A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• 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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• Spaces for ambiguities: playing with hair in community theatre for teenage girls

  2023. Elsa Szatek, Karin Gunnarsson. Research in Drama Education, 1-16

  Article

  This article concerns how the normative matter of body hair is playfully encountered within a theatre practice for teenage girls. By working with Deleuzian-inspired theories, playfulness is understood as embodied doings, interwoven with the local context. The article explores how playfulness is enacted in relation to the everyday, in particular body hair removal. The analysis shows how playfulness is an ambiguous feature enacted together with bodies, affects and materialities. Moreover, playfulness became both a restricting and a transformative force reproducing the already known while also opening up a critical approach of playing with the violent aspects of hair removal. 

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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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• Introduktion till postkvalitativ metodologi

  2021. Gunnarsson Karin, Linnea Bodén.

  Book

  Genom att introducera en postkvalitativ metodologi tar denna bok ett samlat grepp kring frågor om formulerandet av forskningsproblem, forskningsetiska överväganden samt konstruerandet och analyserandet av empiriskt material. Postkvalitativ metodologi beskrivs utifrån fyra centrala ingångar: posthumanistisk teori; forskning som verklighetsskapande; sammanvävning av diskurs, materialitet och affekt samt en feministisk ansats.

  Boken belyser hur postkvalitativ metodologi erbjuder experimenterande tillvägagångssätt och är en prövande berättelse om hur kunskap kan produceras och hur världen kan undersökas med ‘en metodologi i blivande’. Den är således inte någon handbok eller manual för hur forskning ska bedrivas utan ett teoretiskt och metodologiskt erbjudande som bland annat utforskar frågor om ontologi, epistemologi och etik.

  Med sin specifika utgångspunkt i postkvalitativ metodologi ger boken vägledning och inspiration inom många olika områden och vetenskapliga discipliner. Den är därför ett sällskap för studenter och forskare att arbeta tillsammans med i genomförandet av ett forskningsprojekt. Boken vänder sig framförallt till studenter på avancerad nivå, forskarstudenter samt forskare som undrar vad det innebär att arbeta och skapa kunskap med posthumanistisk teori.

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• Sexualitet och relationer

  2021. Simon Ceder (et al.).

  Book

  Kunskapsområdet sexualitet och relationer skapar engagemang, både i skolan och i samhället. Det är också ett område som ständigt är aktuellt – inte minst då både skola och lärarutbildningar har fått stärkta mål. Denna bok syftar till att stödja lärarna i detta uppdrag.

  Boken beskriver sexualitet och relationer i ett samhälleligt sammanhang och kunskapsområdets historiska utveckling fram till nutid. Dessutom diskuteras både skolövergripande och mer undervisningsnära aspekter samt hur sexualitet och relationer ingår i skolans värdegrunds- och kunskapsuppdrag. Med utgångspunkt i didaktiska frågor om vad, hur och varför undersöks hur kunskapsområdet kan behandlas i den praktiska undervisningen och hur utmaningar kan bemötas. Vidare betonas hur samarbete mellan lärare, elever, elevhälsa och skolledning kan bidra till ett produktivt utforskande av kunskapsområdet.

  Boken riktar sig främst till lärarstudenter men också till verksamma lärare och skolledare inom samtliga årskurser men med tyngdpunkt på grundskolans senare år

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• How to expand the boundaries

  2021. Karin Gunnarsson. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology (RERM) 12 (1), 66-78

  Article

  Change is a vital matter connecting to key educational concerns of teaching and learning and it also involves questions of ethics. By deploying a feminist posthumanist framework, this paper elaborates on change together with the notions of boundaries and responsibility. This is done by exploring moments from a collaborative research project conducted in a Swedish upper secondary school concerning a teaching unit focusing on equality and norms. The questions guiding the paper are: How is change enacted within the teaching? And, how to unfold the responsibilities the teaching entails? By working within the interplay of empirical enquiry and theoretical elaboration, the paper addresses how a multitude of encounters become involved in enactments of change. Further, it unfolds how change entails both unpredictability and responsibility for teaching and learning. In the concluding notes the ambiguities of change are stressed addressing the call within posthuman ethics of how to expand the boundaries.  

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• Nothing, Anything, and Everything

  2020. Linnea Bodén, Karin Gunnarsson. Qualitative Inquiry

  Article

  In this article, we elaborate on postqualitative methodology by engaging with two questions: What does postqualitative mean? Why is the postqualitative movement important? The engagement with these questions evokes a conversation, which becomes our methodology. The conversation is an assemblage, always multiple and collective. This allows us to acknowledge the messy and hybrid processes of knowledge production, and it forces us to be responsive to moments and movements, while remaining vague and ambivalent. As such, the postqualitative provides us with nothing. Simultaneously, it offers tools to navigate and can turn into anything. Nonetheless, it implies hope and is therefore everything.

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• In the middle of things

  2019. Karin Gunnarsson. Gender and Education

  Article

  This paper explores a teaching practice that considers equality in social studies in a Swedish upper secondary school. The questions explored were: What become produced within the teaching practice? and How to encounter these issues without reproducing them? To explore these questions I put to work a theoretical framework of feminist post-humanism and a participatory methodological approach. This meant that I collaborated with one teacher and participated in planning and teaching activities. The analysis of the teaching practice focuses on three events involving cries, lines and stairs; these events display the complex processes in which norms and categorizations are produced and revealed how both stabilizations and tensions became enacted within the teaching. In the concluding remarks, I further discuss these tensions in terms of troubles and hopes and elaborate on the encounter between social studies curriculum and a feminist post-humanist approach.

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• Responding with care

  2018. Gunnarsson Karin. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology (RERM) 9 (1), 17-28

  Article

  By engaging with a manual based program called DISA this paper explores how care is enacted in educational health promotion and moreover elaborates on how to engage methodologically with a careful critique. Together with sociomaterialist scholars I propose a theoretical and methodological notion of care that includes the vital doings of materialities, discourses and affectivity. Working with this notion of care makes it possible to engage with exclusions and power while at the same time open up for the erratic and unpredictable. To do this I put to work the concepts translation and touch. With these concepts it becomes possible to acknowledge the transformations taking place within the practice and avoid becoming stuck in stabilization and negativity. Not to ignore the orderings of the practice but to work actively through negativity into a generative potential. This shows that how to respond with care cannot be determined by ready-made instructions. It involves creating an imaginative and fluid practice since care always becomes a moving and temporary matter.

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Show all publications by Karin Gunnarsson at Stockholm University