School-based sexuality education is a field shaped by a multiplicity of actors, interests, professional practices and academic struggles. Intersecting traditionally divided domains such as the public vs. private spheres and natural vs. social sciences, it is characterized by complex entanglements and discursive tensions (Roien et al., 2018, 2022; Weare et al., 2015). Resonant with academic calls for more critical pedagogies in sexuality education many countries have expanded their curricula to not only include the more medical or biological aspects of sexual health and prevention, to also embrace more rights-based or even norm-critical perspectives on gender and sexuality, including LGBT+-rights, sexual consent, and gender identity. Thus, the practice of school-based sexuality education is extensive and transcends traditional curricular distinctions. It is, at once, a school subject with contents from natural, social science amd humanities, a sexual health and wellbeing project, a preventive measure against violence as well as a strategy to produce democratic citizens.

A growing body of empirical studies point to how the multiplicity of sexuality education policy and curriculum challenge teaching practices. Complex and conflicting aims may be tied to confusion, low levels of confidence and pedagogical dilemmas amongst teaching staff.(Bragg, 2021; Walker et al., 2021). Furthermore, local school contexts, prioritizations and discourses play a central role in how and what extent new rights-based and critical approaches are enacted (Bragg et al., 2022; Bredström et al., 2018; Goldschmidt-Gjerløw, 2022). While much of the existing research tends to foreground one empirical setting at a time, such as a policy text or a school setting, there seems to be a lack of knowledge of how these settings are mutually entangled and how curricular concepts move in dynamic trajectories between the settings.

With this study, I aim to address this knowledge gap by exploring how a national initiative to strengthen sexuality education in Danish primary and lower secondary schools is carried out and how knowledge about gender and sexuality is negotiated and produced throughout trajectories between different settings of the initiative.

Resembling other European countries, Danish sexuality education curriculum has taken in rights-based and even norm-critical approaches to sexuality and gender, e.g. sexual consent, gender equality, LGBT+-rights (Roien et al., 2022). However, the ambitions of the national learning objectives are not fulfilled in practice. Therefore, the government has funded a national initiative, the “SSF-Kompas” (www.ssfkompas.dk), consisting of a digital platform with materials and inspiration for teachers, as well as a teacher training program.

In line with recent scholarship foregrounding socio-material and materialist perspectives of sexuality education (Allen, 2018; Bowen-Viner et al., 2024), I employ a socio-material approach to explore how knowledge about gender and sexuality moves within and between the initiative and school practices. Inspired by actor-network-theory and the concept of multiple ontologies (Latour, 2005; Mol et al., 2003), this approach allows me to analyze pedagogies and knowledge in the curriculum as emergent and dynamic products of situated negotiations between human and non-human actors, rather than autonomous entities which are acquired or enacted in a linear top-to-bottom process (Fenwick et al., 2015; Nordin et al., 2019). Abandoning dichotomies between facts and values, I will examine how legitimacy emerges in the complex learning situations of sexuality education when logics rooted in natural sciences, human rights frameworks and norm-critical approaches mesh (Gunnarsson & Ceder, 2024). Inspired by Mol’s concept, my aim is to explore how multiple ontologies surrounding gender and sexuality may coexist, and how they emerge parallelly through different alliances.

The data material will be generated via a multi-site ethnography (Marcus, 1995) involving participant observation and semi structured interviews. With this method I aim to embrace the complexity and ‘messiness’ of the sexual education initiative and its many entanglements. Using the strategy of following-the-actor I aim to trace the production of knowledge about sexuality and gender through different sites and their agential alliances. The multi-site ethnography will take place in different settings related to the initiative: - The digital platform and online courses of the initiative - Training courses for teaching staff in schools and local teacher training colleges - Classrooms in public primary schools in which sexuality education is taught During visits to these sites, around 10 interviews will be conducted with course facilitators, coordinators and external actors involved in the initiative, as well as around 10 interviews with teaching staff who have participated in the teacher training or engaged with the digital platform. Inspired by the method of praxiography (Mol et al., 2003) I will pay particular attention to everyday practices of the different settings as well as how they mobilize and activate different arrangements of actors. The aim here will be to generate data on how knowledge about sexuality and gender is being done, how it emerges through the practices and objects of the specific sites, and which tensions arise in the process.

By exploring the “SSF-kompas” initiative from a socio-material perspective, this Ph.D.-study will contribute with new understandings of sexuality education in Denmark and internationally. Empirically, the findings will strengthen the almost non-existing empirical research on sexuality education in Danish schools. Theoretically, the study will produce inputs to the expanding academic discussions regarding the relevance of materiality and technology in sexuality education. Rather than deliver a deterministic assessment or evaluation of the effectiveness of the “SSF-kompas”, this study will seek to contribute with detailed and textured account of what happens when such an initiative is put into work, including its potentially ambiguous, unintended or contradictory effects. The study will contribute with insights about how knowledge about gender and sexuality is constituted as legitimate across the different sites through dynamic relationships between a complex array of human and non-human actors. In addition to this, the study will contribute with important understandings of how overlaps and attachments between actors across time, space and settings make (im)possible enactment of curricular knowledge about gender and sexuality. In addition to the scholarly contributions, the findings of the study will inform discussions surrounding the practical organization of teacher training programs and teaching practices within gender and sexuality.

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