The panel will examine sexual violence governance as a critical site for understanding power, gender, and institutional legitimacy in contemporary African universities. With growing public attention to campus sexual violence across the continent, higher education institutions operate within highly uneven accountability landscapes. In some national contexts, there are no comprehensive legal frameworks or model policies guiding institutional responses to sexual violence. In others, policies exist on paper but are inconsistently implemented, weakly enforced, or symbolically deployed to protect institutional reputation rather than survivor well-being.
By bringing together scholars working on sexual violence in African higher education, this panel seeks to interrogate how universities respond to sexual violence under these divergent conditions. It asks: What forms of accountability emerge in institutions operating without formal legal mandates? How do universities define misconduct, establish reporting mechanisms, investigate cases, and provide survivor support in the absence of national policy guidance? Where sexual harassment or gender-based violence policies do exist, what explains persistent gaps between policy design and everyday practice? Panelists will examine how institutional culture, leadership priorities, resource constraints, gendered hierarchies, and student activism shape the effectiveness, or failure of campus responses.
Methodologically, the panel welcomes qualitative, mixed-methods, and policy-oriented research, including survivor-centered interviews, institutional ethnographies, document analysis, and comparative case studies across regions and institutional types. By centering institutional accountability, this panel explores how universities are positioned as governance actors in shaping responses to sexual violence and considers possibilities for strengthening survivor-centered accountability in higher education across the continent.
Interested participants are invited to submit a 250 word abstract or paper summary via email to joyceade@buffalo.edu by March 12, 2026.
