PROBLEMATIZING SOLUTIONS: A Case Study of Claims about Campus Safety in an Era of ‘School Violence’ by Julie Rayanne Gregory A thesis submitted to the Graduate Program in Sociology in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada December, 2014 Copyright © Julie Rayanne Gregory, 2014 Abstract This dissertation traces networks of power and of resistance. Specifically, it explores how diffuse claims about school violence as a growing social problem are picked up and used by administrators and students at one Canadian university in ways that coalesce around understandings of a safe campus environment as necessarily technologically-mediated. The primary data used to facilitate this exploratory comparative analysis are publically available documents produced following public knowledge of an act of sexualized violence that occurred at that university in the summer of 2007. Together, I read these sets of documented claims as a security project that simultaneously represents changes made to campus environments in the name of safety as (1) preventative means to ensure student, faculty and staff safety, (2) reactions to socially meditated individual and institutional fears, and (3) constitutive of intertwining processes associated with corporatization and militarization. Two main claims that emerge from this comparative analysis are (1) that techno-securitized campuses are both responses to, and constitutive of, acts of violence, socially mediated fears and uneven distributions of power and (2) that university administrators and students co-narrate campus safety through an ongoing process of discursive negotiation and re-negotiation. Indeed, following the analyses presented in this dissertation, just as students are subject to administrative security-related consumption choices, so too are administrators subject to student-led claims about how best to achieve a safe campus environment. I suggest that these claims-making convergences and divergences oblige analyses that neither deny that techno-security measures are promoted in good faith by people hoping to make people safer nor ignore the importance of contextualizing these efforts in relation to processes which help constitute campuses as unsafe spaces, administrators and students as moral regulatory objects and subjects, and some solutions as more or less reasonable. When situated in relation to the sociological scholarship about moral panics, social problems, and moral regulation this case study draws to the fore the volatile, co-constructed and constitutive aspects of claims-making, with a notable focus on some of the economic forces that inform these discourses. ii Acknowledgements There are few words to express the appreciation and respect that I have for my supervisory committee: Vincent Sacco, Laureen Snider and Rob Beamish. During the tenure of my time at Queen’s University, you provided me with overwhelming support and encouragement. I feel honored to have had the opportunity to work closely with, and to learn so much from, each of you. Thank you! Many thanks also to Samantha King (Internal/External Examiner), Carrie Rentschler (External Examiner) and Martin Hand (Head’s Delegate) for your engaged questions and thoughtful comments, all of which will help to guide future iterations of this research. Finally, I acknowledge and thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for the financial support that I received from 2008-2010 for this research (Award Number: 767-2008-2163). iii Table of Contents Abstract....................................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................................... iii Chapter 1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1 1.1 Techno-Securitization as Preventative .............................................................................................. 8 1.2 Techno-Securitization as Reactive .................................................................................................. 13 1.3 Techno-securitization as Constitutive ............................................................................................. 20 Chapter 2 Literature Review ..................................................................................................................... 27 2.1 Moral Panics ................................................................................................................................... 29 2.2 Social Problems .............................................................................................................................. 40 2.3 Moral Regulation ............................................................................................................................ 51 Chapter 3 Methodology ............................................................................................................................ 62 3.1 Events ............................................................................................................................................. 63 3.2 Institutions ...................................................................................................................................... 73 3.3 Documents ...................................................................................................................................... 84 Chapter 4 Administrative ‘Solutions’ ....................................................................................................... 94 4.1 Technological Responsiblization .................................................................................................... 95 4.2 University Branding via Techno-Securitization ............................................................................ 106 4.3 Policing Campus Safety ................................................................................................................ 116 Chapter 5 Student Counter-‘Solutions’ ................................................................................................... 127 5.1 Rhetorical (de)Legitimacy ............................................................................................................ 128 5.2 Shifting Contexts, Shifting (Solution) Claims ............................................................................... 138 5.3 One Solution, Multiple Problem(atization)s .................................................................................. 148 Chapter 6 Conclusion.............................................................................................................................. 160 6.1 Theory ........................................................................................................................................... 160 6.2 Praxis ............................................................................................................................................ 167 6.3 Future Research ............................................................................................................................ 173 References .............................................................................................................................................. 178 iv Chapter 1 Introduction Who is more paranoid: the person who sees the need for all this security technology or the one who sees it as a form of totalitarianism? (Casella 2003a: 92) In this dissertation, I undertake a comparative analysis of administrative and student claims made about the need to make one Canadian university’s campus safer following public knowledge of the sexualized assault of Jane Doe that occurred on that campus in the summer of 2007.1 Methodologically, this dissertation represents a case study approach to research which assumes that analytic explorations of this event, institution and related documents – or parts thereof – provide a fruitful vantage point from which to learn about and make a broad argument regarding processes that extend beyond the relatively limited spatial-temporal boundaries of the particular research site in question (Inglis 2010: 510). The starting thesis that drives this dissertation is that in a context characterized by diffuse concerns about acts of violence on school grounds, campuses are constructed as unsafe spaces and techno-securitization is constituted by many people – albeit following different logics – as an institutional necessity.2 1 Throughout this dissertation, I use the term sexualized assault to underscore my agreement that such occurrences exist on “a continuum of threatened violence that ranges from sexual remarks to sexual touching to rape” that are less about sex and more about pervasive beliefs that buttress widespread understandings of “violence… as sexy and sexuality as violence” (Buchwald, Fletcher and Roth 2005: xi). 2 Following Devine (1996: 86), here techno-securitization is shorthand for tendencies to promote campus safety via “network[s] of security guards and technolog[ical] devices.” More broadly, in this dissertation technologies are defined as the “use of scientific knowledge to specify ways of doing things in a reproducible manner” (Bell 1999: 29, original emphasis) and securitization is defined as a “sustained