Gender and sexuality education research: Making critical and creative activisms matter

Kellie Sanders (La Trobe University), Piper Rodd (Deakin University)

We are currently seeing a renewed and radical backlash across public, political and media spheres in response to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and meaningfully redressing the ongoing harms and inequities of entrenched systemic and structural injustices.  Drawing on the microcosm of local women’s Australian Rules football, this paper asks what can be learnt from women who, despite sexist and homophobic vitriol, contempt and mockery of the professional women’s game, and (at least sometimes) misogynistic club cultures, continue to play local football and foster cultures that value participation, growth, fun and care. Reflecting on the changes and challenges that women who play continue to experience playing in local clubs, we explore the factors that support women’s resilience. In doing so, we unpack what seem to be key features and virtues of what we call quiet activism – everyday acts of subversion and resistance, critical public pedagogy within (often, unintended and) informal sites of adult education, and the empowering and sustaining role of collectives to inspire, build and sustain social change.

Sara Motta (Newcastle University), Dr Polly Bennett (Deakin University)

In this presentation—part paper, part poetry—we critically reflect on our online kinship and interactions while navigating the productivity demands of neoliberal and settler colonial universities. Across interstate and international conversations, we find spaces of resistance, encouraging one another to reject harmful directives from management and prioritise care for ourselves and others. These dialogues, infused with humour, compassion, rage, and exasperation, serve as acts of defiance and decolonising practice against the alienation of academic environments. Amidst global crises and ongoing colonialism, including violence in Palestine, and the cognitive dissonance of institutions claiming diversity while punishing classed, racialised, disabled, trans and queer communities when we act, our connections become deeply political. These relationships—built with colleagues, students, and kin—sustain us and our activist commitments. We explore how kinship resists despair, fosters joy and flourishing, and enacts change within and beyond the academy, even in the face of backlash.

Emily Gray (Monash University), Jacqueline Ullman (Western Sydney University), Mindy Blaise (Edith Cowan University)

Feminist scholars have turned to creative approaches because of their concern with the shortcomings of conventional research methods for attending to complexity (power relations and intersectionalities), conveying findings to broader publics, and working towards systemic change. This presentation explores both the how a creative feminist intersectional approach (Cooke & Nyhagen, 2024) guided the making and communicating of several research processes and products in a national study investigating academics’ attitudes towards, experiences of, and attunement to everyday sexisms in Australian Universities. This presentation invites participants to experience the creative processes and products used and developed in the national survey recruitment video, intersectional everyday sexisms vignettes, sensory prompts, ‘do-it-together’ resources, a Cards Against Everyday Sexisms game, The Oppressive Grind broadsheet, and an online microcredential that were part of this national project. The presentation will demonstrate how creative approaches are vital for communicating research findings with impact that contribute to systemic change.

Amie O’Shea (Deakin University, Jax Brown (Deakin University).

Amie is a university academic. Jax is a disabled trans advocate. We are both tired neurodivergent queer parents. We have each at various times led and resisted, subverted and embraced the contemporary research climate. We have conducted and evaluated and participated in sexuality research and researched or provided a lot of sexuality education for and about people with disability, for decades. We will share some of our best work in sexuality education research and ask ourselves if we think it has made any difference, how, and to whom.

We will spill the tea on how we bridge the tensions between research and ‘the real world’. At times this has positioned us within different or competing agendas, where we have needed to find middle ground. We will talk about how we have maintained our practice(s) and offered mutual and independent aid and self-care, and what we do to respect and accommodate our shared and different ways of knowing and being.

Lizzie Maughan (University of South Australia)

Is a neuroqueer methodology needed and what might it look like? There is a significant intersection between queer, activist, and neurodivergent communities/identities.  How can we embrace this? What does it mean for how we research? In this paper we reflect on how queer intersections with neurodivergence were made evident in our ARC project exploring the experiences of queer and religious people existing within a legislative context providing exemptions to anti-discrimination protections for religious schools and other organisations. Not only did this intersection feature in our data, but it was a salient point of solidarity for participants both with each other and with a neurodivergent researcher.  While recognising non-normative, creative, and flexible research methods are already neuro-friendly, we offer the provocation: what more can we do to embrace this intersection in our research, and what does neuroqueer research contribute to broader efforts to create social and political change in education?

Merrin Wake (Deakin University)

This work uses the metaphor of “Puzzle to Portrait” to explore how gender and sexuality education research can support parents/carers, educators and supporters of trans and gender diverse (TGD) young people, particularly in regional and rural contexts. It positions identity as a developmental driver, challenging deficit-based and pathologizing narratives. Grounded in lived and living experience, the work uses an affirmative process of change through co-created, trauma-informed, and relational practices. It resists hierarchical and colonised agendas by prioritising slow, community reality and knowledge over metrics. The work is sustained through non-queer and queer solidarities that hold space for rage and hope, grief and celebration, critique and imagination. It reflects critically on the risks of creative narrative storytelling, including institutional/organisational fear and discomfort and unintended exclusions, while advocating for transformative spaces of connection and care that support lifesaving, long-term trust and relationship building. This presentation contributes to inclusive developmental pedagogies and intersectional support models that honour complexity, trust, and collective healing.

Troy Potter (University of Melbourne)

Drawing on findings from a pilot study about young men’s reading of gender violence in music videos, this paper explores shared reading as a methodological approach to engage young men in critical discussions about their lived experiences of gender. Reading literature can represent diverse perspectives, enhance cognitive empathy (Lindé, 2021), and facilitate critical conversations about social justice issues (Colantonio-Yurko & Adams, 2025). Shared reading (Billington & Steenberg, 2021) can foster a sense of belonging and community, which is crucial for open dialogue about gender-related issues. Using qualitative data from the pilot study, I propose that shared reading practices can be used as a methodology to not only enhance young men’s critical thinking about gender, but also facilitate the cultivation of real-world connections that have the potential to enact personal growth and collective action towards gender justice. The paper concludes with a shared reading activity.

Issiah Berkhardt-Bedeau (Deakin University)

Second in a series of creative auto-ethnographic works. This immersive art installation explores the significance of the educational value of Vodun (Voodoo) as it relates to sexuality and health. Positionally, as a Vodun practitioner, this art-activism showcases this powerful, but little-known and understood living indigenous knowledge system, foundational to the researcher’s intersectional Afro-Caribbean ancestry, identifying those originating links to our most enduring human archetypes of pro-creative existence. Offering onlookers a respite from too-often nihilistic European diatribes, this immersive video and printed exegesis imagines a new ‘digital assemblage bricolage’; an audio-visual methodology inspired by surrealism. Viewers are surrounded by dynamic imagery and sound, exploring the wisdom and Afro-futurism of sex, gender and sexuality within the ancient and modern educational justice framework of Earths oldest spiritual system, where health and well-being iconographies as ontologies and epistemologies of masculine and feminine initiation, celebrate child to adult development and reproduction, in a refreshing way.

Teaching and researching gender and sexuality education has been shaken up by political backlash, neoliberal imperatives, and cultural conservatism. Drawing on autotheoretical stories of my experiences – facing backlash against the Safe Schools Coalition in Australia, becoming and working as a primary school teacher in the UK, over a decade of delivering teacher education on respectful relationships, and campaigning explicitly for socialist politics – I explore how discomfort functions as both a pedagogical tool and a political strategy. Following Sara Ahmed (2021), I examine the generative potential of discomfort. What are the possibilities for change that open up when students, teachers, and institutions confront unsettling truths about gender, sexuality, and inequality? Explicitly engaging Marxist praxis, these moments are brought to life in stories that reveal the tensions in being a ‘productive’ researcher and the impossibilities of being a ‘good teacher’ under neoliberal logics. Bringing to life my experiences of solidarity in schools and practices of care in scholarship, I argue that embracing discomfort is essential to sustaining pedagogical resistance and transformative change.

Kate Hepworth (Body Safety Australia)

Curiosity and Courage outlines six key learnings from the last decade of Respectful Relationships Education, sexuality education and child sexual abuse prevention practitioners from Body Safety Australia. Drawn from our experience in schools, early childhood education settings and directly in community, this report aims to move beyond conventional academic research practices or classroom resources. Instead, we share how to do this work safely, inclusively and without compromise through practical, real-world examples. Curiosity and Courage does not shy away from the resistance and backlash that arise in doing this work in communities, yet it is not a cautionary tale; it aims to empower practitioners to overcome barriers in delivering comprehensive sexuality education. This report acts as a call to action for other grassroots organisations to contribute their valuable practice wisdom, de-silo the prevention sector and walk in solidarity in the face of growing resistance to this vital work.

EJ Renold (Manchester Metropolitan University)

Building upon participatory arts-based praxis developed in previous research projects, and in dialogue with feminist and queer post-qualitative educational scholarship, the paper explores the making and mattering of a Welsh-government funded arts-activist engagement project with over 70 children (age 9-11) in rural, urban and suburban schools across Wales (UK). The project was designed across two phases. The first phase used a range of multi-sensory arts-based methods in friendship group interviews to explore the everyday gender assemblages that children become entangled in. The second phase invited children to make a range of ‘dartaphacts’ (arts-based objects carrying messages for others to interact with, see Renold 2018) graffitied with ideas for making the world more gender-safe, gender-inclusive, and gender-fair. Through fieldnotes, images, vignettes, and film, each section progressively unfolds the transformative power of the visual arts to attune (Phase 1) to and activate (Phase 2) how ‘gender matters’ in the lives of pre-teen, and how ‘what matters’ can be further amplified with policymakers and practitioners.