Queer Cwtch: A phEmaterialist approach to addressing gender and sexual diversity and equity in schools

• In Event: Disrupting the Mythology of Bias-Based Bullying: Queer Kids and Social Violence

Abstract

Objectives or purposes: This paper critically engages with the rhetoric of ‘prejudice-based bullying’ and its failure to address the complex terrain of contemporary normative sex/gender/sexuality peer violence in schools (Saltmarsh, Robinson and Davies 2012; Ging and Neary 2019). Rather than merely critiquing anti-bullying discourses and practices through research findings, we introduce a phEmaterialist, intra-activist praxis to welcome Other ways of being-knowing-responding in the field of ‘gender and sexual bullying.’

Theoretical framework/Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry: Our approach is informed by post-individual, post-developmental, and posthuman theories of relationality regarding how peer violence plays out in educational settings (see Osgood and Robinson 2019, Schott, R. M., & Søndergaard 2014). Our approach to conceptualizing gender and sexual diversity and equity and the violations or absence of these conditions (violence) involves attending to the matrix of power relations that encompasses more-than-human elements. We term this approach PhEmaterialism, combining posthuman perspectives (Ph) and materialism with a focus on education (E). Our methodological praxis is “post-qualitative” and scrambles conventional and linear modes of doing and representing qualitative research (see https://postqualitativeresearch.com).

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials: This paper draws upon the Gender and Sexual Equity in Schools project which researched how six high schools in England (n=4) and Wales (n=2) were supporting students in understanding and addressing gender and sexuality in their lives. The methodology includes interviews with 20 teachers and focus groups and individual interviews with 144 young people. This paper focuses on a semi-rural school in Wales, and our fieldwork with members of the school’s LGBTQ+ youth group. We explore how interview and arts-based data generated throughout the day, became resourceful beyond the fieldwork encounter.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view: We structure our paper in ways that enable us to share our phEmaterialist praxis and to introduce and explore the concept of ‘queer cwtch’ (cwtch is a Welsh word that means cuddle, safe place, hide-away): first, as a way to both understand and describe the discursive-affective-material forces and feelings of a newly formed LGBTQ+ group; second as a praxis for creating intra-activist research encounters that can expose the complex and contradictory ways in which gender and sexuality comes to matter in young people’s lives; and third, to speculate how these forces and feelings, as queer potentials, can be nurtured by school leaders to create more inclusive, expansive environments, supported by activist and arts-based methods.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study: This paper offers research strategies for engaging with what matters to queer youth, creating spaces for multiple ‘queer cwtches’ through arts-based methodologies. It contributes to how researchers are working creatively with, and getting beyond, risk-based bullying discourses in educational policy and practice (Gilbert et al. 2018). We argue creative methodologies have the potential to open up educational research, through making data lively and resourceful, which can have an impactful difference in the world.

Authors

• EJ Renold, Cardiff University

• Jessica Lenore Ringrose, UCL Institute of Education