Scholarship on sexual violence rarely originates from scholars in the field of writing studies and/or addresses the issue in intersectionally Feminist ways. To address this gap, this study seeks to account for the complexities and interconnections between mid-level university administrators, their practices, guiding texts, and their institutions. Mid-level administrators are defined in this study to be administrators that are in charge of units and personnel but housed under larger organizational structures and colleges. Examples of such mid-level administrators would be Department Chairs, Resource Center Directors, Writing Program or Center Administrators, Title IX Coordinators, etc., but this study does not include individuals such as individual teachers, students, provosts, deans. To specifically center on the experiences of mid-level administrators and their embodied nature, this study uses institutional ethnography as the methodology. This project draws on various methods of textual analysis, storying, site observations, and interviews within this methodology. The dissertation maps how texts, social relationships, and policy all interact with one another to create everyday practices, such as how these mid-level administrators support survivors and train staff within their organization to report instances of violence. The findings illustrate that (1) universities’ values and missions do not always align with their actions and (2) administrators want to enact care-based practices to care for students, yet they feel they are not provided with the necessary tools to do that work. This dissertation concludes by offering tangible suggestions and changes—such as recommendations for intersectional praxis, development of care-plans and climate assessments, and creation of spaces and avenues of support for mid-level administrators—that can serve as a starting place for universities to enact a care-based, intersectional approach to sexual violence prevention and response.
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