CFP: Australia Forum on Sexuality, Education and Health

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CFP: Australia Forum on Sexuality, Education and Health

1st National Conference
Equity and Justice in Gender, Sexuality, Education and Health
University of Western Sydney, Parramatta, NSW
22-23 November 2015

The Australia Forum on Sexuality, Education and Health (AFSEH) announces a Call for Papers for its 1st National Conference, to be held on the Parramatta campus of the University of Western Sydney.

AFSEH brings together practitioners, educators, students, researchers and policy makers from across Australia, working in the fields of gender, sexuality, education and health.  The forum enables discussion and debate on contemporary issues and concerns, builds and consolidates networks, and develops collaborative initiatives.

The 1st National Conference seeks to increase the public profile of work on equity and justice particularly pertaining to gender, sexuality, health and education issues today.  The meeting will provide a catalyst for important interdisciplinary work to address these concerns.

Keynote speakers include Simon Blake (Chief Executive Officer of the UK National Union of Students and formerly Chief Executive Officer of Brook the health charity for children and the National Children's Bureau's Sex Education Forum) and Julie Bates (Director of Urban Realists, lobbyist, 'out' sex worker, harm reduction advocate and sex worker rights activist for more than a quarter of a century)

We invite abstracts for papers, posters and symposia presentations. Abstracts should be 300 words long and address one (or more) of the themes below. All abstracts will undergo peer review.

Conference Themes

?   Genders and sexualities in health and education: working together for equity and justice

?   Digital cultures and youth: rights, ethics and responsibilities

?   Intersectionality, sexualities and gender

?   Communities, parents and sexual health: whose rights?

?   Youth-led initiatives: local and international perspectives

?   Popular pedagogies and informal education

It is envisaged that at least two publications will arise from the conference:  a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal, Sex Education, and a book based on a combination of theoretical and cross-disciplinary educator/practitioner work.

Please include along with your abstract, the presentation?s title, the presenter?s name and affiliation (or list of presenters? names and affiliations), the conference theme addressed and contact details including an email address.

Send your abstract to Jawed Gebrael: J.Gebrael@uws.edu.au 

Abstracts should be received by close of business, Friday September 11, 2015

Registration information for the conference will be available shortly.  Follow the AFSEH bloghttps://afseh.wordpress.com/

CFP: Mediated Intimacies: Relationships, Bodies and Technology

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Mediated Intimacies: Relationships, Bodies and Technology

Call for Papers: Special Issue of Journal of Gender Studies to be published March 2017 edited by Alison Winch, Feona Attwood, Jamie Hakim.
We are looking for 7000 word completed essays by 31st December 2015

In what ways does media convergence culture represent, intervene in, exploit and enable intimate relations? How is intimacy being reconfigured under neoliberalism?

On the one hand we are living in atomized and individualistic times where relationships are increasingly strategic and competitive. On the other the media has become, as Beverly Skeggs argues, intensely intimate. This special issue on mediated intimacies aims to explore how understandings of intimacy are (re)constructed and experienced, particularly in digital cultures. In addition, we are interested in the ways in which the apparently alienated entrepreneurial self is constructed through and by forging intimate connections and simultaneously how these networks are mined and monetized by corporate culture.

This special issue of Journal of Gender Studies is developed from a symposium held in July 2014 on Mediated Intimacies where the speakers explored, among other topics, girls’ online friendships, ‘expert’ sex advice in printed media, male seduction communities, and how pornography reconceptualises the very idea of intimacy itself.

Potential papers could explore the affective dimensions of intimate practices reflecting the pleasures and pains of life lived under neoliberalism, including how precarity and class impact on the ways in which intimacy is forged. Because digital culture is primarily corporate driven (Taylor 2014) we are interested in how user-generated media employs self-branding strategies. For example, in the refashioning of the body or gendered and sexual identities, or the ways in which intimacy can be a form of self-promotion.

Feminist and queer perspectives seek to expand the reach of what is constituted as belonging, love, connection and intimacy. Whereas recession culture has reestablished normative gender categories (Negra and Tasker 2014) contemporary digital cultures have the potential to challenge and rework gender and sexual identities (McGlotten 2013). This issue hopes to explore these productive tensions.

Potential papers could also explore how sexuality, sex, sexual knowledges and sexual pleasure function by looking, for example, at Do-It-Yourself porn, sexual subcultures and alternative sex practices. A final consideration underpinning this issue is how different intimacies intersect along axes of class, race, disability, age and geographical location.

Possible topics could include:

● adapting and resisting gendered and sexed identities
● forging new normative gendered identities
● mediatised kinship (families, parenthood and fertility)
● geolocation technology
● dating and hook up apps, sex dating and relationship cultures
● selfies
● role of experts (e.g. sex advisors and agony aunts), including their changing meaning in peer-driven contexts
● mediated romance
● fitness apps and body culture
● use of social networking sites, including instagram, Facebook, Twitter
● self-branding
● the mediation of friendship
● rebranding feminism
● pornography
● monetization of intimacy, including big data, content generation and PR/advertising

Please send 7000 word completed essays by 31st December 2015 through Scholar One Manuscripts: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cjgs20/current.

Please direct enquiries to Alison Winch (a.winch@mdx.ac.uk), Feona Attwood (f.attwood@mdx.ac.uk) and Jamie Hakim (j.hakim@uea.ac.uk)

Publication schedule:

  • 31 December 2015: Papers to peer reviewers

  • March 2016: Comments to authors

  • June 2016: Authors final revisions

  • September 2016: Final acceptance