Blue-light emergency phones on campus: Media infrastructures of feeling

Abstract

In recent years, movements such as #metoo, Slutwalk, and others have drawn attention to women’s experiences of a lack of safety in public, professional, and educational spaces. This article steps back to an earlier era of such activism, tracking the context in which blue-light emergency phones were installed on college and university campuses in the United States. I argue that blue-light phones constitute an infrastructure of feeling, drawing on Raymond Williams’ classic formulation of the ‘structure of feeling’. They served not only to address emergent understandings of campus safety (particularly sexual assault), but to produce affective experiences of ‘safety’ among students, parents, and administrators. The infrastructure of blue-light emergency phones then concretized that structure of feeling in such a way as to render it more dominant, more persistent, and more tightly intertwined with local campus cultures, not only at the time, but through to the present day.

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