“Towards Culturally Safe Virtual Spaces for ALL” presented by Park, Ueno, Kai and Skybetter
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Culturally safe spaces are crucial for unpacking and acting upon lived experiences of being marginalized for one’s culture, ethnicity, gender, or class. These spaces are carefully curated to shield interlocutors from bias, victim blaming, dismissal, or attacks often encountered in everyday contexts, while facilitating open dialogues between like- minded members to validate personal experiences for brainstorming and implementing strategies, old and new. By confiding in one another, it builds support networks and communities to act together, establishing a critical mass of individuals to push the agenda forward. However, when these spaces happen online, the traditional framework of safe space making faces previously unforeseen challenges such as sentiment polarization or in-group/out-group dynamics. Further, given the geopolitical skew of global infrastructures, discourses in certain regions become a de-facto referencing frame for the rest of the globe due to academic dependency. This panel, therefore, invites a media art scholar, a sound artist, an AI scientist, and a choreographer/scholar to reflect on these issues from their respective vantage points to discuss critical impediments and how we may create different types of safe spaces that are open to ALL by mitigating the limitations of digital sociality through new technological affordances.
