This article presents emancipatory feminist teaching methods to empower adult women who are survivors of sexual assault in higher education settings. It delves into the work of leading scholars such as Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, and Ira Shor, as well as feminist pedagogy and relevant literature on sexual assault survivorship in higher education.…

This essay details research into feminist digital activism in the Australian context through analysing the themes that emerged from the Teach Us Consent website. It provides a preliminary analysis of its contents as a means to continue and deepen the conversation around issues of gender, consent, and the education system. It also examines the…

Politically expedient approaches to difficult knowledge about sexual violence have included educational practices that create conditions for 'safe' spaces, such as announcing content in advance, trigger warnings and other pedagogical practices that make care allowable and smooth out the sharp edges of violence that can knowingly invoke trauma.…

By employing a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this paper examines the issues of women's movement and empowerment by exploring the literacy practices of feminist activists. The narratives of literacy and its impact on women's empowerment have been dominated by economic approaches. Freire's notion of consciousness-raising has provided insight…

Universities in the United States have undertaken the goal of addressing gender-based violence (GBV) on campus. Legal reforms have provided guidance on how this should be done, including the adoption of Title IX and the 2011 "Dear Colleague" letter. This guidance focuses on limiting liability concerns through mandatory/responsible…

Rape culture has roots in our gendered history of the United States which manifests itself on college campuses as well. Attending college has been found to be the riskiest time for women in terms of sexual assault, as up to 1 in 4 women may experience some type of sexual assault or attempt during their collegiate years. This study explored how one…

North American feminist scholarship on violence against women (VAW) focuses primarily on gendered-based violence and does not substantively incorporate intersectionality. In this paper, I offer a comparative analysis of Canadian Indigenous and White middle-class adolescent girls' narratives of toxic masculinity, rape culture and sexual violence. I…

In this article, we report findings from a feminist discourse analysis of YouTube vlogs in which women and girls discuss and narrate their experiences of sexual violence. The analysis yielded three discourses and three counterdiscourses: the "refusal" discourse and the "complicating consent" counterdiscourse; the "deviant…

This article derives from part of a larger study on sexual violence prevention in teacher education that analyses the narratives of fifteen teacher candidates in an Ontario university. It begins by providing a rationale for the research, which engages emerging teachers as key stakeholders in prevention education. Narrative inquiry was conducted to…

Rape culture and sexual violence have especially entered popular discourse in recent years, largely due to the significant activism of Tarana Burke's #MeToo movement. As such, because educators are increasingly taking up these topics, approaches to such intense subject matter in literacy learning need to be creatively and critically (re)considered…

Drawing on data from a larger feminist study that explored how secondary English teacher candidates responded to a sexual trauma text set and pedagogy for teaching such narratives with Canadian adolescents, this paper examines how caretaker discourses emerged in response to these stories and learning. This especially manifested as emerging teacher…

With sexual violence prevention programs gaining traction in secondary schools, students' attitudes toward sexual violence have begun to be measured more frequently. While these attitudes are measured as outcomes of prevention programs, students' preexisting attitudes toward sexual violence shape how prevention programs are received by the…

As a literature professor whose own research is at the intersection of literary and gender and women studies, in each of her courses, Diana Aramburu devotes a few weeks solely to the topic of gender violence and femicide. In this article, she documents her own teaching practices around these topics, and assesses the results of these practices by…

This case study explores the experiences of nine female-identifying feminist public educators working with Ontario, Canada, sexual assault centres who regularly facilitate discussions about sexual consent and gender-based sexual violence in schools, post-secondary institutions, and community workshops. The educators discuss their experiences of…

Over the last decade, there has been growing awareness about issues of sexual consent. This has resulted in a global shift towards prioritising education and campaigns which address consent and sexual violence. Yet much discourse about consent continues to reinforce legalistic and binary notions of consent/rape which do not map onto young people's…