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Studies and Analyses
Exploring Sexist Violence in Universities: A Groundbreaking Study
Published last year, Mediaciones y Traslaciones (Mediations and Movement) is the first scientific-educational study providing a critical survey of how the genders are represented in universities in terms of knowledge-generation, relationships and communications.
The term ‘sexual violence’, one way of describing violence carried out by people known or unknown to its victims, both in public and private places, has been substituted by ‘gender violence’ or ‘domestic violence’ since the mid-1990s.
This led the report’s two authors, Cristina Vega and Amparo Navarro, to suggest that this choice of use of some terms over others was itself worthy of consideration, for which reason they carried out an “open and necessarily partial” study with the help of professors, students and associations.
“In this report we want to call into question the dominance of violence in the production of knowledge, and in the generation of public cultural imagery and information,” Vega explained to SINC.
The study, based on interviews and accompanied by a guide, comprises ten audiovisual sections looking at universities as spaces of knowledge production, describing the different ways in which violence is viewed from the standpoint of specific disciplines, and considers symbolic violence within educational relationships. Of particular interest is the final section, ‘Science, bodies and objects’, in which the authors focus on how women have been displaced as holders of scientific wisdom since the development of the medico-ideological theories of Aristotle and Galen (see video).
The reference guide, which includes practical exercises and extremely interesting bibliographic resources, is based on the work of researchers of the calibre of Donna Haraway, Sadie Plant, Saskia Sassen, Thomas Laquer, Rene Clair and Richard Levontin.
This original work, aimed at teaching staff, students and persons who wish to open up the debate about these issues, is part of The University in the Face of the Symbolisation of Violence research project, being carried out at the Feminist Research Institute at Madrid’s Universidad Complutense university.
