Amelia MeyerhoffFor her senior project, Amelia published The Clapback, “an investigation of the sexual assault and rape climate at Cal Poly,” which tells the story of 61 survivors from our campus.
It would be difficult, if not altogether impossible, to overstate the impact of senior English major Amelia Meyerhoff’s recent work to expose, so as to dismantle, the horrifyingly pervasive culture of rape that California Polytechnic State University has long sheltered. Her remarkable senior project, The Clapback, is an interactive feminist ethnography that invites us to confront, in heartbreaking detail, what it is to suffer and survive the immeasurable violence of sexual assault. A survivor herself, who moreover found most of the official support systems the university makes available to victims of sexual assault woefully inadequate, Meyerhoff invited other survivors to share their stories with her. By the end of her project, she had interviewed more than sixty current students and alumni — all but two of them women, and most of them women of color — who together offered hundreds of hours of testimony about their experiences, which Meyerhoff then transcribed verbatim, arranged thematically, analyzed for data, and has now disseminated to the public at the-clapback.com.
If Meyerhoff’s impact is impossible to overstate, this is in large part because the transformative consequences of The Clapback have only just begun to unfold; it will undoubtedly resonate well beyond Cal Poly. Having had the honor to serve as her senior project advisor, I can safely say that I have never seen a student demonstrate the degree of courage, compassion, and determination that Amelia brought to bear on her work. In devising a project that is at once an invaluable tool for feminist, anti-rape pedagogy, and a communal discursive space in which survivors can share their stories with each other and the world, Amelia Meyerhoff has dealt a powerful blow to the isolating silence that enables the perpetuation of sexual violence. Which is, of course, the point. Written by: Ryan Anthony Hatch, senior project advisor |