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This article focuses on a study in which feminist new materialist and arts-based methodologies were employed to explore how three girls address their experiences of sexual harassment as part of ‘cr...

This paper examines what research with children can do and become when it intra-acts with a MeToo hashtag, creative methods, experiences of sexual harassment and the making and travelling of Valentine’s Day cards. The paper is grounded within a creative research-activist project, #MeToo Postscriptum, which aimed to address sexual harassment in pre-teen peer cultures. Analyzing the project, the paper explores how the idea of response-ability manifested in three space-times of the project, and how the material-discursive practices of the project reiteratively reconfigured the conditions of possibilities to respond, react, and act against abusive gendered and sexual child peer cultures. Mapping response-ability through our research endeavours helps theorize the contingent, complex, and entangled ways research-activist methodologies can activate change, enables us to envision response-able practices to counter sexual harassment in young peer cultures, and sensitizes us as scholars and educators to our responsibilities and accountabilities that become recrafted in response.

This article explores the vital roles of matter in the emerging sexual cultures of elementary school children. Based on a case study of a seven-year-old girl, it draws from ethnographic research on the gendered and sexual power relations of students in Northern Finland. Inspired by feminist, new materialist theories, the analysis indicates how everyday objects may be seen as co-constituting heterosexual femininity by attaching even young girls to teenage cultures and emphasizing femininity and distancing them from childhood and masculinity. This article shows, furthermore, how materiality acts in generating “cross-pulls” that may evoke popularity and admiration, but also cause restrictions to the agency of girls in the ambiguous entanglements of child sexual cultures.

In this paper, we explore non-violence and the responsibility for non-violence inspired by Karen Barad’s work on the material–discursive notion of response-ability. Our analysis, by way of thinking...

In this paper,1 we join those in the field of Participatory Design (PD) that have become inspired by the “ontological turn” as captured in the proliferating discussions around relationality, becoming, and nonhuman agency. The paper offers an account from a PD case where a social media platform was designed with and by professionals for their collaboration around the topic of workplace bullying and harassment. Through this account, this paper reimagines PD in a “posthuman landscape” and explores how this ontological turn forces—and/or enables—a rethinking of ethics and politics in PD. In a timely conference which asks for scrutinizing the ways that the political heritage of democracy, participation, and equality can be enacted in the diverse terrains of PD, our short paper proposes the “politics of mattering” as a way of accounting for the design process as an always-relational becoming and its practices as already-political.