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'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]

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 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]

This paper is concerned with extending existing understandings about the role of schools as sexualising agencies. It seeks to uncover previously undisturbed spatial and material dimensions of schooling with regards to sexualities and their implication for how young people learn about sexualities at school. In this regard, the paper asks: how do apparently mundane spatial and material schooling arrangements constitute particular sexual meanings and identities for students? A visual methodology is employed to capture schooling places that students identify as constitutive of sexual meanings and identities. How students’ embodied sexual practices negotiate and contest these spatial/material configurations is also investigated. Through this analysis, the paper makes a theoretical contribution to an understanding of space as an in process materiality. It is concluded that the spatial and material arrangements of schooling contribute to a larger schooling project concerned with muting and regulating young people’s sexual subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The idea that pleasure might form a part of sexuality education is no longer a ‘new’ idea in the field of sexuality studies. In this paper we examine how originally conceived notions of pleasure have been ‘put to work’ and theoretically ‘taken up’ in relation to sexuality and education. It is our contention that because of the nature of discourse and varying cultural and political contexts, pleasure has been operationalised in ways we did not intend or foresee. Throughout this discussion we seek to discern the discursive limits of visions of pleasure to illuminate their normalising potential. Drawing on Foucault's thoughts about pleasure as having ‘no passport’ and queer theoretical understandings of this concept, we argue for a re-conceptualisation of the potential of pleasure in sexuality education. In particular we identify the need for wedging open spaces for the possibility of ethical pleasures, in forms that are not heteronormatively pre-conceived or mandatory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is concerned with how to analyse photographs produced during research on sexualities and schooling. Photo-diaries and photo-elicitation were employed in an examination of the sexual cultures of two New Zealand secondary schools. This visual methodology sought to disclose spatial and embodied dimensions of sexualities at school while centring and valuing students’ perspectives. In an attempt to answer the question ‘what does this photograph really mean’, the author experiments with a series of analytical accounts conceptualised as ‘realist’, ‘interpretivist’, ‘performative’ and ‘materialist’ approaches. These readings are interrogated for their political and ontological effects. On the basis of the project's aims of taking young people's perspectives seriously and foregrounding material reality, an argument for a ‘materialist’ reading is made. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper seeks to explore the relation between sexuality and pedagogy. This theoretical concern is examined with reference to two key pedagogical moments during a first-year undergraduate course about schooling and sexuality. Through critical reflection of these episodes it is argued that when sexuality is the intellectual focus of a course, the pedagogical scene becomes inescapably 'sexual'. While existing research analyses desire between teacher and student as a potential element of the pedagogical scene, this paper investigates how sexuality might manifest more generally and offer a pedagogical resource in educational encounters. The possibility of a sexual and embodied pedagogy that explicitly invites students to be sexual subjects in a space that traditionally prioritises mind over body is considered. How teacher and student subjects are invoked and to what ends this might be pedagogically productive are also investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual methods are often marginalised in educational research and have not been employed to collect information about sexuality at school. This paper examines the viability and effectiveness of conducting research about the 'sexual cultures' of schools in New Zealand using photo-diaries and photo-elicitation. 'Effectiveness' is judged by what the visual methodologies literature purports are the benefits of these methods. These advantages include providing participants with greater autonomy over what and how data is collected. The paper argues it is feasible to employ visual methods to research sexuality in schools. Such methods offer participants alternative means of recounting their stories, can help illuminate an esoteric object of investigation like 'sexual cultures' and engage participants less likely to volunteer for sexuality research. The use of visual methods is not without challenges however. Securing ethics approval and school participation along with problems with camera retrieval and protecting participant agency were some difficulties encountered in the current study. For those wishing to pursue less conventional research methodologies in educational settings, this discussion highlights potential benefits and struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to explore how we might understand young people's agency in sexuality research using visual methods. It is concerned with troubling the perception that power is held by the adult researcher and denied to youthful participants who simply submit to their authority. Rather than attempting to cast moments of young people's agency as examples where the relations of ruling are reversed, this paper endeavours to tease out the nuances inherent in young people's agency. This examination is undertaken in relation to selected episodes from research investigating the sexual culture of secondary schools using photo-diary and photo-elicitation methods. To elucidate the mechanisms of young people's agency, Butler's and Davies' work on the process of subjectification is drawn upon. Using a post-structural theoretical framework, it is argued that young people's agency involves a simultaneous mastery and submission, which is a consequence of the process of subjecthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]