Files
Abstract
Gender-based violence at colleges and universities results in a host of negative consequences, including disrupting students’ access to education. In attempting to understand this social problem, scholarship on this issue has been dominated by criminological, public health, education, and public policy perspectives. In this dissertation, I utilize a social movement perspective to examine students' violence prevention efforts at the local and national level. How do social movement organizations at the national and local level work to address the problem of gender-based violence? How do activists select and engage with movement targets? How do the social, political, and cultural contexts in which students are situated shape their activism? I address these questions based on interviews, observations, and content analysis of documents related to the activities of students involved in Cavaliers Against Violence, a student organization at a university located in the southern region of the U.S., and Survivors Fighting Violence, a national social movement organization. Through this research, I challenge monolithic representations of the campus anti-violence movement and demonstrate the importance of contexts in shaping student activists' goals, targets, and strategies. Furthermore, I highlight how marginalized survivors' needs are being centered in proposed anti-carceral solutions to violence on campus and, simultaneously, ignored in local contexts that reproduce the white institutional spaces of campus within organizations. Finally, I call for the use of feminist epistemology to guide the interdisciplinary and intersectional study of gender-based violence in educational settings.