“Did you know the concept of social safety only exists as such in the Netherlands?” The audience in the lecture hall at VU University Amsterdam looked surprised and laughed. We alle learned this for the first time during the lecture that Dr. Ea Høg Utoft delivered for Lova’s annual meeting on June 12th, 2025.
General Members Assembly
Every year, Lova Network meets for a lecture or study day, combined with the General Members Assembly (GMA). During the GMA we discussed the annual report of 2024 (including the financial report) and the plans for 2025. This year, we also voted for the change of chairs. After five years of chairing, Jasmijn Rana passed on the baton to Lise Zurné (Erasmus University Rotterdam) and Loes Oudenhuijsen (Avans Hogeschool Den Bosch) who will co-chair Lova Network from now on.
Leaving Lova Chair Jasmijn Rana in the midst of new Lova duo-chairs Loes Oudenhuijsen and Lise Zurné
Gender, diversity and Higher education
After the general assembly, Loes and Lise opened the annual meeting and gave the floor to Dr. Ea Utoft. The lecture, titled “The Discursive politics of social safety work in Dutch higher education” was based on Dr. Ea Utoft’s ongoing research with Prof. Marieke van den Brink on social safety policies and practices at Dutch Universities. Her research is based at Radboud University, Nijmegen, where she started working in 2022 after a postdoc and PhD at Aarhus University, Denmark. At Radboud University, she works as an assistant professor in the Gender & Diversity research group at the Faculty of Social Sciences. She is also involved in the ongoing preparations for the upcoming Master of Intersectional Gender Studies. Her research focuses on gender and diversity in higher education, singlehood and international mobility of scholars, and epistemic injustice against feminist knowledge production in academia. In 2024, she co-edited the special issue of Tijdschrift for Gender Studies on “The Feminist Classroom”.
What is social safety?
When she arrived in Netherlands, Dr. Utoft was overwhelmed with all the information about social safety: there were lectures and courses being offered, such as the active bystander course, there were special protocols and phone numbers, and she even recently encountered “social safety walks.” But when she tried to figure out what social safety means exactly, she couldn’t get a clear answer. “Social Safety” was everywhere, but it was also very vague. Internationally though, “social safety” as a term does not exist. Of course, similar measures exist at universities around the world, but they are often embedded in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies and practices. Her research therefore asks “what is social safety?” and “what is social safety work?”. In her lecture, Dr. Utoft outlined how she and her colleague traced the history of the concept of social safety in several policy reports that have been published in the last couple of years. The most extensive report Social Safety in Dutch Academia, published by KNAW in 2022, has been very insightful and impactful, but did not actually define the term. Racism, bullying, sexual harassment, lack of free speech…; social safety becomes an umbrella term that supposedly covers it all.
Contradicting meanings
For her research, Dr. Utoft and Prof. van den Brink interviewed fourteen “social safety workers” in Dutch higher education institutions with a variety of jobs in HR, DEI and health and safety departments, in which they examined the meanings, the practices and the organisation of social safety. The respondents all show a different process of meaning making when it comes to what social safety is. Some would focus on psychological safety, while others were explicit about how social safety goes beyond that. Some explicitly mentioned “being able to speak up” or issues of consent, other would more generally say that people feel unsafe when their personhood is negatively impacted. Some would say social safety focuses on everything that could be legally prosecuted such as discrimination and sexual harassment, while others would say that it is actually everything that is not covered by the law but still makes people feel unsafe. The interviewees would often use the metaphor of the ‘grey area’, but with unclear and even contradicting meanings and definitions.
Decoupled from social justice
The question that arises is whether social safety is “old wine in new bottles.” With the help of the work of Sara Ahmed, we could say that social safety is a new (and specifically Dutch) way of discursively reframing social justice issues. But while the terminology changes and we yet again think that we found the correct term, what happens in practice stays more or less the same. The idea is that a new term might work to energise people and that it might change something that wasn’t possible before. But Sara Ahmed shows how the issues at stake often become depoliticised in these discursive reformations. Building on the work of Lombardo, Meier and Verloo, Dr. Utoft argues that the concepts are stretched and expanded to include more issues, or shrunk to exclude other things, and they are bent and therewith decoupled from the actual goal. Social safety can become a form of virtue signalling, without addressing actual problems of sexism and racism.
Is social safety a helpful term?
Maybe social safety can be a helpful term, but it is clear that its potential is not yet reached. After Utoft’s lecture, members of the audience shared their experiences of how social safety is often not working because it is too vague, or that people assume training and workshops can actually significantly change working culture. The depoliticisation of social safety (or sexism, racism etc) is a risk because it makes it unclear where the responsibility of a safe working environment lies. Might a clear, and shared, definition work? Not only the audience today, but also the respondents of the research look forward to the conclusions of Dr Utoft and Prof. van den Brink, because it might help them in their work of making our higher education institutions a place where more people feel a form of belonging, inclusion and safety.
Lova Chair Loes Oudenhuijsen thanking Ea Utoft for her keynote