Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Victims of intimate partner violence (IPV) are being seen across multiple systems, yet little is known about the predominant patterns of cross system utilization. We are in the process of developing an integrated health, criminal justice, and civil court database to identify the trajectories of IPV victim help-seeking across these systems. To pilot our methods, we selected a random sample of 28 out of 1003 police-identified IPV victims (stratified by police jurisdiction and offense level) within one Midwestern county and extracted all available records related to these cases from hospital emergency department, prosecutor, court, and police administrative data for the years 1999-2003. Using these administrative data, we composed qualitative case narratives of emergency department, criminal justice, and civil court service utilization patterns over a four-year period. Findings indicate case narratives constructed from administrative records over time can reveal important information about the effectiveness of a system embedded with disciplinary silos. Furthermore, identifying patterns of service use can facilitate development of effective interventions in and among the various systems in which IPV victims seek relief from the injuries and construct safety plans for themselves and their children.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper explores the nature of the specialist industry of marketing law schools in the United States, Canada and Australia, which has significantly grown over the past decade, along with the growth in a range of influential ranking systems, often with dubious and unreliable methodologies underpinning. It explores the manner in which marketing strategies may influence core activities of law schools as part of their overall `positioning’, and in what ways competition amongst law schools for students has led to substantive changes in pedagogy, research profiles, infrastructure in a number of law schools. The paper also critically examines the manner in which various `core constituencies’ of law schools, such as prospective students, current students, alumni, prospective donors, the professoriate, central University administration, the legal profession, government, etc -are targeted by marketers and how these constituencies perceive and respond to these marketing strategies.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper investigates collective identity organizing of Pro-eating disorder (Pro-ED) groups on the Internet. Pro-ED groups have gained considerable media and scholarly attention in recent years owing largely to the superficial understanding of their commitment to the recruitment and maintenance of eating disorders among women. This study takes a grounded theory approach (Glaser and Strauss 1967) to uncovering the tactics employed by these groups. Using an adaptation of face-to-face ethnographic methods to investigate online communication (Mann and Stewart 2000) alongside the acknowledgement that online “communities” represent important sites of organizing and resistance (Ho, Baber, and Khondker 2002), the author identifies three collective
organizing practices in pro-ED groups that reveal a highly gendered character: 1) promoting beauty as self-worth, 2) organizing in and around the realm of domesticity, and 3) relying on friendship between each other and their eating disorders. The author argues that the identification of such gendered practices of mobilization illustrates how gender is socially constructed in and through collective action, and how collective identity organizing is constructed in and through gender ideologies.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Over the last several decades significant changes have been made to curriculum within institutions of higher education in response to demands for representation, inclusion and balance in perspective, content, pedagogy and program by traditionally marginalized communities. In some cases the changes have been extensive, infused throughout the disciplines and resulted in the creation of new departments; in most cases they have been concentrated in particular sub-disciplines and resulted in programs and minors.

This presentation will discuss research conducted over the last two years about the movement for curricular transformation in the City University of New York. This project aimed to contribute to the process of documentation of the important contributions these changes have made in reaffirming the central mission of access and excellence in public higher education, in the context of historical tensions about what goals are to be served, but also asserts that it is time for national retrospective and prospective reflection about curriculum in higher education. What has been accomplished, what has not? Does the study of social justice fit within academic purview, and if so, how and where?

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Liberal educators and advocates promote comprehensive sex ed as a response to the dangers that they believe lie in young people not having enough information about their bodies and options to be able to make responsible sexual decisions. While conservatives wrap youth and sexuality in mystery, science, flipcharts, and vocabulary terms are naturalism’s wrapping paper—the gilded paper and ribbons with which liberals and comprehensive sex ed wrap young people’s bodies and sexuality. In this ethnographic study of two pubic middle school sex ed classes, I demystify the natural, examining the implicit lessons sex ed offers in race, gender, and sexual difference.

Understanding the natural as ideological allows for an exploration of sex ed’s multiple “unnatural” lessons about bodies. Discussions of erections and ejaculation support men’s and boys’ claims to pleasure, while the absence of clitorises in representations of female bodies helps to reduce sexuality to an issue of reproduction in women’s and girl’s lives. Teachers’ consistent use of images of pink-skinned, slender, able-bodied, and conventionally modest female bodies affirms normatively racialized and gendered ideas about girls’ and women’s sexuality. Students’ scornful responses to these discussions of female bodies and organs contain an implicit lesson that teachers routinely avoid discussing in sex ed—that even the most conventional female bodies elicit scorn and derision. Though classroom depictions of female sex and reproductive organs sexuality educators enact, reproduce, and sometimes challenge gender, racial, and sexual inequalities.