2023 In Review
Speakers
Wanda Swan, Founder & CEO of Start By Talking LLC
Wanda Swan is a nationally recognized thought leader in survivor advocacy, anti-oppression work, restorative justice, and violence prevention. A speaker, scholar-practitioner, anti-oppression coach, and Research Fellow for the University of New Hampshire’s Prevention Innovations Research Center, she has been deeply embedded within the anti-violence movement for over 15 years.
Wanda’s work has spanned across higher education, local and state agencies, and nonprofits dedicated to survivor resiliency and sustaining anti-oppressive environments. As both a curator and co-conspirator of systems disruption and research that informs her field of practice, she is co-founder of, and currently holding co-leadership roles in, professional organizations like Campus Advocacy and Prevention Professionals Association (CAPPA) and NASPA’s Sexual and Relationship Violence Prevention Education and Response Knowledge Community (NASPA SRVPER KC).
As founder and CEO of Start By Talking, Wanda supports clients through individual and group coaching, organizational assessment, and virtual learning on the strategy of Whiteness and how those messages reverberate across policy, procedure, and practice.
Her research project, now nine years old, on identifying and reseating the Black founders of the anti-violence movement serves as the vehicle that first allowed her to birth a company with the audacious goal of liberation for all through 1:1 conversation. Today, Wanda’s vision has expanded beyond her ancestor’s wildest dreams.
Jennifer Hirsch & Shamus Khan
Jennifer S. Hirsch, a medical anthropologist and Professor of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University, works at the intersection of public health and social science, with a research agenda that examines gender, sexuality and migration, the anthropology of love, social dimensions of HIV, and undergraduate well being, including sexual assault. Hirsch co-directed the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation (SHIFT), a research project on sexual assault and sexual health among Columbia undergraduates.
Jennifer Hirsch continued…
With Shamus Khan, she is coauthor of Sexual Citizens: Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus (WW Norton), which draws on SHIFT’s ethnographic research to examine sexual assault and consensual sex among undergraduates in relation to the broader context of campus life. Hirsch co-directs the Columbia Population Research Center, which brings together faculty from schools across the campus who work on population health and inequalities. A 2012 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2015 Public Voices Fellow, and a 2018-19 Visiting Research Scholar with Princeton’s Center for Health and Well-Being, Hirsch’s published work includes both scholarly and popular writing on health and social inequality. She is author of A Courtship After Marriage: Sexuality and Love in Mexican Transnational Families, the award-winning coauthored The Secret: Love, Marriage and HIV, two edited volumes on the anthropology of love, more than 80 peer-reviewed articles, 15 book chapters, and many op-eds in venues such as Time and The Hill. Hirsch also just completed six years of service as a board member for Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, including the last two as board chair. Hirsch earned her A.B. from Princeton University in History, with a certificate in Women’s Studies, and her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in Population Dynamics and Anthropology.
Shamus Khan is a professor of Sociology and American Studies at Princeton University. He writes on culture, inequality, gender, and elites. He is the author of Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School (Princeton), The Practice of Research (Oxford, with Dana Fisher), Approaches to Ethnography: Modes of Representation and Analysis in Participant Observation (Oxford, with Colin Jerolmack), and Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus (W.W. Norton, with Jennifer Hirsch).
Shamus Khan continued…
Shamus co-directed the ethnographic component of SHIFT, a multi-year study of sexual health and sexual violence at Columbia University. He directed the working group on the political influence of economic elites at the Russell Sage Foundation, is the series editor of “The Middle Range” at Columbia University Press, and served as the editor of the journal Public Culture. He writes regularly for the popular press such as the New Yorker, the New York Times, Washington Post, and has served as a columnist for Time Magazine. In 2016 he was awarded Columbia University’s highest teaching honor, the Presidential Teaching Award, and in 2018 he was awarded the Hans L. Zetterberg Prize from Uppsala University in Sweden for “the best sociologist under 40”.
Conference Details
Breakfast
9:15 – 9:45 a.m.
The morning will begin with a breakfast bar and coffee.
Keynote & Panel Discussion
Centering Survivorship and Building Communities
10 a.m. – Pugh Auditorium
The day begins with a talk by Wanda Swan centered around anti-oppressive advocacy for campus communities.
Panel Discussion with Jennifer Hirsch, Shamus Khan, and Betsy Barre
11 a.m. – Pugh Auditorium
Sexual Citizens was published in 2020 and is a nationally-renowned book that transforms how we understand and address sexual assault. Through intimate portraits of life and sex among today’s college students, Jennifer Hirsch and Shamus Khan present an entirely new way to understand sexual assault. Their insights transcend current debates about consent, predators in a “hunting ground,” or the dangers of hooking up. Sexual Citizens reveals the social ecosystem that makes sexual assault a predictable element of life on a college campus. The powerful concepts of sexual projects, sexual citizenship, and sexual geographies provide a new language for understanding the forces that shape young people’s sexual relationships. The result transforms our understanding of sexual assault and provides a new roadmap for how to address it.
Lunch
12 – 1 p.m. – Benson 401B
Workshop Sessions
1 – 4 p.m. – Benson University Center 401
Four different workshop sessions will be offered during this time in Benson University Center Room 401, Sections A-D. The workshop topics are TBD, so please indicate your interest in attending these sessions, and you will receive an email with further information as soon as they are confirmed.
What’s in the Punch?
Centering harm reduction in student organizations
1 p.m. – Benson 401A
Tim Wilkinson and Betsy Adams
Presented by leaders in Student Engagement, this session is designed to dig into the social environment at WFU and help student leaders understand organizational responsibilities for interpersonal violence prevention and response. The workshop will also use a risk and protective factor analysis to evaluate our social environments.
Detox: a mindful look at masculinity
1 p.m. – Benson 401D
Peter Rives
This workshop is designed to help participants think about the ways in which masculinity is taught and will introduce the concept of mindful masculinity and the options available to male-identified individuals with regard to the embodiment of masculinity.
Pleasure: the politics of feeling good
1 p.m. – Benson 401C
Deb Marke & Hannah Rehm
The goal of this workshop is to help participants understand their bodies and how to listen to them. Workshop leaders will normalize feeling grounded, listening, naming and understanding feelings. They will also destigmatize and demystify sex and pleasure.
Anti-oppressive advocacy for campus communities
2 p.m. – Benson 401C
Wanda Swan
This workshop aims to increase understanding of how overarching systems and field-specific training developed problematic approaches to the higher education field; increase understanding of how the role and history of anti-Blackness served as a backdrop for inequitable care for Black students and survivors of violence and develop organizational strategies to identify and shift from non-racist to anti-racist perspectives.
Title IX for student-athletes
2 p.m. – Pugh Auditorium
Jessica Telligman
This workshop is for current WFU student-athletes and will serve as their yearly Title IX training session, highlighting resources and reporting options at the University.
Building Blocks for Healthy Relationships
2 p.m. – Benson 409
Katie Whitley
The goal of this workshop is to identify relationship red and green flags, identify different forms of boundaries, identify different forms of communication, teach boundary-setting/communication skills
Dating Culture v. Hookup Culture:
a student-led conversation
2 p.m. – Benson 401A
Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc.
This workshop is a student-facilitated conversation about student observations of interpersonal relationships.
Employees: Responding to Disclosures of Sexual Misconduct in the Workplace
3 p.m. – Benson 401A
Kim Caprio
This workshop is for WFU employees. The goal is to promote participant confidence in responding to disclosures from students and employees by providing education on trauma-informed responses, including what to say and what not to say.
Consent is Sexy: a student-led interactive workshop
3 p.m. – Benson 401C
SHAG: Sexual Health Advisory Group
This workshop is student-led and will focus on all things consent.
Student Employees: responding to disclosures of sexual assault
3 p.m. – Pugh Auditorium
Jessica Telligman
This workshop is for WFU student employees. The goal is to prepare students for how to respond to disclosures from other students about allegations of sexual misconduct when those disclosures happen in their work role.
ConsentCon 2023 Program
ConsentCon is a conference dedicated to exploring the meaning and operationalization of consent on college campuses.