Episode 013: Jen Gilbert

Education

Feb 24

Dr. Jen Gilbert is a gender theorist and sex education researcher who studies bullying. As one of the leaders of the Beyond Bullying Project, her research takes her into high schools where she works with young people to understand their experiences of bullying, and with schools to help them do something about it.

Transcript

Cameron Graham: My guest today is Associate Professor Jen Gilbert, one of my wonderful colleagues at York university. Dr. Gilbert is a sex education researcher and one of the lead researchers on the Beyond Bullying Project. This initiative takes her into high schools where she works with young people to understand their experiences of bullying and to help them and the school do something about this distressing phenomenon. I spoke to her about this research project in November over coffee and I'm looking forward to learning more about it today. Jen, welcome to the podcast.

Jen Gilbert: Thanks for having me.

Cameron: I'm always really interested in the work that people are doing right now, but I try to understand the context of the trajectory of their research, so that I can really understand where they're coming from. So if you don't mind, I want to just go back to one of your papers from earlier, a 2007 paper called “Risking a relation.” And in this paper, you help the reader wrestle with a profound question about sex education, which is not, “What do adolescents need to get out of sex education?”, but “What do adults need from adolescents in the name of sex education?” It's a really interesting switch on the question because it admits something about our need to feel that we are properly educating these people and somehow making them immune to all the mistakes that we may have made as adults when we were younger. Is that a fair characterization of where you're coming from in that paper?

Jen: Yeah, I think so. I think that, in that paper, I'm trying to look at the ways that adults are not so separate from the adolescents or young people they think they're educating. It's not as though adults are the ones who don't need education, need a sex education, and young people are the ones who do need a sex education. Instead we ought to think about the relationship between young people and adults.

Cameron: Well, geez, I mean anybody who's a parent must realize that you have a lot to learn if you want to talk to your kids about sex, that you do need an education. And yet, we seem to be in a time where politicians feel it's just straight forward what we should be teaching in education, in sex education in particular. And the kinds of arguments that are made from people all across the political spectrum about what they think should be in sex education really reveals a lot about themselves and their values and that comes into all of our policy decisions. So it's that kind of the thing, that question about what we as adults think has to happen in sex education.

Jen: That sounds right. I mean, I think, on the one hand, adults are trying to repair the injuries of their own youth. They're trying to prepare young people to have a different youth than they had. Or they may have had a really great adolescence and they want young people to repeat that version of adolescence that they had. Sex education debates really show how much adults need from young people in the name of sex education. If you ask young people what they want from sex education, sometimes it's quite different when then what we offer as teachers or the ministry documents and curriculum and so on.

Cameron: You go so far in your papers to state that there is no such thing as an adolescent in the sense that the whole idea of an adolescent is something that is socially constructed by adults to make sense of this period of youth. That whole category is a social construction in itself, right?

Jen: Yeah. But also that when you think about youth, you can't just think about the young person themselves. You have to think about their parents, their family, their culture, their community. You have to think about the media, digital cultures, all of the context in which the young person is growing up. And sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between that individual and the social realities that they're grappling with every day. So to say there's no such thing as an adolescent is to say, in order to understand young people, you really have to take this much bigger view of their world.

Cameron: So it's like an objectification of this category that we slot these humans into and we treat them as if they are exemplars of that category. Right. Rather than having their own rich complex history.

Jen: Yeah, exactly. I think that young people are as complicated as adults are and we need to work harder to recognize how complicated their lives are and to actually acknowledge the distance between us as well that we can't remember what it was like to be 15. That what it's like to be 15 from the vantage of a 40-year-old is quite different than from the vantage of the 15-year-old.

Cameron: Yeah. We either have a romanticized view of our youth or a horrified view of our youth, depending on our experiences on a given day.

Jen: Exactly.

Cameron: I know that when I was growing up, there seemed to be this huge disconnect between the questions that I had about sex and the answers that my parents were prepared to give me and the ways in which they're prepared to give me the answers. And the same thing with the school curriculum around these things that seemed woefully inadequate for me. And I don't imagine that too much has changed, but I think that there seems to be a lot more richness in sex education today because of the growing understanding of things like trans and queer issues, trans and queer people, who have to be included into this debate at all. Is that something that's essential to your work because of your own perspective on it, or are you just simply dealing with what's out there in the sex ed curriculum right now? Why does that become such an important topic for you in your research?

Jen: Well, definitely it comes out of my own experience in the world and being a queer person, and advocating for the rights of queer people to see themselves represented and supported in school environments. That's always been very important to me in all of my work. But I think what else has happened is by thinking about queer issues in school, it actually enriches how we understand heterosexuality. I think when you think about what queer and trans young people need from sex education, it allows us to make a sex education that's better for everybody, not just for queer and trans youth. That our ideas about sexuality and gender are enlarged, they're more generous, and they make more room for everybody, not just for people who identify with the LGBTQ alphabet.

Cameron: It's kind of a general struggle I think for – well, struggle is overstating it, but an intellectual argument – that is constantly there for academic research, which is breaking down these binary categories, whether you're talking about a subjective objective divide or a binary opposition between men and women. It's from a research perspective, things always get more interesting when you start to break down that binary opposition and realize the nuances within each side, but also all those spaces that are left out in between those two opposed categories. So that must make your research so much richer as you're working through all these different variations on the theme.

Jen: Absolutely. And I think when you're studying young people as well, that they're beginners at these categories in some cases. That there's a way in which we think of these categories as quite solid and always already existing in a person. But in fact, it takes some fumbling around and experimentation to figure out even what it means to be a man or what it means to be a woman or what it means to be queer. And I think when you study youth, you get access to the messiness of it and it helps us remember I think our own messiness. So there's something really wonderful for the academic researcher to be able to spend time thinking about that. The in-process, the becomingness of identity.

Cameron: That's something that for, I think most healthy adults never goes away. You're constantly in the process of becoming.

Jen: Absolutely. I mean, now of course it's wonderful to study youth when you're very close to being a youth. But there's something that happens to the academic researcher. If you study, like I started studying youth when I was basically still myself very young. I continued to study youth, but now I'm not young. And that's really an interesting process to understand how my own relationship to the category has shifted as I've aged. And it helps me think about what it means to be older, actually.

Cameron: Have you passed the age where you can still be considered the cool prof?

Jen: Absolutely. Now I'm older than my students' parents. That sort of freaks me out. I used to be my student's age or just above them and now I've passed all the way through and now I'm older than their parents. So that's hard.

Cameron: Yeah. It is a different kind of transition. As I get grayer and grayer, I become more and more distant from my students and I don't know what that's doing. I try to just remind myself that the teaching is not about me.

Jen: It's true. But I sort of, I forget that I'm not 26. And so I'm talking to them as if we have something in common, when in fact we might not have that thing in common that I imagined we did.

Cameron: I'll tell you what reminds you that you're not 26 is when you bend over to pick up a rice crispy.

Jen: And throw out my back. I know. It's terrible.

Cameron: Yeah. So the reason you're not in the studio today, just to fill the listeners in, the reason you're not in the studio is you threw out your back just bending over to pickups a rice crispy. And so you were unable to travel. I'm very grateful that you're willing to spend the time to at least use Zoom to talk to me.

Jen: Anytime.

Cameron: So let's talk about this kind of “flagship” project for you, Beyond Bullying. One of the central features of this project that makes it so fascinating to me is that you actually set up recording booths in high schools and let students tell their own stories about bullying. And it just seems like such a powerful way to do research. This is not you sitting there with a lab coat on and a notepad asking them interview questions or something like that. This is just giving them the space to say what they feel they need to say. Can you tell me what that's like for the kids, but also for you as a researcher to be a part of that?

Jen: Well, it's been a great project. It's been so much fun and it continues to evolve as we get further away from the experience of being in the schools. But schools are very complicated places and they're complicated places for adults as well, not just for the young people who spend their days there. So going back into a high school and hanging out with the students and talking with the teachers, it was really exciting. And we designed this project. It was in some sense very minimalist where we just built these booths and whoever walked by, we just said, "Why don't you come in and tell us a story about sexuality or gender. It doesn't even have to be true. It could be about politics, it could be about your friends, your family." And we were really surprised at how many young people and teachers were willing to kind of go into the booth and sit down and tell a story. They ran from like 25 seconds long to like half an hour long. And it was really interesting because it's very rare for a researcher to give up control over the story.

Cameron: Exactly. That's what I find so fascinating from a research perspective.

Jen: Yeah. We weren't in there, and it could be frustrating. When we got the story. sometimes we were like, oh, we wish we could have been in there so we could have probed and said, "What do you mean by this? Or tell me more about that." Which is really a strategy of the qualitative researcher. But when you say, "No, I'm not going to intervene in the story, you start it and stop it whenever you're ready," it meant that we got different kinds of stories I think from young people.

Cameron: And so in what way do you think they were different? Are there any particular stories that stuck with you?

Jen: Well, it's interesting when you ask someone to talk about ... We sort of framed it, “Come and talk to us about LGBTQ anything.” And when they went into the booth, of course no one was there to monitor whether they're actually talking about anything. The invitation was open ended enough that they would tell stories about a whole range of issues that would sort of touch on queer and trans issues, but also veer off. I mean, we heard a lot about how important friendships are for young people. So figuring out how to be a good friend to a friend who has come out as gay, for instance, or kind of grappling with your own feelings of discomfort, learning that one of your friends is gay. We heard a lot. We also heard stories about racism. We heard stories about sexual harassment. We heard stories about English class and novels that people were reading or movies that they'd seen. So it was just such a variety of topics that sort of coalesced around the invitation to talk about LGBT anything. It makes me think how generative this signifier LGBTQ is for young people.

Cameron: Yeah. It just blossoms out into so many different directions.

Jen: Exactly.

Cameron: I'm interested in how you opened up this space for students. Was there like a brochure or announcement? Did it have like the words “Beyond Bullying” on it, or how is this presented to the students to get them to come?

Jen: Well, that's a great question. We worked with each school to figure out how to do that. So in each school we had a little advisory board of students.

Cameron: Just quick question, how many schools were involved in this project to start with?

Jen: And so far, three. Well three, we did three and we've had colleagues in Mexico use the project to do it in another three. And we're starting in Canada this year.

Cameron: Okay. So three different schools.

Jen: Yeah, three different schools. We worked with the schools to figure out what would be the best place to locate the booth, both physically in the school, but also in the school day. So in one school for instance, we worked with their health coordinator, who did health initiatives in the high school. And he became our liaison. And we worked with a youth advisory group to publicize the booth and the project across the whole school. In another school we worked with all the English classes because that was the only mandatory class. And so we went into every single English class and the school sort of framed it as about storytelling, which kind of mapped onto some of their curricular expectations. And then in another school we used their home room. And in each school we had a couple of lead teachers and then a youth group that would help us figure out how to pitch the project to students. And then every day we were in school from 7:30 in the morning to 4:00 o'clock. And we had a table, and on the table we always had a bowl of food. Chocolate bars in the afternoon or granola bars in the morning. We were raffling off an iPod touch for everyone who participated. We hosted pizza parties, we hosted lunchtime things. And so we just tried to build all sorts of activities around the booth. So if you came to the booth, you didn't have to necessarily be telling a story. We wanted to provide like an alibi or some cover. So if you were interested, you know, there were flyers. You could come and talk to us without stepping right into the booth and announcing to the school that you are going to go tell a gay story.

Cameron: I can see why that would be necessary. So you create this kind of an event that draws people in and from there they can self-select into whether they record something.

Jen: Yeah, and then once your friend tells a story, then it feels safer and then you'll go tell a story. So it sort of happened like that. There were groups that would come and once one person told a story, other people would feel, “Oh, I guess it's all right.” And then we'd have some group stories where kids would go in together.

Cameron: Oh really? Okay. I was interested in how these stories played out amongst the community of students. Were they regarded to something that was very, very private or did they come out and then just chatter about what they'd said? Like how did they consume the experience of having recorded?

Jen: Well, I think both happened. I think there were some students that used it as a chance to perform their identities, to perform either their queer trans identities or their allyship. So they would tell a story and then tell people what they said. But then people also used the booth as something closer to a confessional where they would go in and they would tell us something that actually felt quite intimate. And the booth could hold both those possibilities open for students.

Cameron: It is an empty space. You can fill it with-

Jen: It was very empty. It just was totally blank except for a black fabric. So everyone looked the same when they were video recorded. But other than that, there was nothing in there.

Cameron: No Snapchat filters or anything?

Jen: No filters, no posters, no nothing.

Cameron: Wow. I understand from your paper that sometimes there's some students would go back more than once. What was going on there?

Jen: It was interesting. In each school we sort of ended up acting like a bit of a hangout spot for the two weeks for students. Sometimes it was for queer and trans students, but not always. In fact, sometimes queer and trans students were like, "I can't bear the proximity to the booth." And they never came near us. But I think we saw ourselves as sort of like a misfit magnet. The misfits would come hang out and it gave them a way to be in the school, but not necessarily be in class, which was something very valuable. So they could come and they would skip class, but they'd have this excuse, they were hanging out with us. And that was-

Cameron: Very attractive excuse.

Jen: It was great. I mean, I think that any opportunity to keep kids connected to school is really important. We had this one student in when we were in San Francisco and she would come to the booth every day and then she would eat her lunch with us. She would have her spares with us and she would also escort people back and forth to the booth. So she would say, "Oh, I'm going to go get my friend." And so she would go interrupt someone's class and get her friend and bring her friend down to the booth. And so all day she would just be sourcing all these new students' stories. And every school gave us hall passes, so we were always able to give people a legitimate excuse for not being in class. We didn't police who ought to be there, who didn't. If you wanted to hang out, that was great.

Cameron: Did you ever get any participation from the bullies?

Jen: Well, I think when we started the project there were some people who were really worried that we would be collecting stories where students would say really hateful things about their peers. So the question from various ethics boards came up, “What are you going to do if you hear a really homophobic story, for instance?” And we didn't really get very many homophobic stories I think in part because they didn't want to go near a big gay booth. But also we did get stories where people were uncertain, where people were trying to figure out how they felt, where a lot of students were trying to navigate their own feelings about queer and trans issues and their more conservative family's feelings. And how could they both respect their family's beliefs but also have their own beliefs. I mean, that's such an adolescent problem anyways. But it really came up when talking about gay things.

Cameron: Hmm. Yeah. I wonder why?

Jen: Well, it's one of those markers. I mean it's interesting because we were doing this research in the United States and it became – I think the same could be true, it might be true, when we do the project in Canada – where acceptance of gay, trans, queer issues is a marker of Americanness. So their immigrant parents were backwards because they didn't accept gay people, but they were progressive and modern and American.

Cameron: That's interesting.

Jen: So there's really interesting dynamics when you start thinking about queer and trans issues in schools like that.

Cameron: Yeah, and intersection with race and ethnicity, as well.

Jen: Yeah. Yeah.

Cameron: Very interesting. Did you hear from the teachers?

Jen: In every school, we had several teachers tell stories. And those were really interesting, too. I think we have this idea that young people and teachers alike need information about LGBTQ so they can teach tolerance. But what that forgets is that most people in the school already have a relationship with queer and trans people. So it's not as though this issue is like “out there” somewhere and we have to teach people to be nice to those people “out there.” Those people out there are already in the school, are already people's brothers and sisters, ex-wives. They're friends. And so we had lots of stories from LGBT teachers talking about what it's like to work in a school as an out queer person. But we also had lots of stories from teachers about their gay brother and what it was like to grow up with their gay brother or how important it was for them to create a classroom that would be welcoming for LGBTQ students, and how much they wanted to figure out how to support those students, and sometimes had the resources and sometimes didn't.

Cameron: This is such a trepidatious space for adults to venture into in any capacity, but when you're a teacher, you are equal parts responsible and vulnerable in this space.

Jen: Well, lots of my newer work really focuses on LGBTQ teachers and the ways in which this group has really been left behind by the gay rights movement, where we really focus on young people's wellbeing. But we don't think at all about what it's like to be a queer trans teacher and how vulnerable those teachers can feel, even when they have workplace protections. We think that schools are all about students and we forget that the teachers’ wellbeing also matters.

Cameron: Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. I'm just trying to, I mean, it's difficult enough for me as a straight white male of a certain age, and grey haired, to function as a teacher. In many ways, I have the easiest experience because of my visible identity. And even for me it's very difficult to find how to talk to students about issues that really matter. I teach accounting, but I'm always trying to help them understand it in terms of their own lived experience and issues of power dynamics and inclusion and authority and all those kinds of other issues that underpin the whole mechanism of producing accounting. And so trying to help students work through that while at the same time being an authority figure myself, it's difficult to find that tone. I can imagine, but I can't really understand, the experience of someone who is in a marginalized visible minority situation, trying to operate as an authority and also be helpful to students who are vulnerable. It becomes so layered and so complex in such a hurry.

Jen: Absolutely. I mean, I think because I work in education, working with teachers, you see that the dream of teaching is not equally available to everyone. And that the idea of the teacher is raced and classed and sexed. And even when you don't meet those criteria, you're always working to fit yourself in to a very, in some places, very narrow mold of what a teacher looks like. And that poses real problems for some gay and lesbian teachers, queer teachers, trans teachers. And I think that we have to have more ideas about what it means to be a teacher.

Cameron: One of the really beautiful things about this project, from my perspective, is it is so intensely focused on subjective experience. From a research perspective we're often told, over and over again, that research is about this objective activity of discovering facts. You are very deliberately celebrating the subjective experience of the students and of the teachers. And I mean, it comes across right in the way that you write the paper. You've got this lovely little sentence about how when you set up the booth, you had teachers walking down the hallway who would just look down at the floor and they didn't even want to make eye contact with you because they felt so uncomfortable. It helps the reader understand what was really going on, how profound this thing, this act, was, of setting up this recording booth. So I wonder if you can just talk to me from your perspective as a researcher, about how you understand the importance of subjective experience in terms of producing knowledge for an academic audience, but also for this practical audience of the schools who need to have policies and stuff that work.

Jen: I think that what's really interesting about spending time in schools is you recognize how intimate and emotional an atmosphere a school is, that it's built of these relationships that are very profound between teachers and students, between students themselves. It just feels like there's always tensions and loves and crushes. I mean, the landscape of the school is one that's built on this emotional plane. And I think for research, when we want to design programs, when we want to create curriculum policies, we can't assume that the school is like an empty building that we can insert all of these programs, policies and plans into and not account for the subjective experience of what it's like to be in school. We wanted to create a project that captured how the experience of talking about LGBTQ issues in school requires something of the teacher and the student. And one of our big research questions was, what are the conditions necessary for having conversations about LGBT issues in school that go beyond bullying. And one of the conditions, we think, is recognizing how schools are very complex, contradictory spaces. And if you're going to study that, you're going to need a methodology that allows you to kind of chart those contradictions, those complications. So we relied a lot on field notes, multiple sets of field notes. We did interviews with students and staff and teachers as well. We tried to collect a lot of different kinds of data so we could get a really robust sense of the setting, right? But in the end, little things really matter. The smile, the gesture, the pat on the back. Also, the mean glance, the averting one's eyes. Those all help create that emotional atmosphere in the school that's so important.

Cameron: Yeah. So in terms of how you deal with this data as an academic, you say you're trying to chart this space. What does charting look like? How do you actually use the recordings and the field notes that you took, and the interviews? What do you do next with that as an academic?

Jen: Well, I mean, there's lots of different versions of what you might do next with it. We used qualitative coding software where we entered our field notes, our interviews and the stories, and as well as artifacts that we picked up in school. In our interpretive practices, we tended to follow themes that presented themselves across multiple kinds of data. So for instance, it might be a student that we interviewed that gets mentioned in a story that we also had field notes about. We kind of get a sense of how is this person moving across all of our sources of data. But we wanted, in a kind of ethnographic tradition, to have thick descriptions of the school each day that we were there.

Cameron: So how does this then lead from your work in analyzing all this data? How does that begin to then move forward into new practices that could be enacted in the schools? What's the link between that analysis that you do and the outcome that you're hoping to achieve? How do you fill in that gap? Or do you just publish it in a journal and walk away?

Jen: Well, we do that. [laughs] No. I think we're really interested, for instance, in what happens when policies meet the atmosphere of the school. We have this idea that we could have a really great policy. It's sort of like the magic bullet theory of educational policy. Like, if only we had a really great anti-bullying policy, it would solve the problem of bullying. Well, the experience of queer and trans students in schools is really complicated. It at once can feel dangerous, and risky, and there's also these really important spaces of refuge, in the same day. There is no policy that can go in and fix that. So we're really interested in what happens when policies and program and curriculum meet the messiness of the school. It's not to say that policy doesn't matter, but instead, can we have different goals and aims for policy? And also frankly, with this project, we were interested in staging an intervention that was not an intervention. The goal of Beyond Bullying was not to create a curriculum or create a policy or fix anything. It was really about understanding the school. And too often in education, we prioritize the intervention or the program before we really know what's going on. We make an intervention that then invents the problem it's going to come in and solve, and we wanted to reverse that process.

Cameron: How did this project come into being? Where was the genesis of it and who else is involved in the project?

Jen: Oh, it's been a great collaboration. It started with Jessica Fields and Laura Mamo at San Francisco State Universitym and Nancy Lesko at Teacher's College at Columbia. Jessica Fields and Nancy Lesko and I had worked together before on another project, looking at LGBTQ issues in teacher education, and we had a good time, so we decided to branch out and think about how these issues were getting talked about in schools. Initially, we had actually listened to an NPR program, StoryCorps, that ... Do you know that program?

Cameron: No, but I know that genre. There's some interesting things-

Jen: Yeah. And it was so lovely. In StoryCorps, two people who knew each other would interview each other. And so we decided that we really liked that model. And initially, actually, we had wanted – here's the bad story of research! – initially we had thought that we would bring gay and lesbian and queer and trans community members into the school to interview young people, young queer and trans people in the school. But we quickly realized that we were never going to be able to get ethics approval to do that because, still, the idea of bringing a queer trans adult into school is seen as too risky.

Cameron: Phhh.

Jen: I know. And so then we decided, okay, let's create this very minimalist research design where we just collect stories to try and figure out how are people talking about sexuality and gender in schools, in ways that don't necessarily map on to those big policy languages around bullying. And so we worked with the Bay Area Video Coalition in San Francisco and they helped us design this booth.

Cameron: One of the things you're doing in this project is trying to move away from the idea that bullying is this “problem,” right? To take the focus off of the bullying and look at the underlying issue here, which is this inability of certain people to be able to be themselves in an institutional space like a school. So you're really flipping the problem right upside down.

Jen: We're trying to figure out how the focus on bullying precludes other kinds of conversations in schools, but schools are really resistant to framing LGBTQ issues through any other frame besides bullying. And that's just, that was a finding that we had when we went into the schools. I remember telling my son that we had this new project, at the time he was like eight years old and in school, and we said to him, "Oh, we're working on this new project. It's so great. It's about lesbian and gay and queer and trans young people and it's called Beyond Bullying." And he was like, "Beyond Bullying? What's that, murder?"

Cameron: [laughs]

Jen: And somehow that just sort of captures how difficult it is to imagine thinking about queer and trans issues in school beyond bullying.

Cameron: Well, we have this kind of common intellectual process of viewing people as if they are victims and objectifying them as victims. Right? And we must fit them into the victim box before we're able to respond to them with any empathy, and it really takes away any opportunity for them to have their own voice.

Jen: Yeah. And in this project we really, we were interested in stories about friendship and stories about family and stories about what was your school day like? We wanted to see that queer and trans issues intersected with the more ordinary aspects of growing up, going to school, being a friend, that kind of thing.

Cameron: You've got some new research funding for a project on sexual consent. I wonder if you can tell me a little bit about that project.

Jen: I can!

Cameron: It's not a secret?

Jen: [laughs] I know. That project is still in its early days. But one of the things that interests me in thinking about sex education is the ways in which curriculum policies tend to organize themselves around particular concepts and ideas. So in the '90s, sex education was really concerned with abstinence. In the late '80s, early '90s, HIV AIDS was really the center of sex education debates. And so in about the mid 2000s, all of a sudden this idea of consent comes to be part of discussions around sex education. And I'm really interested in why? Why is sexual consent now the litmus test for what a progressive sex education should look like? And so I want to talk to young people about what sense they're making of this new focus on consent. It's something that young people themselves are really interested in. I'm also focused on the limits of thinking about consent as a model for how we talk about ethics and sex education.

Cameron: There's other researchers at York doing work on that general topic, and one of them is Heidi Matthews, who's a law professor at Osgoode. One of the things that she talks about is how this focus on consent imposes kind of a transactional economic thinking on the whole issue of a sexual relationship. Right? It turns it into this thing that, like, “two willing, rational parties agree to a contractual relationship.” That's implicit in this notion of consent. And by making that the focus of everything, making everything about sex revolve around that question of consent, you're taking out all of the joy of discovering sexuality together as two or more people. And it's almost dehumanizing, to her, to reduce it in that way. So I don't know what your perspective is on the whole idea of consent and how it comes to dominate our discussions around sex and sex education.

Jen: Well, I think that on the one hand, it does suggest some new ways of thinking about how to prepare young people for the risks of sexuality and sexual activity. I think the focus on consent helps us understand and helps us prepare young people for the idea that assault and violence is also a risk of sexual activity, not just disease and pregnancy. So in that way, I think it opens up some new kinds of conversations. However, I think you're right. And when we talk about consent as the center of what it means to be a sexual person, it does lead to this idea of transaction: the neoliberal subject who's fully in charge of their desires, knows what they want in advance, and is able to articulate them. In a weird way, it sort of takes the ... it makes the transaction happen in a vacuum outside of power dynamics. I think we need to keep open some space for the messier parts of sexuality, while at the same time recognizing how sexuality is a site of violence and coercion. And we need ... I think we're working to try and find some more robust language to help young people navigate those dangers.

Cameron: I need to wrap up here or the episode's going to go on forever, because it's so fascinating to talk about these topics with you. But just from the point of view of other scholars, particularly younger scholars who are trying to figure out, you know, “How can I do my research in a way that really brings meaning to me and really is making a difference in the world?” You're doing work that is right out there in the field and it's got certain risks and rewards, right? It gives you a level of engagement that sitting back in a laboratory or in a dusty old archive doesn't have. But there's also some issues around getting permission to conduct the study and the kinds of delays that you could run into. If you're on a tenure clock or trying to complete a PhD, the kind of field research that you're doing might not necessarily be a good fit. So I wonder, how do you recruit people over to the way that you're doing research and tell them about the risks and rewards of it?

Jen: Well, that's true. I mean, people are tricky. They're much more unpredictable than texts and representations. You have engage with someone. And I think that that's really the reward, but it does pose some problems. But I think that everything that happens on the way to getting into a school to talking to people is itself data. So the process of trying to secure ethics approval from the university or from the school board, those are moments to learn from as well. And so I have had students, young doctoral students, who've gone in both directions. And both directions have their risks frankly, because there's something very lonely about sitting in a dusty archive. And there's places to get stuck there, just as there's places to get stuck once you decide that you're going to do qualitative research with actual people. And I don't value one over the other. I think they're both really important. And I do both kinds of research, but they do present different challenges.

Cameron: Well, I tell you, it's such an eye opener to me to look at the kind of research that you're doing. It's so different from the work that I do. It's so intimate. And it's just … I don't know, the word that comes to mind for me is “breathtaking.” Honestly, when I see the kind of connection that you're making with people, it seems so fabulous to me as an accounting researcher, that you can do research that matters-

Jen: I know. I cannot believe I'm being interviewed by an accountant.

Cameron: I'm not an accountant, I'm an accounting researcher!

Jen: Oh, I take it back. I cannot believe I'm being interviewed by an accounting professor. But it's so wonderful to think that there are ways in which we can connect across our disciplinary divides and learn from one another and-

Cameron: Well, I know I'm learning a lot.

Jen: Well, it's such a pleasure to talk about my work with someone, so thank you for inviting me.

Cameron: Well, I hope we can continue this conversation over coffee when you're feeling better.

Jen: Yes. I know I'm picking up no more cereal from the floor that's-

Cameron: Promises. Promises.

Jen: Yes.

Cameron: All right. Thanks Jen. It's been a pleasure.

Jen: Thanks for having me.