Academia Meets Community Agency: How to Foster Positive Collaboration in Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Work

Collaborative and supportive partnerships among academicians and community agency members represent one method of working successfully toward ending violence against women. Members of academia and service agencies are uniquely poised to collaborate with one another to foster both domestic violence and sexual assault research agendas as well as direct service to survivors. This paper provides suggestions and methods of how to create positive, collaborative relationships between academicians and service providers in the field of domestic violence (DV) and sexual assault (SA). Specifically, we will discuss the reasons for collaboration, useful steps in developing a partnership, issues of trust and time investment, research methods, and giving back.     

Obituaries: Lady Delia Pilcher

The New York-born journalist and travel writer Francis Nichols (1879-1904) is best known for his travels through early 20^th-century China. However, his attempt in 1903-4 to travel through Tibet to Lhasa ahead of the Younghusband Mission, and thus to become the first westerner to reach the city, has been forgotten, partly on account of his death in the field and the loss of his diary. From new research in recently-catalogued documents and letters in the archives of the American Geographical Society (AGS), the author has compiled an account of Nichols’ mission to Lhasa, including the support he received from US backers, including the AGS, his travels in China, Tibet and India, and his relations with Younghusband and the British. Although Nichols was unable to reach Lhasa, the author observes that he should be credited as the first American to travel from India into the Chumbi valley in southern Tibet and across the Tibetan plateau from Phari to the town of Gyantse, 120 miles south-west of Lhasa.