November 12, 2021

In teaching news, Ball State honored my work with a group of students dedicated to raising awareness and providing resources around the issue of sexual violence on our nation’s campuses with a 2021 Immersive Learning Faculty Award. If you’re a member of a university community, I hope you’ll check out the details of our project at IndeliblePodcast.com and listen to the first season—plus bonus episodes!—of our podcast on Indelible.SimpleCast.com.

So far, we’ve taken a deep dive into topics such as Title IX on campus, empowerment self-defense, the aftermath of an assault and pursuing charges. We want to figure out how to make the conversation about the unacceptably high rates of sexual violence on campus as big and loud and system-changing as we can. The rates of assault (around one in five while our students are in college) haven’t changed in the over thirty years since I was assaulted at a University of Oregon fraternity party and I’m not going to stop making noise and trying to make change; you can read “Slaughterhouse Island” (about my own rape and recovery) in Roxane Gay’s Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture.