The Impact of Increased State Regulation of Campus Sexual Assault Practices: Perspectives of Campus Personnel

ABSTRACT

Seeking to improve university accountability and compliance with federal mandates, states are considering new reforms including mandating reporting of campus sexual assault allegations. These new policies remain an empirical “black box.” To address these gaps, the current exploratory study draws upon a recent survey that examines the extent of awareness, perceptions, concerns, and policy practices of victim advocates and other personnel concerning new legislation. Virginia is chosen as the state for this case study given its recent implementation of a controversial mandated reporting law, as well as other initiatives, across institutions of higher education. Findings suggest that campus personnel are aware and largely supportive of the new reforms, but they also share concerns. Implications for research and policy development are discussed.     

Linkages and Connections: A Framework for Research in Information and Communication Technologies, Regional Integration, and Development

This article examines the relationship between information and communication technologies (ICTs) and regional integration as a pathway to socioeconomic development in Africa and South America. Both regions share a colonial legacy often characterized by stronger economic ties to the developed world than within the regions. In recent decades, regional organizations have been involved in efforts to strengthen the infrastructure for ICTs, as well as the enhancement of economic and political integration as strategies to achieve development. However, the literature continues to show distinct research agendas that unwittingly overlook the connections between these areas. This article proposes a theoretical framework combining research on integration, ICTs, and development. It provides a brief analysis of each region and its ICT initiatives, the potential impact on regional integration, and how this relates to development. We suggest possible applications of the framework to identify and research the processes of integration and expected outcomes of development.     

Women/Gender and Development: the Growing Gap Between Theory and Practice

Briefly reviewing the evolution of the field of women development, the author argues that the field has lost the dynamism characteristic of earlier periods of constructive tension between theory and practice that led to the adoption of the gender and development framework and the incorporation of issues of multiculturalism, human rights, and political participation into a field that had largely been defined in economic terms. Today, however, critical theory is caught in an “anti-neoliberal” position that is increasingly outdated and that has interpreted women’s work, individual agency, and the role of the state in ways that hinder rather than facilitate new thinking and better outcomes for women participants in WID/GAD projects and programs.     

Unheard voices: a critical discourse analysis of the Millennium Development Goals’ evolution into the Sustainable Development Goals

The United Nations’ 2001 Millennium Development Goals and 2015 Sustainable Development Goals are of major importance for worldwide development. This article explores the construction of poverty and development within and across these documents, specifically focusing on the influence of dominant economic discourses – Keynesianism and neoliberalism – in the development paradigm. It assesses the failures of the Millennium Development Goals, as articulated by oppositional liberal feminists and World Social Forum critics, who embody competing values, representations and problem-solution frames that challenge and resist the dominant economic discourses. Finally, it evaluates responsiveness of the UN in the constitution of the Sustainable Development Goals.     

Untitled and Outdoors: Thinking with Saidiya Hartman

In some ways, critical conversations on black performance studies focus the first part of Scenes in its particular engagement with black fungibility. Arguably, the first half is black performance studies’ founding text. Even still, the authors argue that black performance studies is never not a question of ecological possibility, of being black outside in the wake of self-possession’s overdetermined white particularity. Such questions foreground Scenes’ second half. Just as Hartman elucidates how the “nonevent of emancipation insinuated by the perpetuation of the plantation system” bespeaks the state’s anti-black insistence on keeping blackness outside and in the field, the authors argue for the field’s persistence and just as well as for the question of what’s out from the field. It is in that spirit that the authors argue for the centrality of Scenes’ second half for black performance studies.     

Criminalising Academia: The Protection of State Information Bill and Academic Freedom

This article assesses the implications of the controversial Protection of State Information Bill for academic freedom in South Africa, specifically for communications, media and journalism studies. The Bill requires the security cluster to classify sensitive documents on national security grounds. Academic teaching and research can help citizens to understand whether the security cluster is acting in the universal interest, rather than the interest of a political elite; it can also be used to assess media performance in reporting on national security matters. Using a critical approach to the concept of national security, I argue that the Bill favours secrecy over openness, and South Africa’s embrace of the human security definition of national security has contributed to the problem. This overemphasis on secrecy is likely to reduce the few spaces that exist in academia for critical, emancipatory work on security issues, which could hobble the sector’s attempts to understand the deeper processes at work in the security cluster. If such enquiry is marginalised, then the higher education system risks becoming an instrument for continuity rather than change in South Africa’s existing, highly unequal power relations: relations that are being maintained increasingly by force.     

Paid Family Leave,Fathers’ Leave‐Taking,and Leave‐Sharing in Dual‐Earner Households

Using difference‐in‐difference and difference‐in‐difference‐in‐difference designs, we study California's Paid Family Leave (CA‐PFL) program, the first source of government‐provided paid parental leave available to fathers in the Unites States. Relative to the pre‐treatment mean, fathers of infants in California are 46 percent more likely to be on leave when CA‐PFL is available. In households where both parents work, we find suggestive evidence that CA‐PFL increases both father‐only leave‐taking (i.e., father on leave while mother is at work) and joint leave‐taking (i.e., both parents on leave at the same time). Effects are larger for fathers of first‐born children than for fathers of later‐born children.