Methods in Dialogue: Sexualities
Date: 22 April 2009, 3-5pm
Location: University of Manchester
Workshop summary
Our three speakers will introduce the different methodological approach they have taken to researching sexualities. This is followed by by discussion and debate from participants, exploring how ways of conceptualising research questions lead to different methodological possibilities and challenges.
Speakers
'Troubling Genealogy: Sexuality and History' - Laura Doan, Head of English & American Studies, University of Manchester
Genealogy as an analytical framework in identity-based historical practice has been extraordinarily useful in broadening the scope of sexual past, tracking the ancestries of similitude and rupture, yet there is much that it occludes. Later iterations in the Foucauldian mode of genealogy shift attention away from an interest in origins toward the equally politicized project of a lesbian, gay or queer history of the present. This concern with power has ensured that the dominant structure of a politically invested genealogy remains secure, suggesting the need to understand how genealogy itself frames, conditions and informs the very boundaries of our investigations.
Go to Laura Doan's web page (link opens in new window)
'Exploring sexual identities, relationships and forms of existence' - Brian Heaphy (University of Manchester)
Brian will discuss the range of methods he employed in his various research projects on contemporary sexualities. He argues that to understand the contemporary sexualities as they are lived in day-to-day life, it is important to develop approaches that can illuminate sexualities as identities, relationships and forms of existence.
View online presentation (slides plus audio recording) (presentation will open in new window)
Go to Brian Heaphy's web page (link opens in new window)
Kaye Wellings (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine)
In this session we will explore some of the issues involved in producing quantitative information about sexual behaviour. As a founder member of the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles in 1990, and PI on the 2000 and 2010 surveys. Kaye Wellings has been concerned with finding ways of increasing the validity of data on sexual behaviour from large surveys. She will discuss some of the challenges inherent in this, some ways of addressing them, and the kinds of data produced.