4216 - Sexual Harassment, Violence, and the Construction of Knowledge (Sponsored by the ASA Working Group on Harassment)

Session Submission Type: Workshop

Description

The proposed workshop will be a discussion on Sexual Harassment, Violence, and the Construction of Knowledge. The discussion will focus on what our discipline's lack of attention to sexual harassment and violence means for us as producers of knowledge and for the knowledge we collectively produce. Invited participants have produced scholarship interrogating these issues. Rather than a presentation of papers, I will provide panelists with a list of questions for reflection ahead of time, and the session will allow ample time for discussion from the audience.

The questions addressed may include:
• How do the dominant narratives and expectations in our discipline contribute to the marginalization of harassment and other forms of violence experienced by researchers (and even sexual harassment/violence as objects of study)?
• How are these narratives informed by racist, sexist and heterosexist academic cultures?
• What are the costs of the marginalization of sexual harassment and violence for individual researchers and for the construction of knowledge?
• What is the relationship between sexual harassment and violence within academia and the social worlds we study?
• Why has sociology silenced discussions on these issues and what can we do about it?
• How do academic cultures and the knowledge we produce change when we center these issues? What might alternative visions for doing sociology look like?

Sub Unit

• Workshops / Policy and Research Workshop

Session Organizer

• Patricia Richards, University of Georgia

Co-Leaders

• Elizabeth A. Armstrong, University of Michigan

• Rebecca Annice Hanson, University of Florida

• Gloria Gonzalez-Lopez, University of Texas at Austin

• Anna Patricia Hidalgo, Columbia University

• Miriam Gleckman-Krut, University of Michigan