Onward!

Hello! My name is Sydney Sheffield, and I am a fourth-year public health student and aspiring obstetrician-gynecologist. This will be my fifth term as a Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Health intern. Throughout the course of my time with the RRRH internship, I have been working with Dr. Katherine Johnson and Dr. Alyssa Lederer in the departments of Sociology and Global Community Health and Behavioral Sciences, respectively, to investigate the impacts of a course that piloted in Fall 2018. After Tulane released the 2017 campus climate survey results, an interdisciplinary team of faculty members developed the curriculum for this new course for first-year students titled GESS 1900: Sex, Power, and Culture. The teaching team created GESS 1900 with the aim of engaging first-year students in meaningful conversations surrounding sexual violence, sexuality, and sexual health for the purpose of potentially altering campus climate for the better. For the past two years, our research team has gathered quantitative and qualitative data in the forms of survey results, student journal entries, and semi-structured interviews; analyzed the data; and disseminated our findings via presentations (such as the American Public Health Association Annual Meeting 2019, the American College Health Association 2020, and Newcomb Institute’s annual Conceiving Equity lecture, among others) and publications. We are currently in the process of writing, editing, and submitting manuscripts for publication. For the Fall 2020 term, our research team has plans to delve into further education on sexual violence prevention (we are currently reading the book Sexual Citizens) and use this education to focus our discussions on our findings and situate these findings within the context of sexual violence prevention work happening nationally. With any luck, we will have a manuscript published by the end of 2020!