Feeling Intergenerational in a Study of Youth and Sexual Risk

• In Event: Engaging Education Work in and With LGBTQ+ People and Communities

Abstract

Most of the time, when adults talk about risk in young people’s sexual lives, the conversation assumes that risk is both inevitable and bad. In our international, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational study of risk in the lives of racialized and queer young women or nonbinary youth during Covid, our team (4theRecord) learned to think differently about sexual risk. We consider risk a right that young people have both to grow and to learn. Rather than focus on avoiding or eliminating risk, we explore what happens when young people decide to take a risk, when they opt not to, and when they are compelled to take risk despite their own feelings and priorities.

This perspective on risk allows our team of undergraduate and graduate students and early career, mid-career, and senior scholars to ask different questions about risk in young people’s sexual lives. Members of our team are or were queer, nonbinary, young, or racialized. But even the identities we share we do not experience in the same way. In this paper, we focus on age and generation as they intersect with these social differences in research about and with youth. We explore the varied affective relationships our team members had to the risks we studied and to the risks our participants take, considering how intersecting experiences of race, gender, sexuality, and age afforded some analytical and affective possibilities, inviting some shared connection, while shutting others down. We consider how a critical approach to risk allowed team members and study participants to reach across lines of generation, advantage, and identity to risk curiosity about one another’s lives. Ultimately, we identify new grounds for meaningful relationships and rapport with both the young people we study and for large, intergenerational, research teams committed to community-based work.

Authors

• Jessica Fields, University of Toronto - Scarborough

• Jen Gilbert, University of Toronto - OISE