Introduction: Charting a Path for #MeToo in Academia

2019

2019

Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 2019

The Seton Hall Law Review, 2020

HALL LAW REVIEW staff who worked so hard on the symposium, and all of the participants in the Seton Hall symposium honoring Charlie Sullivan. This Essay is dedicated to Charlie Sullivan, a brilliant scholar and teacher and extraordinarily generous colleague. Charlie has always been the consummate mentor and gentleman. There is no question that he understands the difference between appropriate mentoring and harassment.

Journal of Applied Communication Research, 2019

#MeToo has breathed new life into the women's movement and especially into understanding and rectifying sexual harassment, abuse and assault. It has galvanized activists around the globe. And it has placed thousands of stories of the harassed in full view of the public. Sexual harassment, abuse and assault may occur within the organizational context or beyond; but sexual harassment, in particular has been legally labeled an organizational phenomenon. With this in mind, Robin Clair frames the early part of this article around the most recent organizational communication theories (see the appendix for an overview of these theories). Following the essay is a forum, in which invited scholars address questions related to the #MeToo movement.

Academic Psychiatry

Communication, Culture and Critique, 2018

This article examines the movement organizing and media activist work university students do to address sexual violence, the problem of faculty/student relationships, and the failures of some institutional response. It notes, in particular, how students make sexual violence public through the use of open letters; how they create anonymous and informal online reporting platforms for students to disclose sexual violence; and how they model practices of accountability and survivor-centred care. This article notes the essential work student activists do to address, and redress, the problem of sexual assault on university campuses, and how they make their work visible. Students bear a lot of the burden for addressing the problem of sexual assault and faculty sexual misconduct on our campuses; it is a burden many faculty bear too as those who support and advocate for this change. We see how this burden gets articulated in the stories many students are telling and sharing with each other via blogs and social media posts, and the work they do drafting policy and building cross-campus student movements. Contemporary student activism, I suggest , models what responsibility and accountability for sexual violence might look like. With students Ayesha Vemuri and Arianne Kent, I am conducting a research project that examines how student activists use media to intervene in campus cultures of sexual assault, and provide new models of redress and activist imaginations for violence-free campuses. We historicize contemporary feminist student activism against rape culture in the context of longer local genealogies of shared forms of student activist practice in Canada, doing what we call a " media history of student activism. "

Media Report to Women, 2020

Students, scholars, and higher education administrators in the United States have increasingly paid attention to sexual misconduct by university employees, especially following the #MeToo movement that went viral in October 2017. For instance, the Academic Sexual Misconduct Database, compiled by Michigan State University professor Julie Libarkin (2020), collects cases of academic sexual misconduct in the United States, based on public documents and news media reports. An online survey on fieldwork experiences (N=666, of which 516 were women) found that women respondents were 3.5 times more likely to report having experienced sexual harassment than men (Clancy et al. 2014, para. 19). Canta-lupo and Kidder’s (2018) review of over 300 publicly documented cases of sexual harassment of U.S. graduate students, found that a “disturbingly high proportion” of cases involved “higher-severity sexual harassment” (p. 4); 53% of cases involved professors who were serial offenders. They estimated that 10% of women graduate students at major U.S. research universities have been sexually harassed by faculty members.

Journal of Women, Politics & Policy

How can we best protect and safeguard the progress of the #MeToo movement? This article presents 11 reforms designed to ensure the movement's drive toward justice. These fall into three areas. The first concern process reforms designed to (a) protect all those involved-accusers and the accused-in investigations of sexual harassment, (b) end differential treatment of those found guilty, and (c) ensure punishments are commensurate with the crime and proportional in terms of other transgressors. The second set of reforms focus on transparency of the process, including clarifying (a) how to file charges, (b) who makes decisions, (c) relevant public information on how charges and procedures are followed, (d) what transgressions result in which punishments, and (e) how complaints are investigated to protect the rights and privacy of all. Finally, I address cultural issues that address (a) our portrayal of women, (b) our societal attempts to prepare young people so they can better protect themselves, and (c) attempts to encourage bystanders to intervene in the face of sexual harassment of others.

Facta Universitatis, Series: Philosophy, Sociology, Psychology and History, 2021

Critics of the #MeToo movement claim that it has gone too far, that not enough hierarchies of abuse have been created to distinguish between the worst kinds of behaviors and those that are problematic but not criminal. The contention is that the #MeToo movement casts too wide a net. In this paper, I make an argument to the contrary: the #MeToo movement has not gone far enough in calling out the totality of abuse women, and some men, face daily. Left outside of the sexual harassment paradigm is gender-based sexual harassment that is not imbued with sexuality but nonetheless happens because of a person’s sex. I advance two related claims. First, the history of how we came to our current understanding of sexual harassment shows the sexualization of sexual harassment occurred because of political, legal, and practical reasons. Nothing confines us to our current view. Second, I argue against the position that sexual harassment is sui generis from gender-based harassment; rather, both ema...