Sofia Santos (Universidade de Porto): Conducting Research on Sex Education within Portuguese and British Schools: Challenges and Dilemmas

Date: 20 February 2013, 1.30pm
Location: Parkinson Building, Room B11

Sofia Santos, Universidade de Porto

During the last decades debates around sexuality, sexual rights and sexual education have brought new legitimacy to research on sexuality. But despite this increasing visibility and the changes it has enabled, social scientists are still facing great difficulties and obstacles in furthering this research. Currently, these topics are still seen as polemical, deviant and restricted to some academic groups. Thus, as researchers in this field, we have to ask ourselves “is it possible to conduct valid research on sexuality?” and “what kinds of problems will we face during the fieldwork because of the nature of our topics?”.

In this session, I propose a discussion about the difficulties of researching young people’s sexuality in the context of schooling, drawing on experiences from my PhD project on sex education.