Results by title

Campus Whisper Networks examines how personal knowledge about student sexual assault circulates within college campus communities. Based upon both qualitative and quantitative survey data, Janet Hinson Shope and Richard Pringle's research demonstrates that students who have been sexually assaulted tell someone—almost always a friend. Most college students know someone who has been assaulted. Simply knowing, by means of relationships, that one or more peers have been assaulted affects the knowers, and the effects reverberate unevenly across campuses.  

Shope and Pringle highlight the structural properties that prohibit relational knowledge from becoming official institutional knowledge, confining it to whispers and secrecy within informal spheres of knowledge. The rules governing the circulation of such knowledge create an uneven epistemic field of sexual assault. This uneven field is consequential for the communities, affecting survivors and their confidants and shaping student views of the college community. Campus Whisper Networks demonstrates how personal and institutional avoidance, both the “need to not know” and “no need to know,” creates knowledge gaps that hide the community’s wounds and prevent personal knowledge from becoming social knowledge. 

Centering Student Activism is a deep exploration of institutional responses to sexual assault. It addresses critical issues facing campuses today, examining how students navigate institutional dynamics and utilize the power of new and traditional rhetorical strategies to effect change. In doing so, it provides a profound understanding of the mechanisms by which coalitions can transform educational environments.

Centering Student Activism features a national interview-based study of contemporary student activists who deploy rhetorical strategies and tactics—old and new, embodied and digital—with agility and awareness. They aim their strategies and tactics of “intersectional rhetorical feminism” to interrupt and transform a sedimented culture. The students’ activism highlights not only the harms experienced by survivors in the aftermath of their assaults but also how their efforts to communicate those harms are often stymied or silenced by official responses and practices. These student activists pair interruption with rhetorical transformation as they seek to create a survivor-centric culture. In so doing they spotlight the systemic roots of sexual violence and respond to sexual assault through intersectional, coalition-based work.

Through detailed analysis and compelling narratives, Shari J. Stenberg underscores the importance of community care and mutual support in advocacy efforts. Centering Student Activism is an essential work for navigating institutional dynamics, providing an important resource to students, educators, and administrators who seek to understand how universities silence survivors and how students create ways to speak back and transform institutional culture.

Young adults with intellectual disability tell the story of their own experience of higher education

 

How do students with intellectual disability experience higher education? Creating Our Own Lives addresses this question through the eyes of participants themselves. In relating their experiences and aspirations, these student perspectives mount a powerful challenge to assumptions that intellectual disability is best met with protection or segregation.

Taken together, the essays expose and contradict the inherently ableist claim that individuals with intellectual disability cannot be reliable storytellers. Instead, their deeply informative stories serve as a corrective narrative. The first of the four sections, “Laying the Foundation: Why Everyone Belongs in College,” focuses on belonging and inclusion; the second, “Opening Up Possibilities: Overcoming Doubt and Uncertainty,” conveys the optimism of this generation of advocates through stories of personal hardship, hopeful perseverance, and triumph over adversity; the third, “Inclusion as Action: Diversifying Student Experiences,” supports the understanding of diverse student experiences in inclusive higher education; and the fourth, “Supporting Growth: Peer Mentoring and Advice,” offers guidance to those reimagining and creating educational spaces.

Students with disabilities belong in higher education. Not only does this book serve as an important record of students enrolled in inclusive higher education programs, it is also an unprecedented resource, packed with information and inspiration both for parents seeking opportunities for their children and for individuals with intellectual disability who aspire to attend college.

Contributors: Makayla Adkins, Olivia Baist, Brandon Baldwin, George Barham, Marquavious Barnes, Katie Bartlett, Steven Brief, De'Onte Brown, Meghan Brozaitis, Mary Bryant, Gracie Carrol, Taylor Cathey, Maia Chamberlain, Antonio E. Contreras, Kim Dean, Elizabeth Droessler, Katie Ducett, Keiron Dyck, Rachel Gomez, Deriq Graves, Micah Gray, Maggie Guillaume, Cleo Hamilton, Nathan Heald, Joshua R. Hourigan, Hannah Lenae Humes, Courtney Jorgensen, Eilish Kelderman, Kailin Kelderman, Kenneth Kelty, Kaelan Knowles, Karlee Lambert, Kate Lisotta, Rachel Mast, Elise McDaniel, Emma Miller, Jake Miller, Lydia Newnum, Brenna Mantz Nielsen, Carly O’Connell, Nadia Osbey, Stirling Peebles, Breyan Pettaway, Amanda Pilkenton, True Rafferty, Taylor Ruppe, Lawrence Sapp, Tyler Shore, Brianna Silva, Alex Smith, Elliott Smith, Phillandra Smith, Payton Storms, Allen Thomas, Kylie Walter, Stephen Wanser, Sayid Webb, Breana Whittlesey, Luke Wilcox, Adam Wolfond.

Cutting, a form of self-mutilation, is a growing problem in the United States, especially among adolescent females. It is regarded as self-destructive behavior, yet paradoxically, people who cut themselves generally do not wish to die but to find relief from unbearable psychological pain. 

Cutting and the Pedagogy of Self-Disclosure is the first book to explore how college students write about their experiences as cutters. The idea behind the book arose when Patricia Hatch Wallace, a high school English teacher, wrote a reader-response diary for a graduate course taught by Professor Jeffrey Berman in which she revealed for the first time that she had cut herself twenty years earlier. At Berman's suggestion, Wallace wrote her Master's thesis on cutting. Not long after she finished her thesis, two students in Berman's expository writing course revealed their own experiences as cutters. Their disclosures encouraged several students in another writing class to share their own cutting stories with classmates. Realizing that so many students were writing about the same phenomenon, Berman and Wallace decided to write a book about a subject that is rarely discussed inside or outside the classroom. 

In Part 1, Wallace discusses clinical and theoretical aspects of cutting and then applies these insights to several memoirs and novels, including Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted, Caroline Kettlewell's Skin Game, and Patricia McCormick's Cut. The motivation behind Wallace's research was the desire to learn more about herself, and she reads these stories through her own experience as a cutter. In Part 2, Berman focuses on the pedagogical dynamics of cutting: how undergraduate students write about cutting, how their writings affect classmates and teachers, and how students who cut themselves can educate everyone in the classroom about a problem that has personal, psychological, cultural, and educational significance.