Awards

• Winner of Winner of the 2020 Book Award from the European Group for Organizational Studies.

Overview

In the United States, approximately one in five women experiences rape during college, and LGBTQ students experience sexual violence at even higher rates. An increasing number of interested parties, from activists and students to legislators and university administrators, are re-evaluating the role that universities and colleges play in the incidence of sexual violence on their campuses. To this end, the number of U.S. universities under investigation for mishandling sexual assaults has recently grown to the highest count to date. Many more universities, guided by federal laws such as Title IX and the Clery Act, are working to better prevent and address various forms of assault on their campuses by implementing new policies, reporting procedures, and investigative processes. Now that such measures have been implemented for several years, however, the question arises of whether these institutional changes are actually combatting the issue of campus sexual assault or whether they might in practice be reproducing that violence in other forms. In Beyond the Rapist, Kate Lockwood Harris considers this question and how the relationships among organization, communication, and violence inform how we understand the ways in which universities talk about and respond to sexual violence. Drawing upon theoretical insights from feminist new materialism, Harris explores how complex physical and symbolic components of violence are embedded in organizations and applies this thinking to the policies and practices of a university known for its Title IX processes. In doing so, she suggests that combatting the epidemic of sexual violence on college campus involves both recognizing that sexual violence is part of larger systems of injustice and refining our definition of violence to encompass far more than individual moments of physical injury.

Full Product Details

9780190876937

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Reviews

"""In Beyond the Rapist, Kate Lockwood Harris carefully crafts a feminist new materialist understanding of sexual violence as an accumulation of organizational actions rather than a single act perpetrated by individuals. She brilliantly illuminates how schools frame campus rape as individual acts in ways that obscure the processes of organizational violence that facilitate rape and leave marginalized students more vulnerable to sexual violence. This book makes a significant contribution to the material-discourse debate in feminist theory, and it advances our understanding of the power of institutions to both enable and prevent sexual violence."" --Caroline Heldman, Associate Professor of Politics, Occidental College ""This book challenges common-sense assumptions about sexual violence on campuses. Through rejecting the discourse-material divide, it recasts violence as communicatively linked to material forces that are intrinsically organizational. As a provocative, insightful text, it provides vital case-based advice for institutions and society."" --Linda L. Putnam, Distinguished Research Professor Emerita of Communication, University of California, Santa Barbara"

In Beyond the Rapist, Kate Harris Lockwood carefully crafts a feminist new materialist understanding of sexual violence as an accumulation of organizational actions rather than a single act perpetrated by individuals. She brilliantly illuminates how schools frame campus rape as individual acts in ways that obscure the processes of organizational violence that facilitate rape and leave marginalized students more vulnerable to sexual violence. This book makes a significant contribution to the material-discourse debate in feminist theory, and it advances our understanding of the power of institutions to both enable and prevent sexual violence. * Caroline Heldman, Associate Professor of Politics, Occidental College * This book challenges common-sense assumptions about sexual violence on campuses. Through rejecting the discourse-material divide, it recasts violence as communicatively linked to material forces that are intrinsically organizational. As a provocative, insightful text, it provides vital case-based advice for institutions and society. * Linda L. Putnam, Distinguished Research Professor Emerita of Communication, University of California, Santa Barbara *

In Beyond the Rapist, Kate Harris Lockwood carefully crafts a feminist new materialist understanding of sexual violence as an accumulation of organizational actions rather than single act perpetrated by individuals. She brilliantly illuminates how schools frame campus rape as individual acts in ways that obscure the processes of organizational violence that facilitate rape and leave marginalized students more vulnerable to sexual violence. This book makes a significant contribution to the material-discourse debate in feminist theory, and it advances our understanding of the power of institutions to both enable and prevent sexual violence. * Caroline Heldman, Associate Professor of Politics, Occidental College *

Author Information

Kate Lockwood Harris is Assistant Professor of Organizational Communication at University of Minnesota. Her research on the relationship between violence and communication appears in fourteen different journals and several edited books. Dr. Harris has won accolades from national and international academic societies for her scholarship on organizational responses to sexual assault, and she consults with organizations to develop violence prevention programs.

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