This post is part of the Countdown to Conference (C2C) series. We would love to feature a brief blog post from you too! Visit our main Countdown to Conference page for details! For more information about #GEAConf2019 visit the conference website
C2C: Keynote Speaker Professor Emma Renold
Twitter: @EmmaRenold and@agenda_matters
Keynote Date: Monday 24th June (FREE Pre-Conference Day)
Keynote and Workshop Title: Becoming resource-ful: the making and mattering of creative activisms to address gender and sexual violence
Abstract: This session shares the making and mattering of AGENDA: A Young people’s guide to making positive relationships matter (www.agenda.wales, Renold 2016). AGENDA was co-created with young people for young people, and started out as a bi-lingual, 75 page activist resource to address gender-based and sexual violence. Since 2016 AGENDA has expanded into an online resource for practitioners and young people with additional new case studies and activities from England and Wales across both primary and secondary sectors (see www.agendaonline.co.uk).
AGENDA is all about creating art-ful encounters that make space for young people to learn about gender-based and sexual violence in relations/hips through the rule-bending and rule-breaking practices of others. Carefully designed, it connects fields of practice together that are often estranged through divisive curricula (e.g. arts, science, humanities) or policy terrains (e.g. anti-bullying, children’s rights, violence against girls and women, safeguarding). Inspired by the Latin origins of activism (actus: “a doing, driving force, or an impulse”) AGENDA invites young people and their practitioner allies to learn and do something about what matters to them in the context of social justice, rights, equalities and diversity. From equal pay and poverty to misogynoir, street harassment and LGBTQI rights this resource lifts the silence on issues so often skirted over in schools with over 30 examples of creative change-making practices sourced from local and global youth activist stories and local case studies.
Creativity, transformation and affirmation are the heart-beat of the resource – processes that have been developed over years of experimenting with participatory research-engagement-activisms, inspired by queer/feminist materialist and posthuman scholar-activism, particularly within the field of gender and sexuality education (e.g. Taylor & Ivinson, 2013, Coleman & Ringrose, 2013; Taylor & Hughes, 2016; Allen & Rasmussen, 2017). Ringrose, Warfield and Baradisi, 2019, Osgood and Robinson 2019, Taylor, Jones and Coll 2019). The aim of this session is to share some of this process through film, images and artefacts and invite participants to try out some of the AGENDA stARTer activities. Throughout, there will be plenty of opportunity to explore the challenges and affordances of how to become more crafty and resource-ful in mobilising creative activisms and pedagogy for addressing gender and sexual violence, and making Relationships and Sexuality Education matter in new ways more widely.
Bio: Emma Renold is Professor of Childhood Studies at the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Wales. She is the author of ‘Girls, Boys and Junior Sexualities’ (2005), Children, Sexuality and Sexualisation’ (with Ringrose and Egan, 2015) and co-editor of the book series “Routledge Critical Studies in Gender and Sexuality in Education”. Inspired by feminist, queer and new materialist posthumanist theory, her research investigates how gender and sexuality come to matter in children and young people’s everyday lives across diverse sites, spaces and locales. Here, (see www.productivemargins.ac.uk) she has explored the affordances of co-productive, creative and affective methodologies to engage social and political change with young people on gendered and sexual violence, including the co-production of the creative-activist resource for young people and practitioners, ‘AGENDA’ (see www.agendaonline.co.uk). In 2018 Emma was winner of the ESRC Impact in Society Prize – a landmark achievement for how feminist-queer qualitative research-activisms can inform policy and practice.
Watch the ESRC video of Professor Renold’s research, ‘Transforming Relationships and Sexuality Education in Wales’:
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