Technological Advocacy and Crime Reporting in an HBCU Setting: Addressing the Prospect of Legal Cynicism in the Ebony Tower

In comparison to white students, the study of Black student attitudes toward crime reporting on college campuses is deficient, especially in historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Using approximately 100 completed student questionnaires, statistical results suggest that the majority of students express a willingness to report a campus-related crime to campus police. The highest reported explanation for refusing to report a crime is based upon the prospect of being labeled in a negative manner. The highest reported explanation for reporting a crime is based upon the receipt of a financial reward and anonymity. Bivariate calculations indicate that age, gender, and residential status are significantly associated with crime reporting decisions. Policy implications, areas of further research, and limitations are provided.

Competition and collaboration: Title IX Coordinators and the barriers to achieving educational equity

How do compliance occupations successfully navigate complex institutional environments characterized by changing policy initiatives, managerial logics, unclear expectations, and competition from other occupational groups? This article examines the work of Title IX Coordinators at U.S. Colleges and Universities, who often hold dual roles, operate at lower levels within the institution, and lack the necessary resources to do their work. Using interviews, surveys, professional association materials, and Title IX job ads, this paper describes how Title IX Coordinators adapt to a complex institutional environment and overcome these obstacles in their efforts to enforce Title IX. Title IX Coordinators develop and create collaborative networks of expertise that develop and build shared institutional influence. Using pre-existing relationships and sharing information and expertise, Title IX Coordinators partner with legal counsel, campus police, human resources, ombuds, student affairs, and other occupations to co-produce Title IX compliance.

Queer Communication Pedagogy

The emerging subfield of queer communication pedagogy (QCP) marks an educative praxis that centers the liberation of queer and trans subjects and, specifically, those who are most violently impacted by racist cisheterosexism in the form of carceral logics and policing. Intersectional articulations of sex, gender, and sexual difference are disciplined and literally policed both in and out of the communication classroom. Course design, for instance, provides a disciplinary means for justifying the violent repression of sex, gender, and sexual difference in the classroom through activities that insist on a compulsory framing of gender in binary terms. Or, policing can emerge in the racist cisheterosexist pedagogue’s gaze that communicatively constitutes “incivility” out of racialized sex, gender, and sexual difference; this is evidenced in the violent policing of queer and trans students of color beginning with the school-to-prison pipeline and on into higher education settings where educators are empowered to call on campus police forces to remedy what they perceive as “unruly”—queer—students. QCP reflects histories comprising both critical communication pedagogy (CCP) and queer pedagogy. CCP, itself informed by critical pedagogy, is committed to liberatory educative ends driven by praxiological means derived of lived experience in historical context. That is, critical pedagogy takes as a point of departure lived experience as a means of resisting intersectional oppression and, in turn, enacting progressive social change. CCP strives toward these liberatory goals through communicative means, specifically dialogic encounters between/with/as students-and/as-teachers. Conversely, queer pedagogy refers to a destabilization of pedagogical presumption implicating the racist cisheteronormative foundation informing carceral-centered knowledge production and educative engagement. In turn, queer pedagogy labors toward the abolition of carcerality including the prison industrial complex and police state. Taken together, QCP marks an activist-oriented educative praxis that labors toward liberation of queer and trans subjects through the abolition of racist cisheterosexist carcerality.