or society (where some of their families are at risk due to immigration status, incarceration, or class status). A sanctuary.
A novel written for middle-grade audiences (readers between 4th-8th grade), I assign Harbor Me to Penn students in my Communications course “Good Talk” early in the semester as a representation of a dialogic ideal. I ask them to identify the choices, structures, and practices that the six kids develop over time to create their dialogue community. I do this because observing, inferring, and analyzing representations of dialogue is a more powerful, less hierarchical, and more pleasurable way to learn than if I were to simply give a lecture. In the same spirit, I would encourage readers of this blog post to do the same – go read Harbor Me and note the many structures of care that the characters create for one another through (sometimes grudging) collaboration and (often painful) discovery.
But since we do not have the privilege of sustained engagement through the structure of a class, I will just directly name some practices and share some resources that I think are helpful for creating a “safe space” for dialogue that does not feel paternalistic, pandering, or protective only of the most privileged.
1. Acknowledge and use your power and privilege as a facilitator/convener.
In Harbor Me, the children are left alone in the room to talk each week without a facilitator – but their teacher, Ms. Laverne, first secures them an empty classroom and provides a basic structure for them: “You’ll sit in this circle and you’ll talk,” she tells them. “This is your time. Your world. Your room.” She is not with them as they talk, but they wouldn’t be talking without her.
My excellent colleague in dialogue at Penn, Malik Muhammad of the Office of Interpersonal Development and Engagement, just introduced me to the language of convening. Rather than the “leader” or even the facilitator of their dialogue, Ms. Laverne is the convener; she has the structural privilege and the institutional authority necessary to provide (and protect) the space that is ultimately shaped and maintained by the students, and to bring them together in it.
Likewise, any facilitator must understand that, while the sanctuary gets built together by all participants (and reinforced, renovated, and repaired throughout the course of their time together), the convener provides the first load of bricks and some guidance around the blueprint. Ms. Laverne sets some basic guidelines or norms for her six students: “No one gets in trouble for talking here. You get in trouble for taking out your phone. You get in trouble for being disrespectful. . . . In this room we won’t be unkind.” When they protest, saying that they like their regular classroom and like being led by her, she encourages them to embrace the discomfort of this new endeavor: “What’s unfamiliar shouldn’t be scary. And it shouldn’t be avoided either.”
Besides serving as the convener, the facilitator can be a “safe space of one” for participants. As the facilitator, I cannot control what participants will say or how they will react to one another, but I can promise that I will use my position to make sure that processes of reflection, accountability, and repair are pursued when trust is broken or difficult moments occur. Chris Adamo, in their chapter “Curricular ‘Safe Spaces’” (in Teaching Through Challenges for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, 2020), notes the oft-forgotten genealogy of the university “safe space” as being originally located with the individual staff or faculty member who would signal (via a sticker on their office door, for example) that they were a person to whom it was safe to disclose LGBTQ identity. While, as Adamo also emphasizes, we cannot guarantee any participant’s “safety” (with us individually or within the communal dialogue space), we can at least signal our intention to be, and create spaces that are, inclusive and supportive. We can keep our individual promises.
And we can try to remain aware of how, because our position of authority as facilitators and the unique decision-making, space-shaping powers that position affords us, we hold extra responsibility to be aware of the (inevitable) traumas and deep anxieties participants are bringing into the dialogue space. To that end, Trauma-Informed Facilitation: Creating a Safer Space for Dialogue is a new SNF Paideia resource that shares some very basic, foundational practices that facilitators can adopt regardless of the dialogue’s purpose, topic, or format, the size of the group, or other variables.
2. Make space and time for participants to name their fears and insecurities about participating in dialogue.
Of course, facilitator anticipation of probable participant anxiety is not enough; participants must also be able to reflect on, name, and process the fears they bring into the dialogue space, in as specific a manner as possible, as the starting point for a conversation on what “safety” means (what they want it to mean) in the context of the dialogue(s) they’ll be having together. In Harbor Me, again, Ms. Laverne allows her students to name their resistance and hesitation around this new dialogue project; she doesn’t simply tell them they “shouldn’t” worry. And as they begin their conversations together they continue to work through their feelings of awkwardness, discomfort, and fear.
Getting Ready to Dialogue is a resource that the SNF Paideia Program’s staff and instructors use over and over in the early stages creating a sustained dialogue community, whether in classrooms, workshops, or co-curricular spaces. It is designed to create reflection and conversation around common anxieties and challenges before engaging in further dialogue as well as provide concrete strategies and scripts for participants to refer to, so that they can take some ownership over their experience and behavior within dialogue (versus waiting for the facilitator to deliver an optimal experience). This is a resource that’s designed to be used with participants; this facilitation guide provides a detailed plan for leading them through it in 20-60 minutes.
3. Unpack and define together what “safety” means (as well as “harm”).
Adamo emphasizes, “[Dialogue facilitators] cannot presume [participants] know what a ‘safe space’ implies. . . . Most importantly, [facilitators] declaring that [the dialogue space] is a ‘safe space’ does not necessarily make it so.” As discussed earlier, “safety” is not a unidimensional or simple construct. Dialogue participants are not just the builders but also the architects of the sanctuary they are creating together; they must dedicate some time to envisioning how they want it to look (and what specific bears they are trying to keep out, and which ones they would like to work on befriending).
Work to differentiate between physical, mental/emotional, and social safety, understanding that feelings of unsafety will tend to manifest physically even if they are related to social or emotional threats. Talk through the difference between dignitary and intellectual safety. Dr. Sigal Ben-Porath (Faculty Director of SNF Paideia) helpfully delineates between the two in her 2017 book Free Speech on Campus (this previous blog post shares some key concepts from that book). In a nutshell, dignitary safety denotes confidence that one’s belonging in the group will not be easily compromised and that harms will be accounted for, while intellectual safety denotes lack of challenge to one’s ideas. Talk about how creating safety in one area is necessary to venture outside of one’s comfort zone in another: dignitary safety allows for intellectual risk-taking, and physical safety is a baseline need on Maslow’s hierarchy for engaging in higher-level thought.
And take time, too, to create a shared vocabulary around the “bears” from whom participants are trying to create safety – what is considered harm? What is abuse? What is simply conflict or misunderstanding? Thinking About Harm is another participant-facing resource from SNF Paideia that includes discussion questions as well a basic taxonomy of terms helpful for these conversations.
Establishing this shared understanding of safety, harm, and related terms will help participants process moments of perceived threat and name the ways in which they are or are not safe. It is helpful, for example, in moments of acute activation, to take time to pause, breathe, and remind participants they are physically safe in this moment, that no harm can come to their bodies in this space and that they have agency both individually and as a group over how they proceed further with the (intellectual, emotional, or social) risks that are in fact present.
- 3. On the basis of this shared understanding around common values and goals for safety (as well as bravery and commitment to vulnerability, learning, and growth), create norms or community agreements together that reflect those values and goals.
Community agreements are like an instruction manual that the collective refers back to as they continue to build their sanctuary together. Safe and Sound is a guide to home repair by Mercury Stardust that frames (literal) home maintenance in terms of safety of multiple kinds. Community agreements or norms similarly help participants keep their constructed sanctuary “safe and sound” as they become more comfortable dwelling there together (and through the inevitable wear and tear of being in community together).
This Effective Norms for Dialogue resource from Paideia can provide some guidance for crafting effective norms. Alternatively, the Hopes and Fears activity from the Constructive Dialogue Institute helps marry together the “Getting Ready to Dialogue” activity with the creation of norms, asking participants to start by naming their anxieties as well as their aspirations for the dialogue ahead before identifying behaviors and practices that will support the creation of a healthy dialogue space.
Final Thoughts
The opening line of Harbor Me is We think they took my papi. It is the voice of Esteban, one of the kids in the ARTT group, echoing in the mind of Holly, the first-person narrator of the novel. She is remembering this as the instigating incident motivating Ms. Laverne to offer them the ARTT room to talk to one another in. Esteban’s father has been arrested and detained by immigration officials; Holly’s father is in prison, two hours north. The space that Ms. Laverne gives them, and that they then shape together, is in direct response to the sudden disappearance of Esteban’s father. It is a recognition that sanctuary has been compromised elsewhere for these children and an invitation to them to build their own, through dialogue and connection. Holly recalls, “Ms. Laverne said every day we should ask ourselves, ‘If the worst thing in the world happened, would I help protect someone else? Would I let myself be a harbor for someone who needs it?’ Then she said, ‘I want each of you to say to the other: I will harbor you.’”
Every day, previously declared sanctuaries get compromised, and spaces that never were sanctuaries to begin with become even less hospitable. We are actively discouraged from harboring one another and encouraged towards suspicion, fear, and judgment; towards personal advancement and self-protection over solidarity and coalition-building. Our dialogue spaces can passively reproduce or actively resist that desecration, division, and fear. We have the opportunity to signal to anyone who crosses the threshold, I will harbor you. We have the opportunity to help participants create a homespace in which they can harbor each other, in which vulnerability is bonding rather than compromising, in which they do not just feel safer but are actively creating a safer world – one that will help them confront the dangers outside with renewed strength and the assurance of a community somewhere that will shelter them.
