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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]

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]

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]

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 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]

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]

This paper explores the methodological politics of researching at the intersections of sexuality, culture and religion in secondary schools. It draws on experiences during a project concerned with how to address cultural and religious diversity in sexuality education in Australia and New Zealand. The paper focuses on two methodological sticking points, one occurring inside academia and the other outside, in schools. The first coheres around the process of gaining ethics approval from multiple institutional committees and the second accesses schools for participation. These sticking points are conceptualized as effects of a set of discursive and material constraints which are idiosyncratic to school-based sexualities research. We argue that discourses of sexuality and young people are mobilized in both spaces and intersect with a social moment of ‘risk anxiety’ in ways that shape the methodological possibilities of the research. These discourses serve to constitute sexualities research as ‘risky’ and ‘controversial’, an image which impedes the generation of new knowledge in the field. By rendering challenges of this research visible and discursively deconstructing the reasons for them, we refuse to dismiss school-based sexualities research as ‘too hard’. Instead, we aim to keep this topic firmly on the educational research agenda by alerting researchers to its challenges so they may prepare for them. [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 explores 'the 5 cm rule', a regulation around student contact discovered during an investigation of the sexual culture of schooling with 16-19-year-olds in New Zealand. Implemented to stem 'inappropriate and unwanted' touching, it stipulates that students must maintain a physical distance of 5 cm at all times. It is argued this rule represents a contemporary type of biopower which forms part of the sexual culture of schooling. As a technique of corporeal regulation it is characterised by a 'loose' exercise of power, that allows for student resistance while producing subjects' 'docility-utility' (Foucault, 1980). The paper contends that the rule contributes negatively to 'the sexual culture of schooling' by constituting student sexuality as 'unruly' and 'problematic'. This stipulation also prescribes a set of gender relations that are inhibitive of mutually negotiated and pleasurable corporeal experience. [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]

The notion of ‘the school’ as a set of institutional processes and practices that shape the possibilities of educational research forms the focus of this article. It is argued that the discursive and material practices that render schools agencies of cultural reproduction also have effects for what research can be undertaken in them and how. With reference to a series of ‘episodes’ that occurred during research about young people and sexuality in New Zealand, evidence for how schools shape research endeavours is provided. These examples present a complex picture of the way in which schools simultaneously police and are regulated by symbolic boundaries of gender and sexuality. How school disciplinary power works to effect what it is possible to claim about the voluntary nature of student research participation is also explored. It is argued that through the powerful discursive and material practices that occur in schools, these institutions can impede research that attempts to transgress dominant meanings about gender and sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research that has explored young people's (hetero)sexual behaviour has often assumed that the idea of 'relationships' is transparent. Subsequently, the diversity which exists within this concept has been neglected. This paper endeavours to unpack the concept of 'relationships' with reference to young people's own understandings and meanings of the term. Drawing on findings from focus group research with 17-19 year-olds in New Zealand, it analyses how relationships are constituted and differentiated. Some of the determining characteristics are: the time partners spend together, a sense of exclusivity and intimacy, emotional attachment and the kinds and frequency of sexual activity engaged in. On the basis of various configurations of these elements, young people's relationships can be loosely categorized as 'one-night stands', 'short-term relationships', 'casual dating' and 'going out'. The diversity, complexity and fluidity in these conceptualizations present a challenge to traditional understandings of these relationships, and have implications for how sexual health promotion might be carried out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]