Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power and Assault on Campus

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Researchers and authors Jennifer Hirsch and Shamus Khan take audiences through their journey with Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power and Assault on Campus, which draws primarily on the ethnographic component of the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation (SHIFT), the groundbreaking mixed-methods research project on sexual assault among Columbia and Barnard undergraduates. Sexual Citizens advances a new conceptual language for thinking about the social production of campus sexual assault: sexual projects, sexual geographies, and sexual citizenship. The book lays out the heterogeneity of experiences that are collapsed into the catchall category ‘sexual assault’, arguing for the importance of an intersectional approach to gendered power that accounts for how gender intertwines with age, wealth, control of space, disparities in clarity about one’s sexual projects and a socially-cultivated sense of one’s own sexual citizenship to create the circumstances in which assaults happen. While written in dialogue with social science theory about gender, sexuality, and social stratification, the book is accessible to general readers, and of course addresses a topic of urgent interest to students, faculty, and administrators on college campuses.

http://www.pop.psu.edu/news/3627/columbia-university-researchers-present-talk-based-sexual-assault-research

Sponsored by Penn State’s Population Research Institute, the Gender Equity Center at Penn State’s Office of Student Affairs, the Criminal Justice Research Center, the Departments of Sociology and Criminology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the Social Science Research Institute.