The dominant 'heterosexual script' positions men as sexually desiring subjects who initiate sex and use active displays of power to attract women, and women as passive sexual objects who use indirect means to attract men (e.g. physical appearance). While much research has highlighted how this script is deployed in high school settings, less work…

Gender-based violence (GBV) is a global health issue that affects significant proportions of women and girls. Despite research showing that children understand and perform stereotypical gender norms from as young as 3 years, addressing gender with young children is controversial. Programs that aim to teach gender fairness and respectful…

This article explores how young people in Sweden talk about and understand violence, with a particular emphasis on how violence, gender, space and time are co-constructed in this discourse. We found that young people display an ambivalent attitude to violence, reinforcing several contradictory discourses of violence. Young people adopt various…

In this paper, we use the Deleuzian notion of assemblage as an analytico-methodological framework to examine different types of 'labour' that teachers are called upon to perform when they implement a programme that teaches about gender-based violence. Drawing on interview data gathered from 129 teachers from primary and secondary schools in the…

In a global climate increasingly shaped by neoliberal agendas that privilege meritocratic individualism, it is apparent that society as a whole and educational policy-makers and practitioners in particular expect students to take more "responsibility" for their own learning and behaviour at school. In the Australian context, as…

This study examines change and the conditions of change in the masculinity of Olli, a working-class Finnish school boy. It explores "respect" as a status bound to masculine reputation, resources for obtaining respect in gendered identity work, and the negotiation of power in peer relations. I discuss how a "banal balancer"…

A doctoral study on constructions of gender in Lesotho rural primary schools has found that meanings attached to children's identities play a role in undermining gender equality in schools. The study employed the social constructionist paradigm as its theoretical framework. Drawing from ethnographic data (conversations, observations and informal…