Collaborating for Change: Transforming Cultures to End Gender Based Violence in Higher Education: Recent Episodes
Susan Marine and Ruth Lewis
Gender-based violence on college campuses is a serious problem-- luckily, activists all over the world are directly challenging it and working hard to create violence-free campuses. In this podcast, we’ll talk with authors who wrote about their work in our book, Collaborating for Change: Transforming Cultures to End Gender Based Violence in Higher Education. Students, faculty, student affairs educators and community activists are coming together across the globe to formulate constructive resistance to the existence of GBV, and through ingenuity and persistence, and shifting policy, cultural norms, and accountability in concrete ways. Listen to learn more about their work and the ways they are pushing back, centering survivors and creating real change on their campuses.
In this episode, Diane Crocker (St Mary's University, Canada) and Marcus A. Sibley (Carleton University, Canada) join Ruth and Susan to explore how rape culture, as a concept, is used to mobilize efforts to reduce campus sexual violence in Canada, and how activists’ understanding of rape culture has limited our ability to change it. They help us understand that while rape culture is not simple, our responses often assume it is. This insight is informed by complexity theory. We begin with the assumption that rape culture is a complex context that does not respond well to solutions that assume static, cause-effect relationships. Our guests conducted research that used narrative methods specifically developed to capture students’ ideas and experiences about rape culture, inviting them to code their own stories, and illuminate how rape culture manifests in their day to day lives. Their stories point to important shifts in current efforts to transform campus rape culture in Canada and beyond.
In this episode, Diane Crocker (St Mary's University, Canada) and Marcus A. Sibley (Carleton University, Canada) join Ruth and Susan to explore how rape culture, as a concept, is used to mobilize efforts to reduce campus sexual violence in Canada, and how activists’ understanding of rape culture has limited our ability to change it. They help us understand that while rape culture is not simple, our responses often assume it is. This insight is informed by complexity theory. We begin with the assumption that rape culture is a complex context that does not respond well to solutions that assume static, cause-effect relationships. Our guests conducted research that used narrative methods specifically developed to capture students’ ideas and experiences about rape culture, inviting them to code their own stories, and illuminate how rape culture manifests in their day to day lives. Their stories point to important shifts in current efforts to transform campus rape culture in Canada and beyond.
In this episode, Catherine Donovan discusses a multi-institutional study conducted in England with colleagues Khatidja Chantler, Rachel Fenton, and Kelly Bracewell, exploring barriers and facilitators to implementing the recommendations of the UUK (2016) report on violence against women, harassment and hate crimes, particularly focusing on sexual violence and harassment. Interviews were conducted with twenty-five volunteers and here we focus on the six interviews conducted with academics. Participant accounts reveal how, in becoming cognisant of the power structures within their universities, they were able to identify the way that power operated to stall or block promoting the GBV agenda, and to point to the transformative measures they had taken to circumvent barriers.
Join us as we discuss this cross-institutional, multi-partner coalition initiated by student organisations in collaboration with security, service and academic staff in two Scottish universities. Along with local service providers and police, our guests critically discuss the tensions encountered and challenges posed in creating a ‘whole-university’ approach to preventing and responding to gender-based violence. In so doing, it highlights the centrality of student leadership for developing an informed response and driving forward meaningful change, and the importance of internal/external partnerships for prevention work, root and branch reform of university policies and practices.