ABSTRACT
This chapter will approach sexual violence in academic spaces from an anthropological perspective, reflecting auto-ethnographically on my own experiences of sexual violence as a graduate student in off-campus spaces. Centering experience as a form of knowledge creation, this chapter will offer ethnographic insights into sexual violence in liminal academic spaces – that is, off-campus or unofficial gatherings or events where academics socialize, network, and work with one another, including student organizations, labour unions, and social events. These spaces exist outside of the institutions that make up the campus but are component parts of the social and political worlds of the academy. With no formal institution claiming liability or authority over these spaces, incidences of academic sexual misconduct in these spaces slip through the cracks in institutional sexual violence policies. How then, this chapter asks, can we make such spaces – which we enter as academics to work, network, and socialize with our colleagues – safer? How might we better support academics who are victimized in those spaces? In analysing the literature on complaint, institutional betrayal, and the neoliberalization of academic sexual violence policies in conversation with reflections on navigating institutional responses, this chapter will identify key issues in how academic institutions conceptualize sexual violence, liability, and the demarcation of academic and non-academic space, and how that informs their responses to sexual violence. This chapter will conclude by reflecting on what trauma-informed responses to academic sexual misconduct might involve by offering examples of supportive and affirming responses from individual faculty and staff members.
