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This paper explores a form of sensuous methodology known as smellwalks. Smellwalks are a method which require a reorientation of the senses to temporarily emphasize the information received from the nose. During a smellwalk, the researcher employs an active form of smelling to examine their environment that diverges from normal smell perception. In this research, smellwalks are deployed to investigate the experience of lockdown in a suburban town in Aotearoa-New Zealand. Six solo walks were undertaken, three during lockdown and three out of it, to compare the presence and absence of smells during these periods. In attuning to the invisible, intangible, mundane, and small details of life via smell, smellwalks opened opportunities for new embodied and material knowledge about lockdown experience. It is argued that smellwalks offer a sensory and embodied method with the capacity to attend to more than vision and representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sexualities and schooling is often constituted as a ‘controversial’ topic. Similarly, photo-methods are an unconventional data collection method in educational research associated with ‘risk’ in school settings. Given this context, why use photo-methods in research on sexualities and schooling? While acknowledging the challenges of using photo-methods in school-based research I suggest their capacity to disclose qualitatively different insights about this field. These findings are drawn from the use of photo-diaries and photo-elicitation in a project examining the sexual cultures of two New Zealand secondary schools. The value of these methods lies in their ability to explore broader features of sexualities and schooling than the official curriculum, policy and classroom practices. These methods can reveal embodied and spatial dimensions of sexuality which inhere in the unofficial minutiae of everyday schooling experiences. The participant driven process of taking photos can facilitate access to what some researchers conceptualize as the ‘unknown, unknowns’. For those concerned with the educative potential of research, photo-diaries might also be helpful in generating participants’ critical reflection of an otherwise taken-for-granted lived reality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Displays of hegemonic masculinity within research contexts are often perceived to inhibit the collection of 'good' data and present a problem which the researcher must overcome. Instead of being seen as hindering the research process, this article takes such moments as 'data', which provide first hand insights into the way male sexuality is made within focus group settings. This environment is seen as constitutive of male sexual subjectivities in the way that it provides a public forum for young men's presentation of self. Through their talk about sexuality young men engage in the management of their own sexual identities, fashioning these through what they reveal and conceal about their sexual selves. In order to meet the objective of the focus group and discuss sexuality 'seriously' yet also preserve masculine identity, young men deploy discursive constructions in complex ways. Such demands render the maintenance of an identity which conforms to traditional constructions of masculinity precarious, so that constant slippage between projections of 'hard' and 'softer' versions of male sexuality occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]