Holding space: On risk, rupture, and rebuilding academia otherwise

What happens when violence enters research not as data, but as lived experience? This essay begins with harm during fieldwork and unfolds into a reflection on the silences, punishments, and possibilities that follow. Holding Space challenges the institutional myth of the invincible researcher. It argues that vulnerability is not a flaw but a relational condition, and that care must be understood not as crisis response, but as research infrastructure. Tracing how institutions manage risk by displacing it onto individuals, the essay critiques the structural erasure of emotional labor and the epistemic violence of enforced detachment. Instead, it calls for a radical reimagining of academia one that embraces unpredictability, centers collective responsibility, and builds the conditions for care as a tensile, anticipatory, and collective ethic of research. Holding space, here, becomes a political practice, a refusal of disavowal, an insistence on recognition, and a call to reimagine academia not as a sanctuary from risk, but as a structure capable of holding it.