This paper explores how participants in a Swedish secondary school do gender talk with comics. Swedish schools are tasked with working with gender, but this can be a challenge for many teachers, and finding materials to work with gender aspects can be difficult. Meanwhile, literary research on comics has shown them to be a potential tool for…

This study was conducted among a group of Swedish teachers and a class of 14-15-year-old students and explored pornography education as part of secondary school sexuality education. Data were generated using mixed methods including teacher-researcher meetings, participant observation in class, student interviews, and teacher evaluation meetings,…

Starting with the question of why there is so much religiously motivated resistance against compulsory sex education, this article explores and discusses entanglements of norms about sexuality, gender, and religion in education. Based on predominantly Swedish data, the aim of the paper is to offer perspectives on connections between religiosity…

To estimate the distribution of the number of acquaintances of the members of a society, the network scale-up method asks survey respondents about the number of people they know with features for which national statistics are available. While many features have been used for this purpose, first names have been suggested to produce particularly low…

The workforce in early childhood education and care (ECEC) is highly gender-segregated with a majority of women. Gender-sensitive professionalization is regarded a way to recruit more men, but there is a call for more empirical research into perspectives that combines bodily aspects of gender, professionalization and men`s career choices. Applying…

Despite the notable increase in women's enrollment in education, a significant gender gap persists in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. This imbalance poses challenges in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. While research on the relationship between gender and STEM has been growing, the…

Drawing from a practice-based research study in Swedish secondary schools, the aim of this paper is to explore how facts and values are made and unmade as separate and entangled phenomena in sexuality education. In this exploration, we work with a posthumanist approach - agential realism - and more specifically the concept of agential cuts. The…

In this study, we investigate the phenomenon of Swedish Natural Science sexuality education. These classes tend to provide factual knowledge, focus on the negative outcomes of sexuality, be heteronormative and include little time for discussion--like much school sexuality education across the world--and this study aims to contribute ideas about…

Sexuality education (SE) takes place in fields of tension where biology, legislation, norms, and values intersect. Drawing on Ahmed's phenomenological account of whiteness, this article examines how Swedish whiteness is constructed and reproduced within SE. In Sweden, SE is formalised as an overarching, subject-integrated knowledge area where the…

The aim of this study is to highlight gender norms in physical education (PE) dance lessons, in order to analyse how secondary school students, both girls and boys, negotiate these norms. To do this, we used Bourdieu's concept of masculine domination and Butler's theory of heteronormativity. Video material was collected from eight Swedish…

Photographs of children are used on a daily basis in Swedish preschool practice. Although the preschool curriculum prescribes gender equality and celebration of diversity, photographs of indoor activities have shown to display a homogenous view of children and an emphasis on masculine-coded productions and accomplishments. This article examines…

The educational mission of most western schools today includes the nurturing of children's sexual upbringing, which many scholars see as a way of controlling their sexuality and forming them into "sexual citizens." This article examines how official Swedish school guidelines and textbooks have mediated sexuality norms through education…

Photographs constitute an important visual language in contemporary Swedish preschool, as they are legible to young children themselves. This article aims to examine which notions of the child are represented in preschool photographs, and how these notions correlate to notions of the child expressed in the Swedish preschool curriculum. The…

Using an intersectional analysis, this article critically analyses implied and expressed norms to identify perceptions of appropriate behaviour in children's play, and to explore how social communicative arenas such as Internet forums construct knowledge and values. Adults' responses to an incident that occurred amongst a group of children in…

This paper provides a discourse analysis of 12 Swedish sexuality education texts intended for preschool practitioners and published between 1969 and 2021. Using Fairclough's framework, we identify three discourses about children's sexual play in relation to children's sexual agency in the texts: child sexuality as encouraged and entangled with…