Overview
In the United States, approximately one in five women experiences rape during college, and LGBTQ students experience sexual violence at higher rates than their peers. Given this context, many colleges are working to better prevent and address these assaults. This book takes up this social problem--how organizations talk about and respond to sexual violence--and considers it in proximity to a persistent theoretical dilemma in the academic field of organizational communication: How are organization and violence related, and what does that relationship have to do with communication? Guided by feminist new materialist and intersectional theories, the book examines one public U.S. university known for responding well to sexual violence. It focuses on the policies--shaped by federal laws Title IX, the Clery Act, and the Violence Against Women Act--that require most faculty, administrators, and student-employees to report sexual violence to designated campus offices. Unfortunately, as these policies intervene in some sexual violence, they also reinforce other violent systems. The book illustrates the negative consequences of considering communication to be either separate from the physical world or indistinguishable from it. It also details problems with the notion that only individuals enact violence. Through its focus on two core ideas--communication and agency--the book encourages scholars to avoid wholly constructivist or realist arguments, and it shows the importance of questions about power and difference in organizational scholarship on post-humanism and materiality. The book concludes with suggestions for how US universities can generate more effective interventions in sexual violence--
- | Author: Kate Lockwood Harris
- | Publisher: Oxford University Press
- | Publication Date: Apr 01, 2019
- | Number of Pages: 184 pages
- | Language: English
- | Binding: Paperback
- | ISBN-10: 019087693X
- | ISBN-13: 9780190876937
