Edge Hill University
Desire, Algorithms, Disruption: What next for Relationships and Sexuality Education in neoliberal times?
In the current moment, young people’s sexual learning is increasingly shaped by media and technologies, mediated through algorithms, digital cultures and affective-attentional economies. From the pervasive influence of the manosphere and incel subcultures on boys’ “masculinity crisis”, to the circulation of technology-facilitated sexual and gender-based violence, and the livestreaming of reproductive and genocidal violence in contexts such as Palestine, young people navigate a complex terrain where desire, trauma, subjection and datafication converge on an everyday basis. These phenomena unfold within broader structures of neoliberal-authoritarian capitalism and its deepening socioeconomic inequalities, producing a “crisis” not only of identities but of wellbeing, relationalities and care.
Using arts-based activities and discussion prompts, this workshop invites educators, researchers, students and practitioners concerned with relationships and sexuality education (RSE) to critically engage with the questions: how might algorithmised desire connect and reproduce sexual and gender crises in seemingly disparate times and spaces? What do these modes of desire and crises tell us about the contexts we are entangled in, and what glitches/ruptures can be recognised as openings for transformative sexual learning? Participants will collaboratively explore what it means to teach and learn about sex, gender, and relationships in a time of “poly-crises”, and how pedagogy can resist/rewrite dominant scripts of violence, normativity, surveillance, and commodification. Thinking with these ideas, we also hope to explore the potential stumbling blocks that come with presenting such realities as “crises”, in the hope of articulating other ways of understanding our present moment. Through this work, we aim to co-create a space to reimagine transformative possibilities for RSE that centre affect, solidarity, and intersectionality—reframing desire not as an individualised, embodied emotion, but an active, mobilisable force for collective change.
Tu Nguyen’s Edge Hill University Graduate Teaching Assistant page
Dr Seán Henry’s Edge Hill University staff page