Becoming AGENDA: The Making and Mattering of a Youth Activist Resource on Gender and Sexual Violence

Abstract

What happens when ‘the margin of manouverability’ (Massumi 2015, p.3) in a specific socio-political context is buzzing with promise and possibility? What might some crafty and serious play with the feminist posthuman ethics of research/er reponse-ability (Barad, 2007) cook up in such a conducive soup? This paper shares the pARTicipatory praxis that informed the making of ‘AGENDA: A Young People’s Guide to Making Positive Relationships Matter’ (Renold, 2016). AGENDA is a 75 page youth-activist bi-lingual (Welsh-English) interactive resource co-created with and for young people in Wales to address gendered and sexual violence. Crafted with an affirmative cut and nurturing a run-a-way praxis that secretes its own co-ordinates, AGENDA invites a care-ful re-mattering of ‘what matters’ when it comes to conventional healthy relationships education. The paper offers a careful cartography of how AGENDA unfolded as a lively resource that continues to matter as it connects to policy and practice assemblages that push-pull the agential becomings of AGENDA on its way.

What if?: becoming response-able with the making and mattering of a new relationships and sexuality education curriculum

“…A pivotal moment in how EJ became entangled in the formation of a new RSE was in the creation of a Welsh Government sponsored youth-activist gender and sexuality toolkit, 'AGENDA: Supporting children and young people to make positive relationships matter' (www.agendaonline.co.uk). Originally co-produced with over 50 young people and key third sector organisations, AGENDA has since evolved as an online resource and outreach programme that invites practitioners to support children and young people to notice, share and call out how human and more-than-human relations and relationships are regulated in the context of social justice, rights, equity and diversity (see Renold 2019). AGENDA carefully re-matters youth voice with an affirmative, transformative, and creative praxis that has risen from years of arts-based research, engagement, and activism with young people (e.g.…”

“…produces an opening' and it is through attuning (in this case to the questions, ideas and experiences of children and young people) that new ways of knowing and methods of doing relationships and sexuality education might flow. Mixing data with art to form the hybrid darta is also an explicit post-qualitative intervention to trouble what counts as measurable data or 'evidence' and to foreground the value of creative methodologies (Renold 2019). The 'ph' replaces 'f' in dartaphact, to register the posthuman forces of art-ful objects as proto-political enunciators.…”

What More Do Bodies Know? Moving with the Gendered Affects of Place

“…We feel that widening the purview of what counts as knowledge is critical to tackling all kinds of injustices, and specifically in the valleys, where economic regeneration is not taking place yet where all kinds of educational experiments are happening (Renold, 2018(Renold, , 2019a(Renold, , 2019b. In the era of the 'Capitalocene' 7 (Moore cited in Stengers, 2019), young people's micro and macro political activisms are becoming vital to ongoing life.…”

Becoming eventful: making the ‘more-than’ of a youth activist conference matter

“…This paper has attempted to map some of the process of what becomes possible not only when a national youth activist 'toolkit' has been co-produced with the diverse publics, 'for whom such practices matter' but what can become possible when an artful and speculative praxis invites 'those it rallies to think, imagine, create' (Stengers 2019, 19) so that what matters, is mattering and has mattered might surface and shake-up the status quo. It is an entangled embodied and embedded praxis that has been cultivated and sustained over many years of learning how to fold with a specific relational field, of local, national and international policy-practice-activist assemblages (Renold 2019a).…”