How A Hashtag Matters – Crafting Response(-Abilities) through Research-Activism on Sexual Harassment in Pre-Teen Peer Cultures

Abstract

This paper examines what research with children can do and become when it intra-acts with a MeToo hashtag, creative methods, experiences of sexual harassment and the making and travelling of Valentine’s Day cards. The paper is grounded within a creative research-activist project, #MeToo Postscriptum, which aimed to address sexual harassment in pre-teen peer cultures. Analyzing the project, the paper explores how the idea of response-ability manifested in three space-times of the project, and how the material-discursive practices of the project reiteratively reconfigured the conditions of possibilities to respond, react, and act against abusive gendered and sexual child peer cultures. Mapping response-ability through our research endeavours helps theorize the contingent, complex, and entangled ways research-activist methodologies can activate change, enables us to envision response-able practices to counter sexual harassment in young peer cultures, and sensitizes us as scholars and educators to our responsibilities and accountabilities that become recrafted in response.

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

“…Yet, with some exceptions (e.g. Lamb and Randazzo 2016, Ward 2017, Wolfe 2018, Ging and Neary 2019, Pihkala and Huuki 2019, Marston 2020, inventive praxes for doing school-based RSE otherwise are often disembodied and disembedded from the political ecology of their situated policy or practice context. In this paper, we respond to this challenge by exploring the 'What if?'…”

Revisiting Lower Secondary Schools in the 1990s: Reflections on and Interpretations of Sexual and Gender-Based Harassment

“…It is important to see the school culture as a whole and students as active agents. One example is a research-activist project, #MeToo Postscriptum (Pihkala & Huuki 2019) aimed at addressing sexual harassment in pre-teen peer cultures. After the students talked with the researchers at workshops, they were invited to send an anonymised Valentine's card to a politician of their choice in which they reflected on some unpleasant sexual experience in one sentence.…”

Moving with Touch: Entanglements of a Child, Valentine’s Day Cards, and Research–Activism against Sexual Harassment in Pre-Teen Peer Cultures

“…We have not identified her experience in its singularity to ensure the girl's anonymity and because our focus is not on the experience described on the note but, rather, on the microprocesses of change and the subtle shifts that unfolded within and through the workshop. However, to respect this movement from silence to speaking out and speaking up, we have elsewhere made parts of the children's notes public (see Huuki and Pihkala 2018;Pihkala and Huuki 2019).…”

“…The creative arts-based research-activist project, titled #MeToo Postscriptum, that shaped the direction of this article, was designed and implemented by two of the authors-Tuija and Suvi-during the weeks before Valentine's Day in 2018. It emerged from Tuija's broader ongoing research and from a long continuum of research on gendered and sexual force relations by the authors (Huuki and Renold 2016;Huuki et al 2010;Holford et al 2013;Pihkala and Huuki 2019;Sunnari et al 2002;Sunnari 2010). Although it is often discussed only in relation to adults, research shows that sexual harassment-verbal, physical, material, emotional, or psychological sexual abuses of power-also affect young people in multiple, contradictory manners as normalized, everyday hetero-sexisms circulating within young peer cultures, media, and the wider social and cultural discourses (Gillander Gådin 2012;Holford et al 2013;Meyer 2009;Renold 2013;Stein 2007;Sunnari 2010;Sunnari et al 2002).…”

“…Occurring in advance of Valentine's Day, in our project, the #MeToo became linked with the postscript section of a Valentine's Day card. The postscript worked to make visible the often-ignored nature and the silence regarding sexual harassment in pre-teen peer relations (Pihkala and Huuki 2019). Using the hashtag connected the project to the momentum afforded by the digital feminist activism of the #MeToo movement (Mendes et al 2018).…”