In this article I argue that rave participation is best understood as a form of accommodative resistance. Such a framework, it is maintained, helps highlight the nuanced influences of normative social discourses in relation to people's experiences and descriptions of moving in, through and past active rave participation. Specifically, the research findings presented herein are based on ten women's narratives about their participation within Toronto's rave scene circa 1994 to 2000. As such, this research represents an effort to make these women's particular -yet conspicuously absent -experiences central to analyses of rave participation. More generally, it is an argument for the importance of engaging various interlocking social discourses -including, but not limited to age and gender -vis-à-vis people's (sub)cultural experiences.

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The purpose of this article is four-fold. Firstly, it is meant to draw attention to Project Prevention, an American-based program funded largely by private donations used to offer people — mostly poor, racialized, drug-using women — up to $200 for limiting their reproductive abilities. Secondly, it highlights links between Project Prevention’s mandate and prevailing discriminatory scientific-medical, legal, political, and media discourses which serve to constitute certain ‘Truths’ about the dangers of prenatal drug-use and parenthood, particularly for women. Thirdly, Project Prevention is framed and theorized within its neo-liberal context in order to underscore the ways that contemporary (pregnant) bodies often become governed through social initiatives which implode state/non-state agencies, public/private distinctions. Finally, to ensure readers are not left with overly simplistic readings of the issues at hand, the article concludes by considering the potential role of counterclaims in terms of who does and does not get constructed as a ‘risky’ reproductive agent.

This article represents a call to understand school safety audits as central to processes of institutional branding. It argues that reading safety audits through a branding optic helps to draw out their uses in providing support for the augmentation of techno-security apparatuses on campuses and to contextualize them vis-à-vis increasing tendencies to govern universities in accordance with business models of management. While safety audits are generally endorsed as necessary for helping university administrators ensure the safety of students, faculty and staff, the more critical reading provided here draws attention to their entanglement with administrative efforts to construct commoditized university narratives. This paper substantiates and extends research by scholars who make note of the ongoing configurations of educational institutions in accordance with intertwining military and corporate logics. The discussion begins with a review of research by scholars who are highly critical of this trend. Next, the paper offers an exploratory case analysis of links between documents produced by one Canadian university’s administration regarding a sexual assault on that campus in 2007, the undertaking of a universitywide safety audit, and institutional investments in increased security measures. The article concludes with reflections on the importance of counter-rationalizations to this relatively new model of university governance.