The field of sexuality education has gained renewed interest within policy and practice in Sweden as well as in other parts of the world (e.g. OECD). In Sweden, there is a revised curriculum from 2022 that includes strengthened formulations concerning what now is labeled the knowledge area of sexuality, consent and relationships. This means that both teachers and researchers find it urgent to explore how this can be carried out in teaching.

Within this educational-political setting, four colleagues and I conducted a practice-based research project in secondary schools. Drawing from the project, this paper aims to theoretically and empirically explore the encounter of practice-based research and feminist posthumanisms with a specific focus on affective dimensions. More specifically, how the matter of sexuality education offered specific affective conditions for the practice-based research collaboration. 

This exploration is carried out with a feminist posthumanist theoretical framework. This framework “turns the attention to sensuous, affective, material and spatial qualities” (Juelskjær 2017, p. 65-66) co-creating both educational and research practices. By putting to work feminist posthumanism, the exploration addresses the indeterminacy of affective conditions. Working with the notion of affective conditions makes it possible to methodologically consider energies, frictions and movements in terms of how they are operating in a manner that is contingent upon relational doings (Gunnarsson 2022). As affectivity is a vital component difficult to bare or linger, this was done by slowing down the messy research practice and being attentive to moments when intensities and frictions were at play.

Grounded in a feminist posthumanist approach, this paper connects to research working with postqualitiative methodology. This methodological approach entails considering how knowledge is a performative practice taking place together with the world. By stressing co-producing and interfering aspects, collaboration and engagement with those whom the research concerns become vital (Duggan 2021; Murris 2020). As such, co-production here suggests research to “engage productively with a world in process” (Duggan 2021, p. 357). Then, the response-abilities of doing research imply “working as collaborative assemblages in order to generate social changes and recognize the material force and impact of our research on the world around us” (Ringrose et.al. 2019, p. 262; see also Renold & Ivinson 2022).

Hence, working with this feminist posthumanist collaborative practice-based approach offered the possibility to engage with sexuality education in terms of careful proximity. This meant interfering and inventing together with teachers, classrooms, and school subjects, within specific kinds of closeness which also involves risks and fragilities. With inspiration from the writing of Puig de la Bellacasa (2017), the ethical-political notion of care is connected to knowledge production and offers a way to entangle methodology, theory and practice. This is done by encouraging the “awareness of the vulnerability of the facts and things we set out to study and criticize” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, p. 36 in Gunnarsson 2023).

As such, this paper addresses how practice-based approaches involve methodological concerns of both being sensitive to as well as working with the creation of affective conditions. This means considering how the research practice involves mutual doings that push and manage affective conditions in specific directions. Moreover, how our mutual research doings carry ambiguities and uncertainties of creating affective-spatial apparatuses for what might take place in the encounters.

The research project was grounded in a theoretical framework of feminist posthumanisms and was carried out with a practice-based collaborative methodology. Five researchers and former teachers were involved in the project. For two years, the project involved collaborations with teachers at four secondary schools, where empirical material analysed in this paper draws from the collaboration of three of them. These were schools with different challenges in terms of school leadership, students, time, and teachers, giving specific conditions for our collaboration as well as sexuality education. The collaborations implied workshops with teachers, participating in teaching and interviews with teachers and students. At each school, 5-13 teachers of different school subjects were involved. This meant that across these three schools, 26 teachers were participating. The workshops included 5-8 meetings that, together, lasted approximately 15-20 hours. They foremost took place in the respective school but also at the university and occasionally at zoom due to the pandemic. The workshops emerged out of the collaborations between researchers and teachers. As such, they responded out of a joint engagement in how to work with sexuality education. We as researchers were in charge of the planning but together we set out the themes in focus for our meetings. Moreover, we critically and creatively engaged with teaching materials such as pictures, films and exercises. Trying them and discussing if and how they could be involved in teaching. The analysis highlights how practice-based research is involved with orchestrating affective conditions. This means being attentive to moments with modes of intensification, movements and frictions. In other words, the analysis puts forward how affective conditions were cultivated and brought into play with regulatory as well as transformative effects.

This paper set out to explore practice-based research concerning sexuality education with a feminist posthumanist approach. Grounded in a collaborative research project the analysis unfolds how practice-based research is dependent on affective as well as social and material conditions. In this paper, I explore empirical moments that are sensitive to how the research practice focusing on sexuality education collectively arranged specific affective conditions. The exploration puts forward how regulatory and transformative affective conditions were brought into play. With laughter, shame and distrust the collaborative research practice made bodies act and become in specific ways, producing certain directions and paces. Accordingly, there are distributed and relational capabilities for navigating affective conditions within the research. Still, there are many troubles and concerns. For example, entering within an ontological take of affective interdependence – what does that do for practice-based research? And, within collective conditions how is research part of orchestrating affective intensities and how could that be acknowledged in relation to trusting the process? This raises further questions about how research and teaching could produce a sense of promise and hope for the future by stressing how every tiny move, each silence, gaze and thought involves transformation. While I do not wish to make any grand claims to methodological innovation, there are moments where the collaboration afforded a space to try new things – a capacity to push the boundaries of the (im)possibilities in research and teaching.

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