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.