From Targets to Agents: Women\u27s Perceptions of Their Vulnerability and the Strategies They Use to Resist

Women in the U.S. are sexually victimized at high rates and are socialized to believe they are unable to defend themselves. While there is ample evidence that women can successfully fight off assailants using physical force (Clay-Warner, 2002; Ullman, 2007), women’s self-defense training initiatives are not funded by the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) or any national anti-violence organizations (Carlson, 2014). The NRA, on the other hand, tailors programs to instruct women to use guns for self-defense leaving them as the only national organization promoting women’s right to defend themselves (Carlson, 2014). This project interrogates how women think about their vulnerability and the strategies they employ to defend themselves, focusing on self-defense training and gun ownership. Using the Listening Guide (Gilligan, 2015; Sorsoli and Tolman, 2008), a feminist form of narrative analysis, I did several close “listenings” of twenty-four interviews focusing on voices of vulnerability and resistance. I also did autoethnography based on my participation in ten armed and unarmed self-defense classes. In their narratives, many women reveal strategies of resistance that directly address the form their vulnerability has taken. By taking self-defense, these women re-learned what their socialization as girls and women had left them ignorant of (Tuana, 2006); that they are capable of defending themselves. Women’s narratives about guns hold many contradictions, highlighting the challenges of self and family protection in a context where guns appear to be everywhere. I propose a new conceptualization of women’s resistance that is informed by vulnerability and experiences of victimization, reflecting complex personhood (Gordon, 2008)

Toward Epistemological Ethics: Centering Communities and Social Justice in Qualitative Research

As qualitative researchers based in the United States, we theorize and ground ethical issues within our work as inherent to the continuum of methods, epistemologies, and research relationships. Through collective and transgressive reflexivity, we write as members of the Society for Qualitative Research in Psychology (SQIP) Ethics Task Force, re-imagining the American Psychological Association's (APA) Ethics Code as a resource that is inclusive of qualitative inquiry and responsive to the "evidence based" quandaries encountered in our praxis. In this article, we name the gaps in the Code that are incommensurate with social justice oriented qualitative research and shake the epistemological ground of the Code from bottom-up. We interweave our vision for a new ethics Code that foregrounds the intersubjective and reflexive nature of knowledge production, preserves dignity, attends to power relations within and outside of the research endeavor, critiques relational and epistemic distance, and explicates the internal connection between epistemology, validity, and ethics. In our writing we note disruption of normative ways of knowing and being within the academy and within qualitative research

Higher Education and Reentry: The Gifts They Bring

This study explores the lived experiences of people with criminal justice histories as they attend and contemplate enrolling in college. The report highlights the journeys of these students and considers a number of important questions: What does it take for people with criminal justice histories to successfully transform the trajectory of their lives? What are the obstacles they face? What affirmative steps can we take to make our public and private colleges and universities more welcoming to this growing population of students