Event overview
Making the art of response-ability matter in post-qualitative gender and sexuality education research, Emma Renold (Professor of Childhood Studies, Cardiff University)
In the spring of 2015, myself and a group of 15 year old teen girls made a graffitied ruler-skirt
to lift the silence of routinised sexual harassment and violence, in school, online and in their community, a post-industrial semi-rural Welsh valleys town in Merthyr Tydfil (UK).
Unplanned, the idea to create a ruler-skirt arose from a throw-away comment by one of the girls; “Boys lift up girls’ skirts with rulers”. It was one of those moments where an affective ‘snap’ (Ahmed 2016) meets creative ‘run(a)way methodologies’ (Renold, Ivinson and Angharad 2017) and “things in the making cut their transformational teeth” (Massumi 2015, ix). In a flash, the ruler seemed to become what Erin Manning (2016, p.1) calls a ‘minor gesture’ - an “always political (…) gestural force that opens up experience to its potential variation”.
Three years on, the ruler-skirt has been activating and making ripples and waves in and across policy, practice and activist spaces that none of us could have predicted. This presentation offers a collective of ruler-skirt risings, providing glimpses of how an affirmative pARTicipatory embodied process and practice makes itself felt across a range of fields, and is only sustainable through collaboration and nurturing multiple ethico-political assemblages that have taken years to trust in, forge and nurture.
Emma Renold is Professor of Childhood Studies at the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Wales. She is the author of numerous publication on children, education, gender
and sexuality. She recently co-produced the bi-lingual activist toolkit, ‘AGENDA’, chaired the
Welsh Government’s expert panel on the future of sexuality and relationships education in Wales and in 2018 was winner of the ESRC Impact in Society Prize.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 8 May 2019 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm |
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