The Palgrave Handbook of Sexuality Education, Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, Editors: Louisa Allen, Mary Lou Rasmussen, pp.69 - 93
This chapter analyses the historical and socio-political contexts of the design and delivery of s... more This chapter analyses the historical and socio-political contexts of the design and delivery of school-based sexuality education for young women and men in two Sub-Saharan African countries: Ghana and Mozambique. The chapter interrogates colonising tendencies within, and created through, school-based sexuality education. Emphasis is placed on the forms of knowledge and pedagogies that are promoted by Western donors in the design and delivery of school –based sexuality. The analyses of the bodies of knowledge and pedagogies underpinning sexuality education in Ghana and Mozambique draws on African feminist, postcolonial and anti-colonial theories. In addition, the chapter builds on scholarly work on the geographies of childhoods and youth that theorises young people as hybrid products of the complex historical geographies of former colonised nations.
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Papers by Esther Miedema
This paper engages with a critical gap in the literature, namely the lack of clarity regarding the theoretical foundations of HIV prevention education. Such clarification is essential to understand, and, where necessary, challenge underpinning assumptions and address tensions between programme development in principle and in situ implementation.
The paper draws on findings from a qualitative, multi-method study conducted in Maputo, Mozambique. Data were gathered from young secondary school people, (peer) educators, policy makers and international agency staff.
A critical theme emerging from the data was ‘the modern’ and its threats; participants perceiving the moral fragmentation breakdown of society to be due to modern phenomena such as the multicultural character of cities, globalisation and an aggressive media. Re-establishing cohesion would require young people became ‘well educated’, were, in the words of one participant, re-humanised.
The paper highlights how particular hope was invested in the potential of education to reinstate young women in their position as the revolutionary vanguard, this time not against a coloniser but an epidemic. By exploring the meanings key actors attach to HIV-related education, the paper offers a framework for more nuanced understanding of educational responses to the epidemic.
Addressing key gaps in available literature on HIV- and AIDS-related education, two analytical frameworks were developed. Based on an analysis of current programmes worldwide and a review of a multidisciplinary body of literature on HIV- and AIDS-related education, the first framework draws a distinction between three broad approaches to HIV- and AIDS-related education: those building on moral concerns, and those that might be understood as informed by notions of rights, or science. The second analytical framework developed in the study distinguishes three principal conceptions of the aims of education: the achievement of autonomy, (civil) enculturation or vocational preparation.
A qualitative multi-method empirical study was subsequently undertaken, gathering data from young people, (peer) educators, policy makers and representatives of international agencies in Maputo, Mozambique on their views regarding the aims of (HIV- and AIDS-related) education. The analysis revealed that participants drew on varying and strongly gendered understandings of what was considered (im)moral behaviour and a commitment to rights in efforts to reduce the spread and impact of the epidemic. Furthermore, in different ways, policy makers, educators and international agency staff identified both the causes of and solution for the epidemic as existing in various forms of modern and traditional ‘culture.’
The analysis illustrates that within HIV- and AIDS-related education, where concepts such as rights and culture are seen as central to many programmes, the different actors involved in such education draw on a considerable variety of discourses. An important consequence is that within and across these various sets of actors, understandings of what constitutes ‘good quality’ HIV prevention education can vary widely. The thesis concludes by reflecting on the potential pf a pragmatic epistemology of ‘knowing’, whereby dialogue and education are acknowledged as ongoing processes to deal with uncertainty, rather than leading to closed-ended certainties.
Date: Monday, March 26
Time: 15:30-17:00
Place: Common Room Anthropology B5.12, Nieuwe Achtergracht 166, Amsterdam.
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Abstract
Scrutinizing the recent disproportionate media and political attention provided to the ills of the ‘white working-class’, this article examines the framing of their apparent underachievement in education policy and discourse in post-Brexit vote England. In a political context dominated by anti-immigration and nationalist rhetoric, this article aims to investigate the framing of such underachievement across class, gender and ethnic differentials. To that end, a Critical Frame Analysis was conducted of three policy documents focusing on differences in diagnosis of, and solutions for, ‘white working-class' underachievement. We contend that the political emphasis on redistributive social justice and identity politics introduces a logic that can lead to remedies consistent with the idea of interest-divergence emanating from Critical Race Theory (CRT). The article concludes that transformative reform is lacking and communicated outcomes overly focus on ‘white working-class’ boys as a specific target, obscuring issues common across and specific to other groups.
About the lecturers
Dr. Esther Miedema is a Lecturer in the Governance and Inclusive Development research programme (GID) of the AISSR, co-principal investigator of the 5-year, 11-country 'Her Choice' research programme on early marriage: http://www.her-choice.org/en/ and principal investigator of a comprehensive sexuality education research project in Ethiopia. Her teaching and research are in the field of education, gender, sexuality and international development. She is interested in a) the genealogy of, and interactions between, global, national and local narratives about education, young people and health within sexuality education, and b) the ways in which young women and men contest and subvert gendered norms and violence, and inequalities more broadly.
Kafui Adjogatse is a Research Master’s student in International Development Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He obtained a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics from the University of Warwick in July 2010, with a quantitative dissertation focusing on the differences between socio-economic incentive structures between violent and non-violent crime in the United States. Having spent five years working as a Credit Analyst at Macquarie Bank specialising on Emerging Markets and Tax Structures, he returned to academia in 2016. His research interests include intersectional structures of oppression across ethnicity, class and gender, in addition to international trade and tax systems. He has recently conducted fieldwork in Mexico for a Research Master’s dissertation that investigates the role of the primary school teacher in the (re)production of an ‘anti-black’ Mexican national identity.
About the seminar series
In this seminar series the relevance and irrelevance of race is being discussed as an object and concept of research in order to explore ways to talk about race without naturalizing differences. The series goes beyond a standard definition of race, one that is allegedly relevant everywhere, and situates race in specific practices of research. In addition the series gives room to the various different versions of race that can be found in the European context and explores when and how populations, religions, and cultures become naturalized and racialized. Scholars from different (inter)disciplinary fields (such as genetics, anthropology, philosophy, cultural studies, history, political sciences, science and technology studies) are invited to address the issue of race through a paper presentation. The seminar is held every six weeks at the University of Amsterdam. Go to webpage seminar series.