This book aims to explore what queer thinking and new materialist feminist thought might offer the field of sexuality education. It argues that queer theory in education might be queered further by drawing on feminist new materialism and extending itself to subjects beyond sexual and gender identities/issues, including a focus on ‘things’. Allen explores how new materialism as a form of queer thinking, might be brought to bear on other important issues of social justice such as, classroom cultural and religious diversity.

Engaging with feminist new materialism, Toni Ingram reveals the ways in which the school ball (or prom) can be understood as an assemblage of material objects, spaces, practices, ideas and imaginings which contribute to the process of becoming school ball-girl. The ball-girl is not a fixed identity or subject but is an intra-active becoming – a dynamic, shifting process where bodies, sexuality and femininities are relationally produced. (Re)conceptualising the school ball-girl as emergent phenomena provides openings for thinking about girls and this schooling practice beyond popular cultural narratives. Building on the social theory of Barad, Bennett, Best, Deleuze and Guattari, this book offers a new perspective on girls, sexuality, gender and schooling, while also exploring the potential of feminist new materialisms for rethinking educational practices and the human subject.

The first book of its kind, Sociology and the New Materialism explores the many and varied applications of "new materialism," a key emerging trend in 21st century thought, to the practice of doing sociology. Offering a clear exposition of new materialist theory and using sociological examples throughout to enable the reader to develop a materialist sociological understanding, the book: Outlines the fundamental precepts of new materialism Explores how materialism provides new perspectives on the range of sociological topic areas Explains how materialist approaches can be used to research sociological issues and also to engage with social issues. Sociology and the New Materialism is a clear and authoritative one-stop guide for advanced undergraduates and postgraduates in sociology, cultural studies, social policy and related disciplines.

By exploring the material-discursive production of gender norms in Australian secondary schools, this book offers a novel feminist posthuman new materialist perspective on how schoolgirls are pre-determined within educational space and place. The text ultimately illustrates how gender and race inequity is reproduced through presumptive thinking and a failure to recognize student potential. Affect and the Making of the Schoolgirl maps affective accounts of students’ everyday experiences in school spaces. Student negotiations with prescriptive processes of subject participation and subject selection are explored to illustrate how inequities are systematically reproduced. Chapters also offer an examination of STEM subject fields as entitled male space. Engaging theoretically with concepts from performative feminist new materialism and affect theory, the text highlights filmic semblances created as part of an onto-epistemological project, and calls for alternative educational encounters which affirmatively acknowledge difference and promote non-binary thinking. This text will benefit postgraduate researchers, academics, and scholars with an interest in gender and sexuality education, teacher education, STEM education, gender inequality, intersectionality, and the sociology of education. Those interested in gender studies, affect theory and feminist theory, as well as educational policy and politics more broadly will also benefit from this book.

This edited collection is a careful assemblage of papers that have contributed to the maturing field within education studies that works with the feminist implications of the theories and methodologies of posthumanism and new materialism – what we have also called elsewhere ‘PhEmaterialism’. The generative questions for this collection are: what if we locate education in doing and becoming rather than being? And, how does associating education with matter, multiplicity and relationality change how we think about agency, ontology and epistemology? This collection foregrounds cutting edge educational research that works to trouble the binaries between theory and methodology. It demonstrates new forms of feminist ethics and response-ability in research practices, and offers some coherence to this new area of research. This volume will provide a vital reference text for educational researchers and scholars interested in this burgeoning area of theoretically informed methodology and methodologically informed theory. The chapters in this book were originally published as articles in Taylor & Francis journals.

This book seeks to re-envision the purpose and pedagogy of sexuality education, disrupting its conventional instrumental and health related aims. Predominately theoretical in nature, it presses at the traditional limits of sexuality education’s thought by drawing together ideas from disparate disciplinary fields including education, geography, sound studies and new materialist theory. The philosophical thought of Sharon Todd provides an anchor throughout, and is employed to reconceptualize sexuality education as sensuous event. The author calls for a reframing of the relationship of education and ethics, and explores what this means for sexuality education classrooms and relationships between and amongst teachers and students. The book explores pedagogies that invite new forms of student sensibility and open possibilities for engagement in sexuality education in currently uncharted ways. It will appeal to students and experienced academics conducting research related to sexuality, education, educational philosophy, queer studies and new materialisms.

Moving beyond the traditional focus on curriculum and pedagogy, this volume explores hidden dimensions of sexuality education in schools and how sexual meanings are produced. Challenging the standard understandings of sexuality education, Allen discusses how students’ knowledge of sexualities is often learnt outside the ‘official’ school curriculum in informal spaces such as the sports field, gym locker rooms and peer groups. By employing visual methods and analysing student photo-diaries, Allen’s original book captures a sexual culture of schooling that allow readers to literally ‘see through young people’s eyes.’ Introducing theoretical ideas in relation to queer theory and ‘new’ feminist new materialisms, this volume calls for a re-conceptualization of how sexuality comes into being at school, in order to take account of its material, spatial and embodied elements.