Conference Program

Across Canada, sex education rarely reflects the lived realities of queer and trans youth, particularly those navigating the intersections of queerness, race, disability, and neurodivergence (Bialystok & Anderson, 2022; Burkholder & Keehn, 2024; Maradiya et al., 2025). Historically, sex education has imagined a “normative” student—affluent or middle-class, white, thin, able-bodied, cisgender, endosex, heterosexual, and male (Bruno et al., 2025; Roberts et al., 2020; Wong, 2024)—assumptions that continue to shape curricular content and classroom practice in Canada and elsewhere (Bialystok & Andersen, 2022). As a result, sex education often reproduces cisheteronormative and colonial futures by erasing or marginalizing queer and trans desires, relationships, bodies, asexuality, disability, and intersex variations, producing what Ahmed (2020) describes as disorienting sites of learning. In these contexts, gender and sex education becomes a site of epistemic injustice, where some bodies, knowledges, and relational possibilities are rendered unintelligible or unworthy of recognition. Relately, teachers are frequently positioned to frame gender identity as fixed, bodies and sex as binary, and desire as heterosexual, leaving intersex, trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer youth without language or recognition for their experiences (Burkholder & Keehn, 2025; Collier-Harris & Goldman, 2017). As Robinson et al. (2024) note, queer and trans rights and visibility have far outpaced Canadian sex education, a gap intensified by recent anti-trans political violence and state interventions that restrict support for queer and trans students and curtail school-based sexual health programming across the country (Awde, 2024; French, 2025). Within these conditions of polarization, sex education emerges not only as a pedagogical site but as a democratic arena in which questions of rights, recognition, care, and intimate citizenship are actively negotiated.

Responding to these conditions, this presentation draws on scholarship in queer joy (Duran & Coloma, 2023; Keehn, 2025; Tristano Jr., 2022) and critical queer theory (Muñoz, 2019) to ask: How might sex education function as a democratic practice that foregrounds agency, embodiment, and relational ethics? Queer joy unsettles deficit-based narratives of queerness and transness by insisting on affective complexity—lives marked not only by harm and constraint, but also by contradiction, ambivalence, pleasure, agency, and joy, even within hostile conditions (Burkholder, Wright, & Keehn, 2025). In my presentation, I propose that queer theories of joy can offer teachers tools to reimagine gender and sex education as a form of intimate citizenship—one that recognizes young people as relational, embodied subjects capable of participating meaningfully in plural and equitable communities. Drawing on my teaching in a sex education methods class with pre-service teachers, I share DIY and arts-based pedagogical practices—such as sewing reusable menstrual pads, queering classroom language, and engaging young people in expansive conversations about bodies—to demonstrate how practices of care, joy, creativity, and play can disrupt normative, risk-saturated approaches to sex education. These pedagogies foreground youth agency and relational accountability, repositioning sex education as a site for democratic learning, epistemic justice, and more livable, affirming educational futures.

Comprehensive Sexualities Education (CSE) still faces several challenges in Italy, resulting in a lack of school curricula and academic training on the topic (Bruno 2024, 2025; UNESCO, 2023). Aiming to design training and education on sexualities that are coherent with the specific context, following a bottom-up approach, the present work is the outcome of a content analysis of suggestions from Italian high school teachers, future educators, and primary teachers enrolled in Italian universities. Through an open-ended question, the study participants shared their advice or prioritized topics, writing a maximum of three words, keywords, or sentences. Participants’ answers were analyzed using a projective content analysis, following the four phases of the data interpretation process proposed by Kleinheksel and colleagues (2020) and, to ensure the reliability of the analytical process and the results, more than one coder was involved (Renz et al., 2018). Statistical analyses were then conducted on the themes derived from the content analysis using SPSS v.27 to investigate possible associations and differences through Chi-square (χ²) analysis. From the content analysis, eight themes and related subthemes emerged. The first theme has been positioned as such for logical rather than numerical reasons, while the remaining seven themes are presented in decreasing order: No suggestions (n = 145); Topics (n = 392); Strategies and materials (n = 246); Approaches (n = 225); Methods (n = 191); Goals (n = 169); Educational responsibility (n = 134); and Educational/training needs (n = 124). Based on the suggestions of in-service teachers and university students, the themes that emerged seem related to several design aspects recommended in international and national documents and guidelines on CSE (IPPF, 2017; Ordine degli Psicologi, 2024; UNESCO, 2018). For example, a wide range of topics is mentioned, reflecting the importance of including not only medical and preventive aspects in CSE, but also emotional and relational dimensions, as well as health in a broader sense (Hawkins, 2024). In terms of school implementation, participants emphasized the importance of active participation, a scientific and professional approach, and educational continuity, suggesting the inclusion of CSE as a stand-alone subject or a cross-curricular component (Goldfarb & Lieberman, 2021). Furthermore, CSE should challenge sociocultural taboos and fill the educational gap created and transmitted across generations, increasing awareness of violence’s dynamics and phenomena (Bonvini & Demozzi, 2024). Finally, participants suggested the importance of shared educational responsibility, with a support network that encompasses different actors and services while also highlighting the educational and training needs of teachers, educators, and parents regarding SE (Plan International, 2020; UNESCO, 2018; WHO & BZgA, 2010). Chi-square (χ²) analyses reveal several differences among the participants’ suggestions, both between the two groups and within each group. Although the study’s findings are not generalizable, the context analyzed appears to be fertile ground for future design and provision of CSE. Based on these results, it is possible to hypothesize training that can be applied across various educational and training contexts and be coherent with the participants involved, while respecting both the bottom-up and top-down approaches.

In the contemporary sociocultural context, marked by the persistence of hegemonic representations depicting people with disabilities, particularly women, in terms of infantilization, desexualisation or victimization, the issue of gender and sexuality education for people with disabilities remains marginalized within both the scientific debate and educational practice. This knowledge gap contributes to forms of epistemic injustice insofar as the recognition of people with disabilities, especially those with complex disabilities, tends to be confined within clinical-healthcare or overtly advocacy-oriented discursive polarities. When assumed as exclusive interpretative frameworks, such polarities may fail to capture the plurality of lived experiences and identity construction processes.
This contribution stems from a scoping review conducted within an ongoing doctoral project in the field of Special Education, aiming to explore the identity construction processes of women with disabilities. Preliminary findings highlight a growing tendency toward the use of participatory and creative research methods, such as Photovoice and Body Mapping as narrative forms.
The analysis of the literature clearly indicates that these methods are increasingly adopted to investigate complex and highly sensitive issues, including bodily, relational, and identity-related dimensions. The researchers’ choice to employ creative methodological approaches, often combined with more traditional data collection tools appears to respond to the need to expand expressive possibilities, enabling communication and self-expression also for those who do not use verbal language or who privilege non-conventional communication modalities. This methodological orientation reflects a renewed attention to research instruments capable of recognizing, from a biopsychosocial perspective, people with disabilities both as active epistemic subjects in the production of knowledge concerning their embodied, relational, and social experiences and as epistemic agents within the specificity of their functioning profiles.
Based on these findings, the paper sets out discuss the emerging methodological perspectives with reference to gender and sexuality education, understood as a democratic practice grounded in the recognition of the plurality of bodies, experiences, and expressive modalities. Creative methodologies, translated into workshop-based activities oriented toward the exploration of bodily imaginaries, social and cultural representations of sexuality, and identity construction processes, are conceived, within this framework, as transformative pedagogical practices, potentially capable of supporting accessible pathways of gender, sexuality, affective, and consent education.

Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) is not only a health-related educational field but also a broader democratic and pedagogical commitment to equality, rights, and relational justice (UNESCO, 2018). Among the key issues addressed by CSE, UNESCO technical guidance includes the disparities reproduced within family life, by stating that “gender inequality is often reflected in the roles and responsibilities of family members” (UNESCO, 2018, p. 38). This perspective becomes particularly relevant in early childhood education and care (ECEC), where educational services play a crucial role in sustaining parental educational responsibilities and fostering school-family educational alliances (Gigli, 2016).

This contribution presents preliminary findings from a qualitative study on gender issues in parenting and in the relationship between families and ECEC services. The study originates from prior focus groups with ECEC professionals in Bologna (Italy), where educators reported recurrent parental narratives – especially from mothers – about the persistent feminization of responsibility, even in contexts where fathers were described as present and caring. These accounts suggested a need to investigate whether and how gender inequalities in parenting are changing, how they are perceived by parents, and what role educational services may play in either challenging or reproducing these dynamics.

The research is framed by literature documenting the persistence of asymmetries in parenting, with mothers still more exposed to primary responsibility for childcare, emotional labor, and educational management (Craig, 2006; Milkie et al., 2002; Musick et al., 2016; Wall & Arnold, 2007). In Italy, this picture is reinforced by structural inequalities in paid work, welfare supports, and work-family reconciliation, which continue to disproportionately affect women’s employment trajectories and wellbeing (Crompton & Lyonette, 2006; Fariello, 2022; ISTAT, 2024, 2025; Naldini & Saraceno, 2011). The study also draws on scholarship on intensive mothering, which highlights how socially valorized models of “good parenting” may intensify maternal responsibility and contribute to guilt, overload, and the reproduction of gender hierarchies (Forbes et al., 2021; Hays, 1996; Meeussen & Van Laar, 2018; Sità, 2017; Verniers et al., 2022).

Methodologically, the study employs in-depth semi-structured interviews with a purposive, maximum-variation sample of parents with at least one child under six attending educational services in Bologna (Italy), and uses reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2008; Palinkas et al., 2015). Preliminary findings show a tension between declared egalitarian ideals and everyday practices: many participants endorse a gender-neutral “50/50” co-parenting ideal, yet traditional gender norms remain visible in the actual organization of care and educational responsibilities. Emerging themes include the perceived “naturalness” of maternal/paternal role division, the weight of economic and professional constraints, the ambivalent influence of participants’ own parental models, and the importance of gender awareness for recognizing inequality in everyday family life.

These early results suggest that gender education and CSE should also be addressed within school-family educational alliances, not only in child-focused interventions. From the perspective of democratic education and intimate citizenship, supporting co-parenting in more equitable ways may represent a relevant pedagogical strategy for fostering relational justice, agency, and democratic coexistence from early childhood onward.

In a context marked by anti-gender polarization and symbolic conflicts surrounding sexuality education, gender emerges as a privileged terrain for interrogating the democratic quality of educational institutions. This contribution examines how university students conceptualize gender education not merely as curricular content, but as a practice of recognition and a space for democratic negotiation.

The theoretical framework draws on the notion of intimate citizenship (Plummer, 2001), integrating perspectives from democratic education that understand learning environments as spaces where citizenship is actively practiced and negotiated (Biesta, 2011). Feminist analyses of epistemic injustice further illuminate how recognition, credibility, and voice are unevenly distributed within educational settings, shaping students’ possibilities for participation and self-definition (Fricker, 2007). Within this perspective, gender education is understood as a practice that structures modes of coexistence, legitimizes identities, and contributes to the conditions for participation in the public sphere.

The analysis is based on a survey administered to university students and focuses on four main areas: (1) opinions on the introduction, within school curricula, of content related to consent and gender diversity; (2) evaluations of the university as a space for free identity expression and of inclusive policies (e.g., recognition of chosen pronouns and gender-neutral spaces); (3) levels of agreement with the idea of gender identity fluidity; and (4) attitudes toward gender equality and relational norms related to consent, control, and power asymmetries in intimate relationships. Existing research highlights how sexuality education constitutes a key arena in which young people negotiate relational norms, agency, and ethical understandings of intimacy (Allen, 2011).

The findings are situated within current debates on comprehensive sexuality education and the resilience of democratic cultures, emphasizing the role of educational institutions in fostering inclusion, respect, and informed participation in plural societies (UNESCO, 2018). Within this framework, the paper argues that gender and sexuality education represents a transformative space for the development of agency, mutual respect, and participatory citizenship, positioning educational contexts as crucial laboratories for democratic sustainability.

In Italian schools, sexuality and gender education often takes the form of a residual and uneven intervention (Chinelli et al., 2023). The absence of mandatory provision and clear national guidance weakens continuity and increases reliance on individual teachers’ sensitivities and local contingencies. In this context, sexuality education tends to enter the curriculum mainly when it is framed as risk management – puberty, reproduction, sexually transmitted infections etc. – while it remains marginal when it addresses meanings, relationships, and rights (European Commission, 2020; Cassar, 2022). Drawing on 46 semi-structured interviews with teachers from early childhood education (kindergarten) to upper secondary school, this paper examines the mechanisms through which this gap between intentions and practices is produced and consolidated in everyday school life. The analysis highlights a recurring discrepancy between what is declared – CSE as education for wellbeing, equity, and citizenship – and what is enacted, which teachers experience as fragile and potentially conflictual. Lack of training, low self-efficacy, fear of disputes with families, and ambiguity around the institutional mandate orient many practices toward what appears “defensible.” As a result, teachers often avoid topics perceived as sensitive (pleasure, sexual orientation, gender identity), contributing to a hidden curriculum in which heteronormativity and gender binarism are not explicitly asserted but operate as a “gender dispositive” (Burgio, 2015). Through reflexive thematic analysis and the use of vignettes, the study shows how teachers continuously negotiate the boundaries of what can be said – not so much whether to talk, but how to do so without exposing themselves. Using the UNESCO (2018) Comprehensive Sexuality Education framework as an interpretive lens, the paper argues that “what remains unspoken” functions as a pedagogical mechanism, shaping what can be named, who can be recognised, and which experiences are rendered legitimate within school spaces. From this perspective, CSE is not merely the transmission of information; rather, it can be understood as a transformative and ethical democratic practice (hooks, 2020). It educates for consent, care, and agency and can therefore help counter anti-gender misinformation and polarisation without falling into defensive postures. Finally, the paper proposes an implementation pathway that treats sexuality and gender as social structures (Risman, 2004), consistent with the evidence presented: at the individual level, targeted professional development and supports for teacher self-efficacy; at the interactional level, dialogic micro-practices to welcome students’ questions and manage complex discussions; and at the institutional level, school policies that make CSE legitimate and continuous (curriculum planning, formal frameworks, transparent communication with families, and partnerships with local health and social services). Reframed in these terms, CSE can operate as democratic infrastructure: not an “additional topic,” but an educational condition that enables recognition, participation, and coexistence in plural school communities oriented toward valuing difference.

This contribution reflects on the preliminary findings of an ongoing qualitative study investigating the relational dynamics of youth sexuality in an "onlife" context. The research involved undergraduate and postgraduate students from humanities departments in northern and southern Italy. The participants fall within the developmental stage of emerging adulthood (ages 19–29), thus encompassing the late stages of adolescence.

The study aims to explore the meanings young people attribute to dating apps and "hookup culture," examining how these phenomena influence their system of expectations regarding both physical and virtual encounters. A preliminary analysis of semi-structured interviews reveals that participants perceive dating apps (primarily Tinder and Hinge) as ambivalent environments: on one hand, they offer a venue for effectively experimenting with affectivity and sexuality; on the other, they function as environments heavily permeated by transferential dynamics. These dynamics foster processes of idealization, particularly during the chatting phase, which is characterized by the absence of the interpretative cues typical of face-to-face interaction.

Expectations built within such relational dynamics tend to oversimplify alterity, encouraging projections that can lead to disappointment and frustration upon meeting in person. However, the use of these apps can also emerge as an informal educational space for exercising choice, tolerance of boundaries, and conflict management, especially when supported by educational practices guided by the Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) approach (UNESCO, 2018). This framework focuses on skills, attitudes, and values, promoting a positive vision of sexuality as a human right and a democratic means of empowerment. In this specific context, education should guide individuals toward an awareness of their own projections and the ability to navigate them.

Furthermore, the qualitative data appear to challenge the monolithic representation of Millennials and iGen as being fully identified with hookup culture. The interviewed students acknowledge the prevalence of casual sex but do not view it as detached from emotional involvement, nor as the defining feature of their personal experiences.

Consequently, a general framework emerges that warns against reductionist interpretations and moralistic judgments, which risk producing a "negative Pygmalion effect" impacting the educational practices of parents, teachers, educators and pedagogists. Finally, the study hypothesizes that “existential communication” (Bertin, Contini, 2004), within the specific context of CSE, can serve as a valid tool for supporting young dating app users. In the perspective of pedagogical problematicism (Bertin, 1968), this approach fosters the integration of egocentric and heterocentric attitudes across the subjective and objective moments inherent in the dialectic of personality formation, while simultaneously valuing the complexity of contemporary experiences.