Pam Alldred

Children and Young People's Views of Social Research The Case of Research on Home-School Relations

In recent years there has been a concern to produce guidelines and explore ethical practice in social research with children. Much of this is framed within a general concern to empower children. However, there has been little attention paid to exploring how children can view research and what understandings inform their decisions about participation. This article draws on empirical data to argue that childrens views of research are linked to the meaning of the particular research topic in the pre-existing and interlocking personal, local and wider societal contexts of their lives generally. Researchers may seek to provide children with the means to make an informed consent about participation in, and to empower them through, research. However, children can view children in different ways, whatever our intentions.

New materialist social inquiry: designs, methods and the research-assemblage

This paper discusses issues of research design and methods in new materialist social inquiry, an approach that is attracting increasing interest across the social sciences as an alternative to either realist or constructionist ontologies. New materialism de-privileges human agency, focusing instead upon how assemblages of the animate and inanimate together produce the world, with fundamental implications for social inquiry methodology and methods. Key to our exploration is the materialist notion of a ‘research-assemblage’ comprising researcher, data, methods and contexts. We use this understanding first to explore the micropolitics of the research process, and then – along with a review of 30 recent empirical studies – to establish a framework for materialist social inquiry methodology and methods. We discuss the epistemological consequences of adopting a materialist ontology.

The sexuality- assemblages of young men: A new materialist analysis

This article presents a new materialist exploration of young men and sexuality that shifts the focus away from bodies and individuals, toward the affective flow within assemblages of bodies, things, ideas and social institutions, and the sexual capacities this flow produces. Using data from two empirical studies, we explore the sexuality assemblages of teen boys and young men, and the micropolitics of these assemblages. We find that the sexuality produced in the bodies of young men is highly territorialised and aggregated by various materialities. However, we also reveal how young men resist these conventional sexualities.

Inside the research-assemblage: New materialism and the micropolitics of social inquiry

This paper explores social inquiry in terms of the ‘research-assemblages’ that produce knowledge from events. We use the precepts of new materialism (and specifically DeleuzoGuattarian assemblage ontology) to develop understanding of what happens when social events are researched. From this perspective, research is not at root an enterprise undertaken by human actors, but a machine-like assemblage of things, people, ideas, social collectivities and institutions. During social inquiry, the affect economies of an event-assemblage and a research-assemblage hybridise, generating a third assemblage with its own affective flow. This model of the research-assemblage reveals a micropolitics of social research that suggests a means to interrogate and effectively reverse-engineer different social research methodologies and methods, to analyse what they do, how they work and their micropolitical effects. It also suggests a means to forward-engineer research methods and designs to manipulate the kinds of knowledge produced when events are researched.

Engaging Parents with Sex and Relationship Education: a UK Primary School Case Study

Objective: To assess an intervention to familiarise parents with children’s books for use in primary (5–11 years) sex and relationship education (SRE) classes. Method: Case study of a 7-week programme in one London primary school, using ethnographic observation, semi-structured interviews and focus groups with parents (n = 7) and key stakeholders (n = 4), and pre- and post-programme self-completion questionnaires (n = 9). Results: Parents reported increased understanding of the SRE curriculum and awareness of relevant children’s books, enhanced interactions with their children on SRE topics and some positive effects on partners and attitudes towards the school. There was increased confidence in addressing issues in the SRE curriculum for parents of 8- to 10-year-olds, although reduced confidence for one mother. Conclusions: Familiarising parents with materials has the potential to enhance SRE, by improving coherence between educators’ and parents’ messages to children about sex and relationships, increased discussion of SRE topics in parent–child conversations and reduced parental anxiety about topics such as sexual orientation. Future challenges of involving fathers, scalability and sustainability highlight the dilemma of how best to enable parental choice or make equalities interventions.

the gendered embroilments of war

For the last few years – but especially since 11 September 2001 – our daily newspapers and nightly news have been saturated with images of death and destruction on such grand scale that for some there is a fear that human beings are becoming anaesthetized to the everyday tragedies of loss and dispossession – the inevitable corollaries of war. For many, the bloody images, alongside the incessant posturing of the power elite, lubricate the machinery that primes audiences to accept the necessity of future wars on the basis of those vague but hallowed notions of ‘national security’ and the faceless but ever-present ‘terror’. Alongside this fear, however, there can be indifference towards the suffering and violence wrought against others. This special issue was envisaged and produced through our political commitment against and horror at unremitting conflict and aggression. As Jean Said Makdisi writes in this issue ‘I am sick to death of violence, death, and ruin and waste. And I am sick also of compromise, surrender and defeat. I am sick of the corruption and cruelty of the world in which we live, of which war is but the tip of the iceberg’. To echo a heartfelt comment by Frosh: ‘Under such circumstances and in the midst of such clouds of darkness, one wonders if any lessons ever get learned’ (Frosh 2002: 389).

Materialism and Micropolitics in Sexualities Education Research

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.

Making the right connections:'knowledge'and power in academic networking

Academic survival demands far more than the obvious vocational skills of researching, publishing and teaching. In order to succeed (or even hang on in) you are required to ‘be’ as well as ‘do’. By this we mean there is a hidden but potent ontological pressure to embrace particular values about who you are and how you relate to others. Such values emphasise individuality, independence, rationality and merit, and form the cornerstones of the educational establishment. Reflecting and reinforcing the lives and experiences of the dominant and powerful these values invariably underpin academic achievement at both school and university. Those who are successful in exams and become teachers or academics themselves have either been brought up to take these values as given, or must internalise them in order to progress. This chapter explores the social process of academic assimilation, focusing particularly on the practice of social networking in universities.

Thinking globally, acting locally: women activists' accounts

This paper intends to describe the range of forms women’s resistance to globalisation takes, emphasising diverse strategies from everyday acts, the development of practical alternative resources, organising in women’s groups or trades unions, mass demonstrations and symbolic defiance. Recognising that it is the women of the South, in particular, who bear the brunt of the impact of neoliberal ‘free market’ economic policies, it hoped to be sensitive to the struggles for survival that might frame the urgency of resistance amongst women of the South, and make links with some of the strategies of activist women in the more privileged North.

Mixed methods, materialism and the micropolitics of the research-assemblage

Abstract We assess the potential for mixing social research methods, based upon a materialist and micropolitical analysis of the research-assemblage and of what individual research techniques and methods do in practice. Applying a DeleuzoGuattarian toolkit of assemblages, affects and capacities, we document what happens when research methods and techniques interact with the events they wish to study. Micropolitically, many of these techniques and methods have unintended effects of specifying and aggregating events, with the consequently that the knowledge produced by social inquiry is invested with these specifications and aggregations. We argue that rather than abandoning these social research tools, we may use the micropolitical analysis to assess precisely how each method affects knowledge production, and engineer the research designs we use accordingly. This forms the justification for mixing methods that are highly aggregative or specifying with those that are less so, effectively rehabilitating methods that have often been rejected by social researchers, including surveys and experiments.