The fear of campus sexual assault has become an inextricable part of the college experience.
Research has shown that by the time they graduate, as many as one in three women and almost one in six men will have been sexually assaulted. But why is sexual assault such a common feature of college life? And what can be done to prevent it? Drawing on the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation (SHIFT) at Columbia University, the most comprehensive study of sexual assault on a campus to date, Jennifer S. Hirsch and Shamus Khan present an entirely new framework that emphasizes sexual assault's social roots—transcending current debates about consent, predators in a "hunting ground," and the dangers of hooking up.
Sexual Citizens: Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus is based on years of research interviewing and observing college life—with students of different races, genders, sexual orientations, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Hirsch and Khan's landmark study reveals the social ecosystem that makes sexual assault so predictable, explaining how physical spaces, alcohol, peer groups, and cultural norms influence young people's experiences and interpretations of both sex and sexual assault. Through the powerful concepts of "sexual projects," "sexual citizenship," and "sexual geographies," the authors offer a new and widely-accessible language for understanding the forces that shape young people's sexual relationships. Empathetic, insightful, and far-ranging, Sexual Citizens transforms our understanding of sexual assault and offers a roadmap for how to address it.
This event was held on Tue 2 Feb 2021, 12:30-2pm (GMT)
About the speakers:
Jennifer S. Hirsch is Professor and Deputy Chair for Doctoral Studies in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences and co-Director of the Columbia Population Research Center. A medical anthropologist and a 2012 fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Hirsch’s research agenda spans five intertwined domains: the anthropology of love; gender, sexuality and migration; sexual, reproductive and HIV risk practices; social scientific research on sexual assault and undergraduate well-being, and the intersections between anthropology and public health.
Shamus Khan is a professor of sociology at Columbia University, where he is the chair of the department. He writes on culture, inequality, gender, and elites. He is the author of over 90 articles, books, and essays, including Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School (Princeton), The Practice of Research (Oxford, with Dana Fisher), Approaches to Ethnography: Modes of Representation and Analysis in Participant Observation (Oxford, with Colin Jerolmack), and Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus (W.W. Norton, with Jennifer Hirsch).
