A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• Skolövergripande sexualundervisning: En intervjustudie om kollektiva villkor för samverkan och förändring

  2024. Karin Gunnarsson. Utbildning och Demokrati 33 (2), 41-61

  Article

  Whole-school sexuality education: An interview study on the collective conditions for collaboration and change. This article explores how whole-school sexuality education is enacted within collective conditions. Drawing on actor-network theory, these collective conditions are examined as socio-material capacities that both stabilize and weaken sexuality education in relation to other actors and practices. The empirical material is based on interviews with three teachers who are particularly engaged in sexuality education. Through the process of tracing, the analysis focuses on entanglements and translations. Rather than being involved in stable translations, it is subject to constant nego-tiations, rendering it fluid and fragile and marked by ambivalence. The conclusion states that sexuality education must be handled with care, and offers a tentative suggestion for how this can be carried out.

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• Mutual Doings: Exploring Affectivity in Participatory Methodologies

  2023. Karin Gunnarsson. Humanities 12 (6)

  Article

  The aim of this paper is to explore the affective implications of working with participatory methodologies within the context of sexuality education. For this exploration, a feminist posthumanist approach is put to work, building on a relational ontology and the notions of affectivity, assemblage and environmentality. Drawing from a practice-based research project concerning sexuality education conducted together with teachers in Swedish secondary schools, the analysis puts forward how the research assemblage navigates and manages affective conditions in ways that produce, allow and exclude certain feelings. With (dis)trust, uncertainty, frustration, laughter and shame, the assemblage made bodies act and become in specific ways. Thus, the analysis shows how participatory and practice-based research become moulded by power relations and intense flows of desire working together. This raises questions about how participatory methodologies within an ontological view of interdependence afford to manage affective intensities to move in certain directions of socially just sexuality education.

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• Cutting facts and values together-apart: an agential realist exploration of Swedish sexuality education

  2023. Karin Gunnarsson, Simon Ceder. Sex Education, 1-15

  Article

  Drawing from a practice-based research study in Swedish secondary schools, the aim of this paper is to explore how facts and values are made and unmade as separate and entangled phenomena in sexuality education. In this exploration, we work with a posthumanist approach - agential realism - and more specifically the concept of agential cuts. The empirical material draws from moments in the teaching of sexuality education, one concerning nakedness and one concerning gender diversity. The analysis puts forward how the lesson topics in relation to school subjects and exercises become significant actors in how facts and values are enacted in the teaching. This implies that facts and values are enacted together-apart within a relational set of interdependency and hence are always present although temporarily more forcefully and ephemeral. To conclude, we discuss the complexities of how facts and values are part of enacting the everchanging knowledge area of sexuality education and urge for acknowledgment of this matter. 

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• Care and Feminist Posthumanisms

  2023. Karin Gunnarsson. The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Sexuality Education

  Chapter

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• Caring Cuts: Unfolding Methodological Sensibilities In Researching Postdigital Worlds

  2023. Sara Mörtsell, Karin Gunnarsson. Postdigital Research, 173-190

  Chapter

  In this chapter, we introduce the configuration of caring cuts. Composed of care and cuts, two key notions in feminist posthumanism and Actor-Network Theory (ANT), caring cuts addresses the entanglement of epistemology and ontology. By putting to work an ontology of relational materialisms, the chapter explores how to respond to the mess, emergence, and elusive objects that become centred by our concern and ways of producing knowledge with and on postdigital worlds. It means that vital methodological questions are raised for postdigital relationalities in education and elsewhere. Instead of seeking to untangle the postdigital, caring cuts is put to work to examine mundane research events with sensibilities of the world-making practices of research. We argue that caring cuts affords acknowledgements of the collective responsibilities that research practices involve and bring attention to the inevitably untidy and non-innocent character of knowledge production and making worlds researchable. With caring cuts, modest interruptions and uneventful events suggest a methodological sensibility of not too hastily putting things ‘right’ but acknowledging that other worlds are possible. This means that caring cuts invites thinking and researching more-than-digital relations anew.

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• Ambigious engagements: exploring affective qualities within the teaching of norms and equality

  2022. Karin Gunnarssonn. Pedagogy, Culture & Society 30 (2), 185-199

  Article

  This paper explores the teaching practice of norms and equality in an upper secondary school in Sweden focusing on affective dimensions. The teaching and the affective qualities engendered were explored empirically and theoretically with a specific focus on engagements. Inspired by feminist posthumanism, a relational ontology was used to embrace affective dimensions as generative intensities. Using a collaborative ethnography methodology the analysis traces affective qualities within the teaching practice informed by theoretical notions of tensions and choreographies. The analysis shows how the practice of teaching is moulded with affective qualities such as safety, uncertainty, distress, troubles, silences – altogether part of enacting different modes of engagements. This foregrounds how ambiguous engagement unfolds in the teaching of norms and equality. In the concluding remarks, the messiness of affective qualities are discussed highlighting engagement in terms of collective disruptions and inviting a critical and creative sensibility.

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