Conference Agenda

This symposium explores the potential for bringing creative methodologies and research communication techniques to research in the field of gender, sexuality and education. The three papers in the symposium draw from three research projects in three national contexts, Finland and Sámiland, Wales and Australia.

The papers in this symposium demonstrate how and why creative research methodologies and methods have become important strategies in feminist educational research in order to create generative spaces for mapping how children in Wales experience, negotiate, and express how gender in/equality matters in their everyday lives; exploring Sámi pine mythologies and personal experiences of Arctic girlhood and selfhood through thinking with Kelohonka – the ancient pine of Lapland; and will provide examples of how feminist creative methodologies and methods enable situated, contextualised, and experiential outputs to be generated from a research on everyday sexisms in Australian universities.

Feminist, queer and Indigenous scholars have increasingly turned to creative approaches because of their concern with the shortcomings of conventional research methods for attending the complexities and nuances of power relations and intersectionalities, conveying findings to a broader public, and working towards systemic change (Coleman and Jungnickel, 2024; O’Sullivan and Reardon-Smith, 2025).

It is argued that creative methods are necessary for not just investigating phenomena, but that they are both engaged and engaging with participants, knowledge, and the broader public (Lury and Wakefield, 2012). The papers presented here strive to activate transformation at the micro and macro levels.

The authors of the papers acknowledge the difficulties inherent to systemic changes to the ways that gender, sexuality and education are lived, understood and perceived, especially during the precarious times we are living in, and specifically regarding the rights of trans and gender diverse people, as well as Indigenous peoples. Presently, gender and sexuality diverse people have varying levels of equality across the UK and European Union. In the UK, trans rights to equal participation in public life and spaces have been rolled back by changes to the definition of woman and man under the Equality Act, which since 2025 are legally defined as biological sex at birth. In Australia, the past 6 years have seen increased racism – especially towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and anti-trans and gender diversity reflecting ideologies that exist in tandem with global political movements aimed at the destruction of equity and diversity as principles of inclusive governance (Butler, 2024). In Finland, there is an intense public debate about Sámi rights to belonging, both within the Sámi community itself and in relation to Finland as a settler‑colonial state. This discussion reflects broader struggles over Indigenous sovereignty, cultural continuity, and the recognition of Sámi epistemologies within national political structures. It also intersects with wider tensions around gender, sexuality, and the rights of trans and gender diverse people, highlighting how multiple forms of marginalisation and resistance become entangled in the current moment of social and political precarity. These dynamics inevitably extend into education, shaping the everyday experiences of diverse children and young people, influencing how they encounter knowledge, identity, and belonging, and affecting the futures they are able to imagine and inhabit.

Considering changing global politics, the symposium engages with how creative methodologies enable gender and sexuality research to reveal subtle resistances that occur in the everyday of education. Additionally, the symposium will demonstrate how creative methods, as research communication tools, open up different opportunities for dialogue, reflection, and pathways to action than traditional research outputs.

The symposium aims to generate discussion, it will be participatory and encourages delegates to engage with data and artefacts, including data-driven creative outputs.

This paper draws upon a Welsh Government–funded arts-activist engagement and research project with 70 children aged 9–11 across rural, urban, and suburban Wales (UK). Using participatory, multi-sensory arts methods, the study maps how children experience, negotiate, and express how gender in/equality matters in their everyday lives. Informed by feminist posthuman and queer post-qualitative frameworks (Deleuze & Guattari 1987; Barad 2015; Manning 2020; Bey 2021; Preciado 2025), the project conceptualises gender as an assemblage: a dynamic, relational, and more-than-human process through which bodies, affects, materials, discourses, and spaces intra-act. While research has richly documented the non-linear and intersectional ways children are entangled in gender and sexuality norms, there remains limited work on how children’s own insights can meaningfully shape gender-equitable educational futures. The study thus responds to a persistent gap between critical research on childhood, gender, and sexuality particularly scholarship challenging developmental discourses of innocence and age-appropriateness, and education policy and practice (Payne & Smith 2025; Gannon et al. 2024). The project unfolded in two phases. First, creative friendship-group encounters used drawing, mapping, image-elicitation and speculative prompts to explore everyday gender norms and pressures. Second, whole-class arts-activist workshops invited children to collectively activate what mattered to them through the making of “dartaphacts” (arts-activist objects), designed to communicate their messages safely to wider publics. Childhood researchers have long recognised the potential power of arts-based methodologies to research some of the most sensitive folds of experience (Lupton and Leahy 2021; Hickey-Moody et al. 2022). Accordingly, children’s multi-modal creative outputs (drawings, objects, movement, slogans, and film) are treated not as data to be extracted, but as practices that travel beyond the research encounter. Rather than presenting linear “findings,” the paper shares narrative, visual, poetic, and filmic vignettes that show how art operates as a passageway (Manning 2020) for attuning to, animating, and amplifying the complexities of children’s gendered lives. In alignment with ECER 2026’s theme, “Knowing and Acting” the paper foregrounds the political and historical urgency of imagining gender-just educational futures through situated, intergenerational, and speculative creative praxis. In a context of intensifying gender-phobia and regulation of childhood gender expression (Butler 2024; Stockton 2021), the paper argues that arts-based, posthuman approaches have the potential for crafting ethical, response-able (Barad 2007) spaces where children’s gendered experiences can matter within and beyond educational research, policy, and practice.

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2015). Transmaterialities: Trans*/matter/realities and queer political imaginings. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21(2–3), 387–422. Bey, M. (2021). Black trans feminism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stockton, K. B. (2021). Gender(s). Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Butler, J. (2024). Who’s afraid of gender? London: Vintage/Random House. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gannon, S., Pasley, A., & Osgood, J. (Eds.). (2024). Gender un/bound: Traversing educational possibilities. London: Taylor & Francis. Hickey-Moody, A., Horn, C., Willcox, M., & Florence, E. (2021). Arts-based methods for research with children (p. 149). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Lupton, D., & Leahy, D. (2021). Creative approaches to health education: Arts-based methods in research, teaching and practice. London: Routledge. Manning, E. (2020). For a pragmatics of the useless. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Payne, E. and Smith, M. 2025. Queer Kids and Social Violence: The Limits of Bullying. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. Preciado, P. B. (2025). Dysphoria mundi. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions

This bilingual creative article explores Sámi pine mythologies and personal experiences of Arctic girlhood and selfhood through thinking with Kelohonka – the ancient pine of Lapland. Acting as a cultural, scholarly and philosophical companion, Kelohonka becomes a medium for connecting with nature, memory, and more-than-human beings. The narrative weaves together Sámi mythology, feminist modes of knowing, and posthumanist theory into a new concept: mythodology – a fusion of mythology and methodology. Mythodology moves across two intra-active landscapes: the physical and analytical, and the mythical and affective. Mythodological knowing brings together ancient archetypal beliefs, sensory embodiment, the memories of personal experience, as well as theoretical and methodological insight. Through these, lost knowledge may be recovered, enabling one to recreate one’s history anew. When transmitted mythologically, knowledge emerges as minor feels (Seigworth & Pedwell, 2022), as a sight, a bodily sensation, an instinctive gesture or movement, a direct knowing, or through companion species. Knowledge also arises through observing the entanglement, as its material elements respond to shifts within it. Drawing on mythodological thinking, the article meanders through forests, lakes, and storms of Sámiland, where Kelohonka serves as guide, protector, and enabler of reciprocal relationship. Mythodological thinking challenges colonial and gendered notions of agency, emphasizing the importance of ancient wisdom, embodied Sámi Indigenous knowledge, and the presence of the affective in sustaining Arctic life. Tämä kaksikielinen luova artikkeli tutkii kelohonkaan liittyviä saamelaisia mytologioita ja henkilökohtaisia kokemuksia arktisesta tyttöydestä ja itseydestä. Kelohonka, Lapin ikiaikainen mänty, toimii kulttuurisena, akateemisena ja filosofisena kumppanina, jonka kanssa rakentuu yhteys luontoon, muistoihin ja kumppanilajeihin. Teksti yhdistää saamelaista mytologiaa, feminististä tietämistä ja posthumanistisia teorioita muodostaen käsitteen mytodologia– mytologian ja metodologian sulautuman. Mytodologia liikkuu kahden intra‑aktiivisen maiseman halki: fyysisen ja analyyttisen sekä myyttisen ja affektiivisen. Mytodologisessa tietämisessä yhdistyvät muinaiset arkkityyppiset uskomukset, ruumiillisuus, henkilökohtaisten kokemusten muistot ja teoreettis-metodologinen oivaltaminen. Näiden kautta kadonnutta alkuperäiskansatietoa voidaan palauttaa, ja siten luoda henkilökohtaista historiaa uudelleen. Mytodologisesti välittyessään tieto ilmenee näkynä, kehollisena tuntemuksena, vaistonvaraisena eleenä tai liikkeenä, välittömänä tietämisenä tai kumppanilajien kautta. Tietoa nousee esiin myös havainnoimalla kietoutumia, kun niiden materiaaliset elementit reagoivat kietoumissa tapahtuviin muutoksiin. Mytodologiasta ammentaen artikkeli kuljeskelee läpi Saamenmaan metsien, järvien ja myrskyjen, joissa kelohonka toimii oppaana, suojelijana ja vastavuoroisen suhteen mahdollistajana. Teksti haastaa kolonialistisia ja sukupuolittuneita käsityksiä toimijuudesta, korostaen muinaisen viisauden, kehollisen tiedon ja affektiivisen läsnäolon merkitystä arktisessa elämässä.

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglements of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press. Kuokkanen, R. (2009). Boaris dego eana: Eamiálbmogiid diehtu, filosofiijat ja dutkan [As Old as the Earth: Indigenous Knowledge, Philosophies and Research]. Cálliidlágádus. Karasjok. Lummaa, T., Vainio, K., Korrensalo, A., Takala, T. & Tuittila, ES. (2023). Itseksi puiden kanssa. [Becoming Myself Among Trees]. Elore 30(1). https://doi.org/10.30666/elore.126754 Niemelä, T., Wallenius, TM. & Kotiranta, H. (2002). The kelo tree, a vanishing substrate of specified Wood-inhabiting fungi. Polish Botanical Journal 47(2), 91–101. Pentikäinen J. & Pulkkinen, R. (2018). Saamelaisten mytologia. [The Mythology of the Sámi People.] Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. Helsinki Seigworth GJ. & Pedwell C. (2023). Introduction: A Shimmer of Inventories. In GJ. Seigworth & Pedwell, C. (Eds.), The Affect Theory Reader 2, 1–59. Duke University Press.

This participatory presentation draws from a project carried out by the authors between 2021- 2025. Understanding and Addressing Everyday Sexisms in Australian Universities aimed to improve the ways in which gender-based discrimination is understood and addressed in Australian universities by employing a creative, feminist, and intersectional approach to researching everyday sexisms. The researchers understand everyday sexisms as slippery and fleeting moments where experiences are shaped in gendered, racialised, sexualised and ableist ways. The term ‘sexisms’ is used to reflect that sexism is understood and experienced differently. Individual incidents can be fleeting and seemingly banal or innocuous. Therefore, situations or outcomes created by everyday sexisms can often be reasoned away as attributable to something else. In addition to academic papers (Gray, et al., 2024a, Gray, et al., 2024b), outputs also included a range of resources made available to universities to supplement gender equity initiatives (Blaise, et al., 2023; Blaise, et al., 2025a, 2025b, 2025c). These creative outputs were produced to equip universities with nuanced insights into how everyday sexisms impact upon the daily lives of their workforce and suggest ways to change the everyday environment of higher education at the individual, discipline and university level. The project’s situated, intersectional and feminist approach to data generation will be presented, as well as how this facilitated the process of making data-driven creative research outputs. The presentation will demonstrate how the project team worked with a creative practitioner to produce the three creative project outputs that this presentation will share: The Oppressive Grind, a research-informed broadsheet developed entirely from the qualitative survey responses to communicate these findings to a diverse audience; Cards Against Everyday Sexisms, a card deck created from direct quotes from participants who completed a range of open-ended survey items. The deck of cards gestures to research done by Carmel Diezmann and Susan Grieshaber (2019) in which luck and playing the “academic game” featured in the responses of women professors working in Australia when asked about their career progression; and finally the presentation will share an online microcredential that is aimed to educate those who take it about everyday sexisms and how they appear in university settings. This microcredential is based on project data and findings and is intended to be used by people of all genders working in Australian universities. The paper therefore provides examples of how feminist creative methodologies and methods enable situated, contextualised, and experiential outputs to be generated.

Blaise, M., Gray, E., Ullman, J., & Fishwick, E. (2023). The Oppressive Grind: Understanding and Addressing Everyday Sexisms in Australian Universities 2021-2024. https://doi.org/10.26183/8dwm-pc13 Blaise, M., Gray, E., Ullman, J., Fishwick, E. & Beardman, G. (2025a). Micro-Credential: Understanding and addressing everyday sexisms. Everyday Sexisms in Australian Universities. https://doi.org/10.25958/wmtz-kk33 Blaise, M., Gray, E., Ullman, J., Fishwick, E. & Beardman, G. (2025b). Cards against everyday sexisms. Everyday Sexisms in Australian Universities. Edith Cowan University. https://doi.org/10.25958/anng-p672 Blaise, M., Gray, E., Ullman, J., Fishwick, E. (2025c). Everyday sexisms take away tote bags: Tools for communicating research findings. Edith Cowan University. https://doi.org/10.25958/p4gg-fd55 Diezmann, C., and Griesbhaber, S. (2019). Women Professors: Who Makes It and How? The Netherlands: Springer. Gray, E. M., Pasley, A., Fishwick, E., Blaise, M., Ullman, J., & Delaney, M. (2024a). Australian university websites as colonialities of gender. Journal of Gender Studies, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2024.2429695 Gray, E. M., Pasley, A., Blaise, M., Ullman, J., Fishwick, E. (2024b). Sexisms and Un/welcome Diversity in Australian Universities. The Australian Educational Researcher. 51, 1945–1960. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-023-00673-1