Assembling citizenship: Teenage pregnancy, sexualities education and the becoming-citizen

Youth Research Centre Seminar Series 2018

Presented by Professor Nick J. Fox, University of Sheffield

This event explores the micropolitical production and reproduction of citizens and citizenship from within a new materialist, relational framework.  Citizenship should be seen not a state or status to be acquired, lost or refused, but a set of capacities that a body may attain through various diverse day-to-day practices and engagements.  Data from two studies reveal the impact of different sexualities-education assemblages (constituted around teachers, school nurses and youth workers in the UK) upon the sexual and non-sexual capacities produced in young people.  These capacities – for instance, a capacity to assert rights to express specific sexual desires or a capacity to manage fertility proactively – contribute inter alia to young people’s (sexual) ‘citizen-ing’.  Such analysis suggests an alternative nomadic citizenship of becoming and lines of flight.

Presenter:

Nick J. Fox holds an honorary chair in sociology at the University of Sheffield.  He has researched and written widely on materialist and posthuman social theory as applied to health, environment, embodiment, sexuality, creativity and emotions, and is co-editor of the journal Health.  His most recent book (with Pam Alldred) is Sociology and the New Materialism (Sage, 2017).