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.…

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.…

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…

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…

Social emotional learning (SEL) aims to promote student well-being, including healthy relationships that are free from harm like gender-based-violence (GBV). We investigated U.S. SEL policy through the lens of GBV, and how policy in the New York State (NYS) context operates to actualize or constrain SEL aims. To do so, we developed and applied a…

Data collected over the past 30+ years consistently show one in five women are sexually assaulted on college campuses (Mccauley & Casler, 2015), and that the occurrence may be even higher due to serious underreporting on campuses (Palmer & Alda, 2016). To better combat sexual assault on campus, universities are charged through federal law…

In India, sexual violence today is a routine form of violence directed against Dalit women--those from the most subordinated castes of India. Dalit is a socio-political identity affirmed by India's ex-untouchable communities, historically considered "service castes" and exploited based on their birth. While all Dalits are exploited for…

One in five women are sexually assaulted while in college (Cantor et al., 2015; Ali, 2011). Research has demonstrated that higher education is a patriarchal environment that is oppressive to women in a number of spheres (Acker, 1990; Burnett et al., 2009; Catalano, 2014; Miriam, 2007; Walby, 1989). Past research on sexual assault and patriarchy…

This conceptual paper explores the ways in which higher education has become an instrument of the state in advancing state goals for addressing violence against women and how bureaucracies to enforce these state goals have coopted the time and resources of higher education practitioners. This cooptation has meant that the broader feminist goal of…

This paper addresses the question of totalising gender-power relations that have led to and shaped the wars of the 1990s in Yugoslavia and the emerging ethno-national states on the "periphery" of Europe. I argue that the same type of gender-power relations continue to dominate the region, notably Serbia, and to perpetuate gender…