Janet Hinson Shope and Richard Pringle, "Campus Whisper Networks: Knowing with Sexual Assault Survivors" (Rutgers UP, 2026)

About this episode

The episode discusses how personal knowledge about student sexual assault circulates within college communities, based on research by Dr. Janet Hinson Shope and Dr. Richard Pringle.

Campus Whisper Networks: Knowing with Sexual Assault Survivors (Rutgers University Press, 2026) examines how personal knowledge about student sexual assault circulates within college campus communities. Based upon both qualitative and quantitative survey data, Dr. Janet Hinson Shope and Dr. Richard Pringle's research demonstrates that students who have been sexually assaulted tell someone—almost always a friend. Most college students know someone who has been assaulted. Simply knowing, by means of relationships, that one or more peers have been assaulted affects the knowers, and the effects reverberate unevenly across campuses. Dr. Shope and Dr. Pringle highlight the structural properties that prohibit relational knowledge from becoming official institutional knowledge, confining it to whispers and secrecy within informal spheres of knowledge. The rules governing the circulation of such knowledge create an uneven epistemic field of sexual assault. This uneven field is consequential for the communities, affecting survivors and their confidants and shaping student views of the college community. Campus Whisper Networks demonstrates how personal and institutional avoidance, both the…

People in this episode

Host: Miranda Melcher

Guests: Janet Hinson Shope, Richard Pringle

Topics covered

• sexual assault
• college campuses
• whisper networks
• student knowledge
• institutional knowledge

Keywords

• sexual assault
• college
• whisper networks
• knowledge gaps
• student survivors

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Rutgers University Press

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