Understanding Sexual Violence on a College Campus
The Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation (SHIFT) is one of the most comprehensive studies of sexual violence within a community. Taking two years, and drawing upon surveys, diaries, focus groups, interviews, and embedded ethnography, SHIFT is an attempt to systematically and scientifically understand sexual violence, and proposes community transformations that can help address and reduce it. In this talk Shamus Khan draws upon the SHIFT project to think through how we might better make sense of sexual violence, and what we might do to create healthier campus communities.
Shamus Khan is professor and chair of sociology at Columbia University. He is the author of over 70 articles, books, and essays, including Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School (Princeton), The Practice of Research (Oxford, with Dana Fisher), Approaches to Ethnography: Modes of Representation and Analysis in Participant Observation (Oxford, with Colin Jerolmack), and the forthcoming Exceptional: The Astors, the New York Elite, and the story of American Inequality (Princeton). He is the co-Principle Investigator of SHIFT, a two year study of sexual health and sexual violence at Columbia University. He directs the working group on the political influence of economic elites at the Russell Sage Foundation, is the series editor of “The Middle Range” at Columbia University Press, and the editor of the journal Public Culture. He writes regularly for the popular press such as the New Yorker, the New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and has served as a columnist for Time Magazine.