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Teaching empowerment? Gender, sexuality education and the contested pedagogical relations of knowing and being known with(in) an HIV prevention programme in South Africa

University of British Columbia

This dissertation is an exploration of the im/possibilities of knowing and being known with(in) sexuality education. The project was provoked by how sexuality education is framed as a global strategy to prevent the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) among youth. In particular, the study aimed to problematize how sexuality education is positioned as a site for youth empowerment in relation to gendered identities and relations. Through feminist and poststructural readings of ethnographic research (Britzman, 2000; Lather, 2007; St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000; Youdell, 2010), this dissertation engages the pedagogical encounters of sexuality education. The pedagogical encounter (doubled through the research encounter) is theorized as a contested site in which educators and learners engage in the messy and always ongoing work of making sense of their lives with(in) place (Ellsworth, 1997, 2005; Massey, 2005).These encounters take form in South Africa, even as the relations explored within them resist a global/local binary of international guidelines, national programmes or local implementation. Within the contours of these encounters, educators from loveLife, a South African non-governmental organization, meet-up with youth in particular moments. Drawing on three opening propositions related to sexuality education as an always political project, this dissertation foregrounds an analytic shift from who youth are and what is known to how understandings of identities and forms of knowledge become coherent within particular pedagogical moments. This shift draws attention to how pedagogical approaches such as loveLife’s are entangled in power-laden understandings of social identities and a perceived (linear) relation to knowledge. In doing so, it destabilizes the claim that youth can be empowered through sexuality education. Within the problematic imperative to “do” sexuality education differently, already present struggles over identities and forms of knowledge point to the necessity of re-articulating what is claimed in and through sexuality education. This dissertation suggests an articulation of sexuality education in which the vulnerability of knowing and being known might become a condition for responsibility to one another and a site for social transformation.

Text

2015-04-07

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/52646

Educational Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/