Held Lecture Hall, 304 Barnard Hall
Conversation
Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College
What would it take to prevent sexual violence on campus, support survivors, and create meaningful accountability? Bringing research on the social and structural dimensions of campus sexual violence into conversation with transformative justice approaches, this event will examine how gendered, racialized, and other inequalities create the conditions for sexual violence, how institutions sustain existing relations of power, and what justice beyond punishment might look like.
Jennifer S. Hirsch, coauthor of Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus, will draw on her research with Barnard and Columbia students, and will be joined by Camila Pelsinger Villalba, a transformative justice practitioner and researcher whose work focuses on community accountability. The discussion will be moderated by Elizabeth Bernstein, Chair of the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, whose scholarship on carceral feminism critiques the reliance on policing and punishment to address sexual violence.
Registration is required. Open to Barnard and Columbia staff, faculty, and students. Co-sponsored by the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College.
Campus Rape Culture and Survivor Justice: a Student-led Workshop
November 30, 7–8:30pm, Milstein 614
In preparation for “Campus Sexual Violence: Rethinking Power, Prevention, and Accountability,” join student leaders for a planning workshop that will include presentation on the history of survivor justice organizing at Columbia University; how universities sustain cultures of impunity; conversations on the Jane Doe case at Cornell University and campus rape culture; and calls for preventative reform. Students will discuss how to move forward to achieve survivor justice and collaboratively prepare questions for our expert speakers at the December 2nd panel.
Light snacks and refreshments will be provided. The workshop is open to Barnard and Columbia students only, and registration is not required.
Jennifer Hirsch‘s research 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.She has published articles in journals such as American Journal of Public Health, Studies in Family Planning, AIDS, and Culture Health and Sexuality. Her books include A Courtship After Marriage: Sexuality and Love in Mexican Transnational Families (University of California Press, 2003), which explores changing ideas and practices of love, sexuality and marriage among Mexicans in the U.S. and in Mexico, and the coauthored The Secret: Love, Marriage and HIV (Vanderbilt University Press, 2009), which analyzes the social organization of extramarital sexual practices in Mexico, Nigeria, Uganda, Vietnam, and Papua-New Guinea and the implications of those practices for married women’s HIV risk. Along with Dr. Claude Ann Mellins, Hirsch co-directed the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation (SHIFT), a study supported by Columbia University that examines sexual health and sexual assault among Columbia and Barnard undergraduates. She is the co-author, with sociologist Shamus Khan, of the Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus, which was named an NPR best book of 2020. Hirsch has been involved in many state-level legislative advocacy campaigns. She is currently working with the Caring Majority on Fair Pay for Home Care workers, and with a statewide coalition to pass legislation ensuring access to comprehensive sexuality education.
Camila Pelsinger Villalba (she/ella), is a graduate student, organizer, and transformative justice practitioner working to build networks of care and accountability in community. Her background in sexual violence prevention, survivor support, mutual aid, and community organizing to shut down immigrant detention centers, jails, and prisons informs her research and work. Camila is currently finishing her PhD on abolition feminist community-based responses to violence at the University of Oxford and recently started law school at Yale University. She has a BA from Brown University in International Relations and a Masters in Criminology from the University of Oxford.
Elizabeth Bernstein is Professor and Chair of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Professor of Sociology at Barnard College. Her research and teaching focus on the political economy of the body, gender, and sexuality. She is the author of the award-winning books Brokered Subjects: Sex, Trafficking, and the Politics of Freedom (University of Chicago Press 2018) and Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex (University of Chicago Press 2007), and co-editor of the volumes Paradoxes of Neoliberalism: Sex, Gender, and Possibilities for Justice (Routledge 2021), and Regulating Sex: The Politics of Intimacy and Identity (Routledge 2004). She is currently engaged in research for a new book project entitled Imagining Immunity: The Science and Politics of Chronic Dis-ease, a feminist analysis of the immunological metaphors that guide common conceptions of bodily risk and suffering, as well as biopolitical interventions designed to address conditions ranging from allergies to autoimmune disorders to the sequelae of infectious disease. Her research and scholarship have been recognized by awards from the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, AAUW, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Sociological Association.