Ending Sexual Violence on Campus

Alright, Now What?

With Ziyana Kotadia and Karen Campbell.

Content note: this episode addresses sexual violence. Too Scared to Learn: Women, Violence, and Education by Jenny Horsman (2013) uncovers how violence negatively impacts a student’s ability to learn. It focusses on women’s literacy, but the broader lesson is clear. None of us can properly learn when we’re scared and targeted. This has huge implications for girls, women, and gender-diverse students in all schools, as well as huge implications for post-secondary environments like colleges and universities, where sexual violence is a particular problem.

It’s the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, a great time to talk about ending sexual violence on campus. Our first guest is Ziyana Kotadia, an advocate and writer in her final year of an Honours Specialization in Global Gender Studies and a Minor in Feminist, Queer and Critical Race Theory from Western University and Huron University College. She’s Chair of the Safe Campus Coalition and a contributor to the Our Campus, Our Safety Action Plan, a call for action from students all over Canada. Ziyana is passionate about poetry, performance, and politics and has a keen interest in exploring intersections among the worlds of academia, art, and advocacy. She was the 2021-2022 Vice-President University Affairs for Western's University Students' Council, one of the nation’s leading student organizations, where she championed gender equity projects and the voices of over 35,000 undergraduate and professional students as the Chief Advocate and Stakeholder Relations Manager to the university's senior administration. Her most recent publications include her op-ed “Universities Need a Consent Awareness Week in Ontario” in the ‘Toronto Star’, her second-place winning poem "Heir to A Garden Heart" in ‘Symposium’, and her academic article "Poetry, Prayer, and Politics: An Autoethnographic Exploration of Womanhood in the Canadian Ugandan Khoja Ismaili Diaspora" in ‘Liberated Arts: A Journal for Undergraduate Research’.

Our second guest, Karen Campbell, Director of Community Initiatives & Policy at the Canadian Women’s Foundation. She speaks new research we did in collaboration with the McGill University iMPACTS initiative, documented in a report entitled: Social Media and Mobilizing Change for Community Impacts. It explores the connection between students, social media, and sexual assault on university and college campuses.

Relevant links: Our Campus, Our Safety Action Plan, Social Media and Mobilizing Change for Community Impacts: Results Report

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