BA, Oberlin College, 2016, Politics

This paper considers the constitutional questions posed by trigger warnings in higher education. Specifically, I look at the relationship between trigger warnings and First Amendment rights. I show that trigger warnings, a hot button issue in academia and the cultural discourse today, are neither exempt from constitutional concerns nor do they automatically violate First Amendment rights.The Court often interprets the First Amendment's central goal as promoting the pursuit of truth through the uninhibited free flow of ideas. The Court defines institutes of higher education as crucial spaces to forward this pursuit. Do trigger warnings aide or hinder the pursuit of truth in the college classroom? I explore two legal frameworks to consider this question. The first considers trigger warnings as a prior restraint on a professor's academic freedom, which is protected under the First Amendment. The second considers trigger warnings as a constitutionally permissible form of accommodation for women in higher education.This paper concludes with suggestions of how trigger warnings can be effectively and legally used in higher education. Trigger warnings can risk infringing on a professor's First Amendment rights; trigger warnings can also be benign and, sometimes, considerate teaching tools. A balance is possible between the two.

Committee: H.N. Hirsch (Advisor) Subjects: Education; Education History; Education, Higher; Higher Education; Law

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2016, American Culture Studies

The contemporary debate over safe space has inspired a multitude of news editorials, blog posts, and passionate commentary, presented along a hard binary of proponents and opponents. Defenders of safe space strategies, including trigger warnings and call-outs contend that these practices benefit a larger social justice project, while opponents insist they reiterate past political correctness movements and constitute censorship. This project strives to situate the contemporary safe space debate within a broader historical and critical context through a textual analysis of the defenses and critiques published between 2011 and 2016. It considers three key themes that recur in that discourse, namely the belief that safe space takes identity politics to an extreme, the belief that safe space strategies create a population of hypersensitive victims, and the belief that calls for safe space constitute a form of violence or policing. Each of these themes is examined in comparison with another safety project, (e.g. women's-only spaces, domestic violence shelters, and public safety or policing). This method complicates the deterministic view of the contemporary safe space movement as a result of the rise in social media. It also challenges the binary that links safe space with progressive politics and opposition to safe space with conservatism. Ultimately, it allows for insights gleaned from the examination of previous safety projects to inform recommendations for effectively pursuing safety as a social justice aim.

Committee: Becca Cragin Ph.D. (Advisor); Radhika Gajjala Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: American Studies; Gender Studies; Glbt Studies; Web Studies; Womens Studies