Dana Cuomo

I practice a traditional feminist pedagogy in that my teaching philosophy centers on the belief that educators and students collaborate in the process of knowledge creation. In the classroom, that includes supporting students to take the lead in discussion, asking students to apply course material to lived experience, and encouraging students to pursue projects and paper topics that allow them to explore their own interests. I also want students to leave each of my classes with tools and skills that support them as ethical leaders and engaged citizens. In WGSS classes, this includes a recognition of, and reflection upon, one’s positionality within the world. I also believe my role as an educator extends beyond the classroom, and I recognize how small gestures play a large part in ensuring a student’s success in higher education. I check in with students regularly and reach out when they are struggling. Through teaching, mentorship, and empathy, I strive to create an educational environment that fosters critical engagement in and outside of the classroom, and one that is also attentive to the holistic and diverse needs of students.

In WGS 101: Introduction to Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, I encourage students to develop their “feminist curiosities” using intersectionality as a guiding analytic. By intersectionality, I mean a theoretical framework that examines how various forms of inequality based on social identities—such as race, gender, sexuality, class, immigration status, age, and ability—often overlap and compound experiences of privilege and/or discrimination. For the final paper in this class, students pick a topic that is seemingly unrelated to WGSS and show how that topic can be analyzed through a feminist lens. We call this the “Curious Feminist Paper,” and over the years students have successfully analyzed an amazing array of topics through a feminist analytic, including: air conditioning, concussions, cars, ballet, reality television shows, video games, alcohol advertisements, ACL injuries, volleyball, and more. My other classes take a similar approach in that I introduce feminist approaches to activism (WGS 250: Intersectional Feminist Activisms), violence (WGS 260: Technologies of Violence), and research (WGS 285: Feminist Research Design), and then encourage students to apply these feminist theories and methodologies to examine issues they’re passionate about.  

Whether they are WGSS majors who have taken multiple courses with me or non-majors who only took WGS 101, students regularly leave WGSS classes saying that the content from the class has immediate application to their everyday lives. Most students who take WGS 101 aren’t WGSS majors, but it’s students from WGS 101 whom I most often hear from after they graduate and who contact me to let me know that they continue to think about what we learned in class as they navigate their jobs, family dynamics, interpersonal relationships, the health care system, and other aspects of everyday life. Because WGSS classes largely focus on understanding how structural oppressions—like sexism, heterosexism, and racism—operate within society and our institutions, students often leave WGSS classes with a greater understanding of how their own individual experiences are connected to much larger structures. This is what I enjoy most about teaching WGSS classes: Students gain an appreciation for how feminist theories and methodologies can help them understand their personal experiences and the world around them, and it gives them the tools they need to support social change.

I’m a feminist geographer by training, which means I’m interested in the relationship between space, scale, and power. I study institutional responses to domestic violence, including the policing response to domestic violence and how criminal and civil court systems address survivors’ experiences of coercive control and technology abuse (e.g., GPS tracking, account access, social media harassment). My most recent project is looking at the protection order process and how domestic violence abusers engage in nonlethal forms of firearm abuse. My projects are community-based, which means I incorporate local stakeholders, like victim advocates, into the research process, including designing research objectives and data collection. In addition to scholarly outputs, like academic journal articles, I also produce training materials, whitepaper reports, and toolkits that convey research findings in a way that are useful to the community partners that I work with. 

Feminist scholars prioritize research that supports social change, and I take that to heart. For example, I served as an expert witness and testified in support of two Washington state bills during the 2022 and 2023 legislative seasons, which incorporated findings from my Seattle-based research projects on coercive control and technology abuse: HB 1901 (a bill to address technology abuse) and HB 1562 (a bill to modify firearms rights restrictions in the context of domestic violence). I also co-direct the Gender-Based Violence Research Lab at Lafayette, where I supervise student research assistants on research projects that examine issues of gender-based violence (GBV) on Lafayette’s campus and provide recommendations to the College to mitigate and address GBV. 

Before becoming an academic, I worked professionally for five years as a victim advocate for survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking. I mostly worked as a legal advocate, supporting survivors as they navigated different reporting processes and court systems, like seeking a protection order, reporting through the Title IX process, or seeking accountability within criminal court. My former advocacy experiences directly impact my research today, including my approach to community-based research and prioritizing collaborative research partnerships with advocates and survivors.

My previous experiences, both as a student and faculty, were at large public universities. Maybe it’s not wise to admit, but I wasn’t sure how I would adjust to a small liberal arts college! As I enter my fifth year at Lafayette, I so appreciate the balance here between high-quality undergraduate education and meaningful support for innovative faculty and student research. Lafayette students are smart, engaged, and curious. I’m constantly impressed by students’ motivation for learning, the depth of our class discussions, and the originality of thinking among students. I’m currently mentoring some of the brightest student research assistants that I have ever worked with (at either the undergrad or graduate level). I’m also really grateful to be part of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program. It’s a fab group of faculty colleagues who share common values around equity and respect, and who work to see those values implemented every day. 

I’m a cyclist, and most of my free time is spent on a road bike. I can’t really underscore the importance of cycling in my life. It’s my favorite form of exercise, and it keeps me grounded, helps clear my head, connects me to the outdoors, and has helped me develop some of my closest friendships. I also do my best thinking on the bike, and without cycling I probably wouldn’t have finished my dissertation or half of the writing I’ve done since.

My Lafayette site

Cuomo, D. (2022) Longitudinal reflections on the slow and fast crisis of domestic violence during COVID-19. Area. Online ahead of print DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12829

Cuomo, D. and N. Dolci. (2022) The TECC Clinic: An Innovative Resource for Mitigating Technology-Enabled Coercive Control. Women’s Studies International Forum. Online ahead of print DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2022.102596

Cuomo, D. and N. Dolci. (2022) The Entanglements of the Law, Digital Technologies and Domestic Violence. Gender, Place and Culture. 30(7): 903-923.

Cuomo, D. and N. Dolci. (2021) New Tools, Old Abuse: Technology-Enabled Coercive Control (TECC). Geoforum. 126: 224-232. 

Cuomo, D. (2020) Geographies of Policing: Domestic Violence, Mandatory Arrest & Police Liability. Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography. 53(1): 138-157