CENTER FOR INSTITUTIONAL COURAGE REPORTS NEW ROUND OF RESEARCH GRANTS
The Center for Institutional Courage has announced its second year of research grant funding to 21 scholars from 10 universities, for eight projects that expand examinations of institutional betrayal and institutional courage. For the first time in this grant process, two longitudinal studies have received multi-year funding.
The 2022 Institutional Courage Research Grants continue the Center’s focus on unstudied institutions and marginalized populations.
“We are thrilled to have funded a second round of research grants, expanding to provide support for multi-year projects across a wider range of topics. Empowering researchers to change the world through these projects is core to the mission of Courage,” said Dr. Jennifer Freyd, Founder and President of the Center for Institutional Courage. “Our grant program is unlike any other in this space, and these grants continue to be made possible by the commitment of our generous donors.”
The grant recipients, their university affiliations, project titles, and summaries are listed below:
Reluctant to Seek Help: Developing a framework of the impact of institutional betrayal by the legal system among Black women who are victims/survivors of intimate partner violence.
Angie Hattery, Earl Smith, Patricia Sloane-White, Emerald Christopher-Byrd
Center for the Study & Prevention of Gender-Based Violence, University of Delaware
This project explores factors—including historical trauma and individual experiences with institutional betrayal—that prevent abused Black women from seeking help from legal-system institutions (both criminal and civil) when they experience intimate partner violence. Specifically, this study will design and test a legal system (criminal and civil) sub-scale of the Institutional Betrayal Questionnaire (IBQ). Data gathered from this study will be used to inform victim/survivor centered policies and practices with the aim of reducing the institutional harm experienced by abused women with marginalized identities.
Cultivating Institutional Courage through the MSU Climate & Response Process
Carrie Moylan & Jacob Nason
Michigan State University
Michigan State University’s Prevention, Outreach, and Education Department operates a novel intervention to address the harms of sexual harassment and prevent future incidents. The model recognizes that sexual harassment negatively impacts employees beyond those directly involved in incidents. Yet our traditional investigation and response systems typically are not prepared to address these wider harms. In this project, we aim to a) identify and describe how employees experience toxic workplace climates after harassment or other direct harms, and b) explore whether and how this intervention might operationalize institutional courage, counteract the harms of institutional betrayal, and improve workplace climate and well-being.
Public Interest Asylum Lawyering in a Context of Institutional Betrayal
Catherine L. Crooke
UCLA
This dissertation project is grounded in ongoing ethnographic fieldwork among public interest immigration lawyers who provide legal assistance to asylum seekers in southern California and at the U.S.-Mexico border. The project aims to understand how U.S. asylum attorneys witness and directly experience institutional betrayal in the course of their day-to-day professional practices. It also seeks to examine how attorneys push for institutional courage even as U.S. government actors engage in institutional DARVO behavior by demonizing, criminalizing, and scapegoating immigrants. More broadly, the project asks: How can insider actors pursue justice within unjust institutional systems?
Exploring the Impact of Timely Warnings on Student Experiences, Perceptions, and Behavior
Chris Linder, Kevin Coe, Heather Melton, Jessie Richards
University of Utah
The Clery Act requires campus administrators to issue timely warnings when immediate safety concerns are present. Survivors report being retraumatized by timely warnings, students of color report experiencing increased hostility on campus after timely warnings go out, and rates of crime have not changed since Clery was implemented. Using institutional betrayal (Smith & Freyd, 2013; 2014) as a theoretical framework and mixed methods case study as a methodology, we will build and execute a research protocol for exploring the impact of sexual violence timely warnings on college students’ experiences and behavior.
De-Siloing Sexual Harassment Prevention and Discrimination Intervention in Higher Education
Elizabeth Hutchison, M. Gabriela Torres, Nelia Viveiros
The University of New Mexico, Wheaton College, Temple University
This research examines how “non-discrimination practitioners” (individuals employed in DEI, EEO, HR, Equity or Title IX offices) view the competing and sometimes contradictory demands of sexual harassment and other discriminatory misconduct prevention, mitigation and/or intervention. Through a survey and structured interviews, the project will show how non-discrimination practitioners view their work to implement university policies, revealing the frameworks and constraints under which they must operate, as well as unintended outcomes of how universities typically enforce policies against sexual misconduct and other forms of discrimination. We posit that the structural separation of sexual misconduct and discrimination response(s) within universities inhibits effective institutional handling of complaints, and expect to offer tools and recommendations for de-siloing that will improve how higher education institutions respond to the intersectionality of harm.
A Qualitative Exploration of Law Enforcement Practices and Norms that Foster Betrayal and Courage
Lori Hoggard, Vanessa Volpe
Rutgers University-New Brunswick and North Carolina State University
Despite composing only 12.4% of the U.S. population, African Americans are approximately 2.8 to 3.5 times more likely than White Americans to be killed by police officers while unarmed. To systematically disrupt this institutional betrayal at the hands of police, institutional courage—the antidote to institutional betrayal—is required on the part of law enforcement practitioners. We will conduct semi-structured interviews with police leadership to determine how police leadership can engage in institutional courage within their police agency and with the local African American community they serve. This work is the necessary beginning to disrupting law enforcement’s institutional betrayal.
Surviving Against the Grain: Gender-Diverse Youth Grappling with Identity, Courage, & Betrayal
Richard A. Brandon-Friedman, Tayon Swafford
Indiana University
Gender-diverse youth (GDY) experience high rates of institutional betrayal within educational environments, contributing to increased psychosocial concerns. This includes harassment by peers and professionals, failures to address gender identity/expression-based bullying, removal of support symbols such as pride flags, discussions of banning books on gender identity, and silencing of discussions about gender identity/expression. Alternatively, courageous resistance to harmful actions and policies can enhance GDYs’ well-being through a solidified sense of self, community connection, and the disruption of oppressive systems. This research will highlight the negative impact of educational institutions' actions while identifying ways to empower GDY to move such beyond betrayal.
Building Survivor-Centered Concepts of Institutional Courage for Action
Sarah Hurtado, Anne DePrince, Julia Dmitrieva
University of Denver
To date, research has revealed the many manifestations of institutional betrayal and its consequences, and much institutional action has been driven by compliance prescriptions as opposed to survivor-centered and social justice oriented approaches. This project brings together an interdisciplinary research team to develop an actionable conceptualization of institutional courage in the higher education setting, using concept mapping, a mixed methods approach with strong feminist and survivor-centered roots, to address the following questions: How do survivors conceptualize institutional courage to prevent and respond to sexual violence? How can their conceptualizations inform specific courageous institutional actions?
For More Information:
· Research Priorities: https://www.institutionalcourage.org/knowledge-base-and-research-priorities
· Research Grant Program: https://www.institutionalcourage.org/research-grant-program
· Research Grants Funded, 2021 & 2022: https://www.institutionalcourage.org/grants-funded