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AbstractNetflix series Sex Education is popular with young people in a way school-based programmes rarely are. Analyzing the first three seasons, this paper explores what and how educative content is offered and how young people are addressed as sexual subjects. It is argued that Sex Education radically expands the conventional content of school-based programmes and attends to many critiques young people repeatedly make of them. Sex Education offers an example of how to educate about sexuality, via a queer and sex-positive approach where young people are understood as legitimate sexual beings who are authorities on their own sexual lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is it ethical to want students to become non-queerphobic as an outcome of our teaching? This question is situated within thinking about teaching for social justice. It takes an event where a student challenges a course's queer pedagogy and thinks with it to expose 'the inherent paradox of education'. This is the notion that in its desires for individual and social transformation, education presumes to know how students should behave and how the world should be. The paper considers how educators might approach this paradox more ethically. It argues for a reconceptualisation of education as an 'uncertain event' that involves approaching teaching without preconceived agendas about what educational encounters will eventuate. It also involves a reconfiguration of ethics and education, where ethics is understood as implied rather than applied. This rearrangement invites educators to engage in a sensible orientation to teaching where attention is paid to its nuances, textures and complexities.. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to understandings of COVID society by offering insights into the lived experience of lockdown. It reveals how larger social and economic impacts of the virus unfold in one suburban town in New Zealand. Employing "smellwalks," it mobilizes smell as an empirical tool to understand lockdown experience. Drawing from the "sensory turn" this method recognizes smell as a way of knowing social existence and gleaning non-discursive and embodied insights into the global pandemic. This paper endeavors to develop sensory methodology within urban sociology by revealing how smell furthers understandings of place and modes of being during lockdown. It argues changes in suburban smells signal disruption to daily life as a result of the government's social and economic pandemic-response measures. For instance, the empty cold smell of the mall usually warm and bustling with activity, conveys the isolation and loss of social connectedness produced by lockdown restrictions. Similarly, the dry smell of concrete dust created by the closure and demolition of a high-street bank reflects the slowing of the national economy. Attention to smell enables insight into new modes of being for residents that involve heightened anxiety around viral contagion and a slower, quieter, environmentally cleaner way of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In our conversations about sexuality, Kathleen Quinlivan and I mused over how a subject as potentially vibrant and life-enhancing as sexuality education could so often be taught in uninspiring and disembodied ways. Students' existing critique of much sexuality education is that it is typically disease and danger focused, marginalises the sensuous body and fails to address their lived experiences. Motivated by the wildness and adventure that Kathleen inspired in her work, this paper is offered as a provocation that attempts to attend to sexuality education's pedagogy differently. Employing the idea of 'smellwalks' as an educational activity, it proposes a reconceptualisation of the subject in ways that endeavour to engage the body and the sensuous. The notion of smellwalk pedagogy challenges the conventional aims of sexuality education and how these are mobilised in the classroom. In the spirit of Kathleen's interest in unruly aspects of sexuality and gender, smellwalks seek to reconfigure the purpose and pedagogy of sexuality education and the nature of sexuality itself. The point of thinking about such a pedagogical experiment is to capture the sense of playfulness and adventure currently missing from most sexuality programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

How does the COVID-19 pandemic shape subjectivity? This paper is concerned with contributing to theorising subjectivity at an ontological level. It draws on a feminist new materialist understanding of subjectivity as an intra-active becoming of human-non-human matter that includes smell. Smellwalks are mobilised to apprehend how subjectivity is altered via restrictions around movement and social connection during lockdown. This sensory method recognises knowing is not simply a cognitive practice and that odour actively shapes understandings of ourselves and the world. The varying presence and absence of odours in and out of lockdown eventuate a re-arrangement of subjectivity which draws on Vannini's (2020) notion of atmospheric dis-ease. Lockdown produces a subjectivity of dis-ease which generates changes in perception of self and others, as sources of potential viral contagion. Lockdown's material conditions engender a 'socially flattened' and 'suspended subjectivity' as our 'normal' selves are experienced as being put on hold until the global crisis abates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article employs new materialist theory to the accounts of women who were pregnant, giving birth or parenting new-borns during the Australian bushfires of 2019/2020. As feminist scholars we are concerned with the inequitable responsibility accorded to women during this time to limit their (un)born children's exposure to smoke. Drawing on Barad's (2007) relational ontology we trace how (non)human phenomena like 'smoke', 'public health advice' and discourses of 'the good mother' work intra-actively to establish conditions of possibility in relation to mother's agency and responsibility in this crisis. Via in-depth interviews with 25 women, we discovered these coagulating forces meant many experienced feelings of 'powerlessness' and subsequent 'guilt' at their inability to prevent smoke inhalation for their (un)born children. To challenge this burden of responsibility, we (re)configure conventional notions of 'agency' and 'responsibility' within a new materialist frame. When agency is understood as an intra-active becoming and response-ability as preceding the subject, responsibility for the air shifts to a recognition that everyone/thing is complicit in the world's differential becoming. We extend this thinking to consider human response-ability and agency in relation to the climate change that has been attributed to causing the fires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some LGBTTIQA+ students maintain campus is a safe space despite also detailing significant discriminatory practices they have witnessed or experienced there. This article explores this paradox drawing insights from new materialism and geographical research. Predominantly theoretical in orientation, it takes the notion of 'dwelling with' from Noora Pyyry's posthuman work in geography and thinks with it, in relation to participants' experiences of being LGBTTIQA+ on campus. These moments offer openings for undertaking a reconceptualization of campus space as neither inherently safe, nor unsafe. Thinking with new materialism enables an understanding of campus space as relational, ongoing and actively engaged in how students experience it. From this perspective, campus safety is not simply secured by the actions of individuals and presence of institutional equity policy. We argue shifting constellations of bodies, objects, and their entanglements create campus space as paradoxically safe-un-safe, potentially engendering a new politics of campus safety. This new politics recognises the issue of campus safety as more expansive than a problem of individuals or structural discrimination. Encompassing a new materialist understanding of space, campus safety is reconceptualised as contingent upon intra-active human-non-human entanglements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the schooling experiences of 12 fa'afāfine and fakaleiti who attended an all-boys faith-based secondary school in Aotearoa-New Zealand. Fa'afāfine are Samoan, and fakaleiti Tongans who are assigned male at birth, but enact varying degrees and types of behaviour deemed as feminine. There are currently no in-depth qualitative studies that examine the schooling experiences of these young people. Within the existing literature the experiences of fa'afāfine and fakaleiti are typically subsumed under the umbrella of transgender and/or non-binary students. This study examines participants' recollections of daily experiences of being fa'afāfine and fakaleiti at an all-boys school where any expression of femininity was frequently disallowed and denigrated. In this highly masculinised environment, participants describe the struggle to be 'like-women' and the cisgender discrimination they faced. Incidents of bullying, physical assault and marginalisation from teachers and students along with the pathologisation and erasure of their identities within school curricula and practices were daily occurrences. These accounts contribute to an emerging and broader picture of schools as cisgender spaces, in which educational structures and processes reinforce the idea there are only two genders, and that gender is based on sex assigned at birth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with how teachers manage homophobia at school. It examines how they deal with homophobia directed at students, and instances when teachers become the recipients of homophobia themselves. This dual focus, on teachers as both the perpetrators and recipients of homophobia, adds complexity to existing studies concerning how homophobia operates in schools. In previous studies, it has been LGBTIQA+ teachers who have provided accounts of homophobia they have experienced. In this research, heterosexual students offer these narratives. Via these accounts, students acknowledge and corroborate teachers' voices in other studies. Students' depictions also reveal nuances in homophobia's operation and that heterosexual teachers can sometimes be its target. In existing literature, LGBTIQA+ students typically provide narratives about whether teachers are effective at addressing homophobia. In the current study, heterosexual students deliver these accounts, confirming their LGBTIQA+ peers' assessment that teachers often ignore homophobia or respond ineffectually. When heterosexual students identify homophobia, they lift the burden for acknowledging and addressing this discrimination from the LGBTIQA+ community. Retelling incidents in this way, recognizes homophobia is not the sole responsibility of individual perpetrators and recipients, but an issue that implicates the whole school and its culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'How can we apprehend homophobia as more than we currently know?' This paper attempts a conceptual intervention to rethink current approaches to homophobia in schools. It draws on ideas from feminist philosopher Todd around attention and openness to uncertainty. It also employs queer theoretical notions of subjectless antihomophobia education from Airton, arguing there may be utility in understanding that homophobia is not held by a subject – as an attitude or set of meanings used against others. Interview narratives from a two-year research project exploring the production of sexual meanings at school offer a window into acknowledging homophobia as subjectless. That is, homophobia does not need a queer-identified subject to be its target to operate. Nor, does homophobia need an ignorant or fearful (human) subject to perpetuate it. Subjectless anti-homophobia education requires understanding homophobia as something in which all of us are implicated, and where homophobia is never ours alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Homophobia is an enduring issue within schooling contexts internationally. This paper attempts to rethink homophobia from the perspective of heterosexual students' accounts of bearing witness to it. Within the existing literature it has been LGBTQ students who have held the responsibility for naming and recounting homophobia. This paper re-orients this conventional account by positioning heterosexual students as its narrators to see what this might reveal about homophobia's operation at school. While this strategy does not disrupt the 'othering' and 'victimization' of LGBT youth in these stories, it has other effects. When heterosexual students name homophobia as unjust, it is possible to see the instability of the victim/perpetrator binary that typically structures these accounts. Narratives of participants in this study did not fit neatly into this binary, revealing its inability to capture the complexity of homophobia's operation. To have any hope of effectively addressing homophobia at school, we need to move beyond the victim/perpetrator binary. This is because it masks some of homophobia's more nuanced moves, such as targeting difference, rather than sexual identity exclusively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores some of the challenges of publishing photographs generated as part of sexuality research. It aims to initiate discussion of these issues to enable sexuality researchers to consider and navigate the use of images in their work. Examples highlighting these difficulties are employed from a photo-method project which examined young people, sexuality and schooling. It is argued that existing child-sex-panics rendered these images risky and intensified their scrutiny by gatekeeping forces. The discussion contributes to a broader conversation within the field of sexualities about the constitution of sexuality research as dirty work. Specifically, the paper investigates how some publishing and editing practices might be conceptualised as constituting techniques that construct sexuality research as dirty work. By not publishing photos which form part of sexuality research, the knowledge it is possible for sexuality researchers to generate and circulate is subsequently curtailed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to reconceptualize qualitative research around young people, sexuality, and schooling. In a bid to contribute to what has been coined "post-qualitative" research, it grapples with questions of epistemology and ontology which some argue much humanist methodology negates. This discussion is situated within current debates about the utility of method and a context in which sexuality research and methodology appears to have stagnated. Taking two moments from sexuality research previously conceived within a humanist qualitative methodological paradigm, the article thinks them with feminist new materialist thought. The aim is to consider what new methodological, ethical, and ontological possibilities feminist new materialist ideas afford for research in the field of sexualities and beyond. The article argues that new materialist thought invites an open-ness and response-ability from researchers which reorients the ethics of sexuality research and the nature of sexuality itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is interested in thinking more about sexuality education at school. As such, it is concerned with a mundane and unacknowledged feature of the sexuality classroom - the mapping of movement. While human movement is a familiar focus of educational research, the movement of things is not. With reference to Barad’s concept of intra-activity, the paper maps human-non-human movements and characterises these as a sexual choreography of schooling. Instead of asking what does movement mean or reveal about sexuality education, I attend to the event movement inaugurates. Predominantly theoretical, the paper weaves together ideas from conventionally disparate disciplinary fields. These include Edensor’s concept of rhythm from geography, Eggermont’s notion of the choreography of schooling from education, and Barad’s spacetimemattering from quantum physics. This theorisation enables a recognition of movement as a force in human-non-human classroom intra-actions implicated in the becoming of sexuality education as event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the mapping of a ‘new’ ontology of sexuality at school. Drawing on new feminist materialist thinking from Barad (2007), Bennett (2004) and Lenz Taguchi (2013), it analyses photographs from a project on the sexual cultures of schooling in a way that takes ‘things’ or ‘matter’ seriously. Seeking to disrupt the idea that humans represent the only site for, and expression of sexuality, it explores how matter and meaning are co-constitutive in sexuality's becoming at school. Instead of seeing sexuality as discursively constituted through a plethora of schooling processes and practices, another proposition is offered. Sexuality does not pre-exist matter/meaning but comes into being via their relation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to trouble the conflation of photo-anonymisation with ethical research practice, as is often promoted by institutional ethics review. Contributing to discussions of ‘visual ethics’ and the application of photographic methods in visual research, it poses the question: what is the effect of the anonymisation of photographs on the integrity of visual research and generation of new knowledge? Discussion unfolds via the exploration of school-based research around young people and sexualities. Examples of photo-anonymisation are examined from a project concerning the sexual cultures of schooling, employing a combination of photo-diary and photo-elicitation methods. The way in which anonymisation techniques meant to protect participants from harm, such as photo-cropping, facial blurring and pixelation, may be counterproductive to this aim, is revealed. Applying such techniques can undermine the agency of participants to convey their ideas and experiences as they intended. It is also argued that anonymisation processes can make a mockery of the integrity of visual methods by casting their meaning and content into obscurity. Such practices can consequently impoverish the generation of new meanings and the advancement of a disciplinary area – which, in the current study, is research on sexualities and schooling. This discussion seeks to encourage visual researchers to reflect upon anonymisation, inciting them to consider the implications of this practice for the ethical treatment of participants and the generation of new meanings in their chosen area. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is concerned with interrogating what has evolved as "normal" representations of the schooling experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students in literature concerned with social/sexual justice. It argues that these representations necessitate understanding LGBT within a binary of either "victims" or "heroes," and this constitution obscures these young peoples' lived schooling realities. In queer style, the article endeavors to expose the "normal" in these representations and consider their conditions of possibility for understanding LGBT students' schooling experience within this dyad. It is proposed that this portrayal limits how we might understand LGBT students' schooling experiences beyond this dualistic binary. To refuse this flat portrayal and lend complexity to it, the article draws on findings from a project around the sexual cultures of schooling that employed photo methods. Identifying inconsistencies between a participant's photo and her narrative explanation of it as an entry point for thought, Barad's concept of intra-activity is drawn upon to think through this binary problem. In this way, the article gestures toward an understanding of LGBT that is neither victim nor hero, nor some combination of both. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asks, what more can we think in relation to debates around young people's use of mobile phones at school? Rather than attempting to answer the question of whether mobile phones are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for young people, this paper recasts the debate's ontological underpinnings. To do this feminist appropriations of the Deleuzian concept of assemblage and a relational materialist notion of ‘more-than-human’ are drawn on. By recognising sexuality-as-assemblage, it is possible to see more-than-human elements (such as mobile phones) as implicated in the becoming of sexuality at school. This conceptualisation implies new texture and dimensionality to the wider project of (re)producing sexual meanings and identities at school. It also necessitates acknowledging an ontologically different understanding of the human-non-human divide, that decentres young people and/or phones as to ‘to blame’ for ‘negative’ practices like sexting. Instead, agency manifests via the intra-activity that occurs when mobile phones and young people are in-relation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the intricate processes of pedagogical teaching that highlight the teacher's attitude in regulating sexual identities and sexual behavior in sexuality education. It explores the purposes and processes of teaching comprehensive sexuality education in diverse communities. The authors argue about the diverse educational response to the dominant forms of authority, subordination, and prevalent systems of hegemony in the teaching practices of sexuality education.

In a discussion of Deleuze's theorization of concepts, Todd May asks “what can a concept do with that which cannot be identified?” Or to put it another way, May writes – “A concept is a way of addressing the difference that lies beneath the identities we experience.” This is not to say that identities, concepts, and experiences are linked in particular ways. The possibility of extending what a concept can do is also brought under scrutiny by Ann Burlein, who draws on the work of Elizabeth Wilson to argue “Feminism needs to engage with scientific authority not simply at those sites where it [science] takes women as its objects, but also in the neutral zones, in those places where feminism appears to have no place or political purchase.” “Why not feminist critiques of the liver or the stomach, she asks?” Such styles of thought are the inspiration for this paper. We argue that queer concepts in education should not stop at places where education takes queer bodies as its objects, but that queer concepts have an important role to play in places where, at first glance, they appear to have no place or purchase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sexuality and humour share a fraught relationship at school, so that how humour might be productively employed in sexuality education constitutes a ‘risky’ consideration. This paper explores the role of humour in sexuality education as observed in a Year 9 New Zealand health class. Adding to existing literature emphasising students' use of humour at school, it also considers how teachers might productively mobilise humour in the classroom. Findings reveal that while humour serves established purposes for students such as consolidating heterosexual masculinities, securing peer group hierarchies and disrupting learning agendas, it may hold other pedagogically productive possibilities. Potential uses include the relief of monotony, engaging with the needs of particular cultural groups of students, reinforcing taught information and reducing apprehension around potentially uncomfortable topics. Via this empirical exploration of the mobilisation of humour, the paper endeavours to open its potential as a conceptual site of possibility in sexuality education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Young people may face conflicting and confusing messages about what it means to respond well in relation to homophobia and transphobia. Consequently, we ask – What might it mean to respond well to homophobia and transphobia? This strategy, inspired by Anika Thiem and Judith Butler, is recognition of the ambivalent conditions which structure attempts to respond well to bullying related to gender and sexuality. Such an approach is counter to educational responses that suggest a remedy in advance of the enactment of perceived bullying. Our paper draws on research conducted by the authors in four such schools, two in Australia and two in Aotearoa/New Zealand. It is a deliberate turn away from focusing on who should be held to account for homophobia and transphobia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the potential of queering as a mode of critique by problematising the ways in which liberal politics of race shape normative understandings of health in a high school classroom. Drawing on findings from an Australian and New Zealand (NZ) research project designed to respond to religious and cultural difference in school-based sexuality education programmes, we critically queer how the Māori concept ofhauorais deployed in the intended and operational NZ Health curriculum to shape the raced subject. Despite the best intentions of curriculum developers and classroom teachers to utilise Māori ways of knowing to meet their obligations within a bicultural nation, we argue that the notion ofhauorais domesticated by being aligned with normalising individualistic notions of well-being that reflect the Eurocentric neoliberal individual enterprise subject. Palatable notions of Māori epistemologies as cultural artefacts and iconography drive that ‘inclusion’. The ‘cunning politic’ of (bicultural) recognition legitimates Māori ways of knowing in ways which privilege whiteness – reproducing rather than disrupting networks of power and dumbing down Māori epistemologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]