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Materialism and Micropolitics in Sexualities Education Research

  • Pam Alldred
  • Nick J. Fox
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Abstract

In this chapter, we establish a language and landscape for a new materialist practice of research in sexuality education. In the first section, we develop the materialist approach to sexuality and—by extension—sexuality education. Sexuality is not an attribute of a body, but an impersonal affective flow within assemblages of bodies, things, ideas, and social institutions, which produces sexual (and other) capacities in bodies. The second part of the chapter re-thinks social inquiry in terms of the micropolitics of the research-assemblage. From this perspective, research is a machine-like assemblage of things, people, ideas, social collectivities, and institutions. We conceptualise research as the hybridising of two assemblages: an ‘event-assemblage’ (for instance, some sexuality education practice) and a ‘research-assemblage’ comprising researcher, methods, audience, and contexts.

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© The Author(s) 2017

Open Access This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License, which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

Authors and Affiliations

  • Pam Alldred
    • 1
  • Nick J. Fox
    • 2
  1. 1.Brunel University LondonLondonUK
  2. 2.University of SheffieldSheffieldUK

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