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I help people
see sexual violence differently.
Kiara Mikita, PhD
Sexual Violence Educator, Researcher, and Visual Practitioner
About Me
ABOUT ME
Teaching and learning about sexual violence is my jam.
I've been doing it for over a decade, and have loved every moment of it.
I draw on evidence-based research to create powerful, interactive, unconventional material that unpacks much of what is often taken for granted about sexual violence.
No matter what the context of our work together, no one leaves thinking about sexual violence the same way again.
What I Do
WHAT I DO
I create playful, engaging spaces, build community, and facilitate transformative learning about sexual violence.
My content and practices are dynamic, research-informed, and yield learning with significant real-world applicability.
I do not read slides, point at charts, or wallop people with material. If you're bored, I'm bored, and I never get bored.
I've learned how to do this because, in addition to studying sexual violence, I study, teach, and learn about teaching and learning.
How You Benefit
WHY IT MATTERS
Stay with me for a second: when we know better we do better, but sometimes we don't know what we don't know, so we don't do better because we didn't know we could.
Learning about sexual violence is a lot like that.
For example, did you know:
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that saying "no" to anything (including unwanted sex) is actually quite unusual?
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that victim-blaming talk about women is grounded in troubling assumptions about men?
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that "sexual violence statistics" are problematic conceptually, rhetorically, and sometimes methodologically?
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that some routine professional practices used by professionals working in sexual violence can be inherently revictimizing?
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that safety tips and victim-blaming can achieve the same outcomes?
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that "victim" used to be a term emblematic of activism, power, and change?
Knowing more means doing better, and that often means unlearning what we thought we knew and learning what we didn't know we didn't know.
My Research
MY RESEARCH
These projects reflect some of what has recently fascinated me most about the world of sexual violence work:
how to support community building and collaboration among sexual violence professionals, shedding light on how women act during and after being assaulted by men (and, in particular, by men they know), how to rid our language of victim-blaming and problematic assumptions about men, and how to dismantle silos amidst disciplinary groups working in sexual violence.
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