Reconceptualizing Qualitative Research Involving Young People and Sexuality at School

Abstract

This article attempts to reconceptualize qualitative research around young people, sexuality, and schooling. In a bid to contribute to what has been coined “post-qualitative” research, it grapples with questions of epistemology and ontology which some argue much humanist methodology negates. This discussion is situated within current debates about the utility of method and a context in which sexuality research and methodology appears to have stagnated. Taking two moments from sexuality research previously conceived within a humanist qualitative methodological paradigm, the article thinks them with feminist new materialist thought. The aim is to consider what new methodological, ethical, and ontological possibilities feminist new materialist ideas afford for research in the field of sexualities and beyond. The article argues that new materialist thought invites an open-ness and response-ability from researchers which reorients the ethics of sexuality research and the nature of sexuality itself.