Alison Hanson

ALISON HANSON, then a graduate student at University of California, Santa Cruz, California, was awarded funding in October 2019 to aid research on ‘Scripting Sexual Violence: The Politics at Poetics of Title IX at UCSC,’ supervised by Dr. Megan Moodie. This project examines how legal, administrative, and narrative practices on campus at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) script sexual violence and constrict possibilities for survivors. Federal regulatory guidance over the past decade has enabled survivors to seek remedy for sexual violence and harassment at universities through the legal framework of Title IX. Yet in 2020, federal rulemaking narrowed Title IX jurisdiction to bolster due process rights for respondents, which spurred broad conversation about the limits of Title IX on campus and shaped survivors’ access to administrative processes. Using research methods of participant-observation with campus administrators and student survivors, interviews, surveys, discursive analysis of legal texts, and social media analysis, this project studies how sexual violence is produced and talked about in the campus environment. The findings illuminate how dominant scripts of sexual violence are changing at UCSC in the wake of this dynamic sociopolitical environment brought by Title IX guidance and the #MeToo movement, as well as the unexpected context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ultimately, this research suggests the need for a broader capacity for hearing survivors’ stories that do not align with dominant scripts to build more supportive campus environments.