Abstract
How might we think about employing a feminist new materialist methodology within the field of sexuality education research? This chapter addresses St. Pierre’s (Rethinking the empirical in the posthuman. In C. Taylor & C. Hughes (Eds.), Posthuman research practices in education (pp. 5–24). Houndmills: Palgrave, 2016) questions for post-qualitative research, where she asks how researchers might ground academic work in a way that decentres the desire to know, how projects might have a purpose that is not knowledge production, and how research might resist methodology itself. In a playful attempt to step into the methodological unknown, it traces the author’s ‘wonder’ (MacLure, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 658–667, 2013) with abandoned shopping trolleys to see what they might teach her about method in sexuality education research. This fascination offers a reorientation to method in sexuality education, which involves experiencing research as an event of becoming, where doing rather than meaning-making is emphasised.
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Notes
- 1.
See a lso Allen (in press) where I delineate and explore these debates further.
- 2.
I leave the subject of this sentence deliberately ambiguous, by not distinguishing between whether it is me or shopping trolleys who are doing the explaining. From a new materialist understanding it is both.
- 3.
Pinterest is a free website where images (called ‘pins’) can be uploaded, saved, sorted, and managed through collections known as ‘pinboards’.
- 4.
Here I ad apt Manning’s (2015) ideas in her chapter ‘Against Method’ in relation to work around artistic practice.
- 5.
Taking shopping trolleys from a shopping centre and failing to return them after use is unlawful in Aotearoa-New Zealand.
- 6.
Here Vannini is drawing on Ingold (2011, p. 16).
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Allen, L. (2018). Lessons in Research and Method from Abandoned Shopping Trolleys. In: Sexuality Education and New Materialism. Queer Studies and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95300-4_7
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