Cultivating healthy relationships - Re-imagining digital sexualities research and practice through speculative fabrication and thinking-with fungi

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My PhD explored how social media, smart devices and gaming platforms shape young people's sexual cultures. By harnessing arts-based methods to unlock a range of embodied, material, spatial and affective experiences, I developed an innovative methodological approach to engaging with young people's digital practices. Drawing on feminist posthuman and new materialist theories my thesis illustrated the enduring force of heteronormativity as well as illuminated how sexuality is reconfigured online. Findings demonstrated how: (a) Young people's digital relationships continue to be oriented by the active male/passive female sexuality binary with unsolicited 'dick pics' considered an unremarkable feature of everyday life for girls (b) Publicising romantic relationships online reproduced and unsettled heteronormative fantasies of monogamy, marriage and domesticity by highlighting their inherent precarity(c) Non-human social media content (e.g food, pets, slime) displaced the disciplinary gaze from the female body and evoked different bodily imaginaries for participants(d) Social media facilitated participants' engagement with environmental activism in ways that momentarily disrupted the gendered bodily regulation they strongly felt elsewhereMy fellowship will communicate and build upon findings from my PhD by engaging academics, policy-makers and practitioners as well as young people. My first aim is to establish a strong publication track record to ensure maximum impact on the field. Secondly, I will hold stakeholder workshops with policy-makers and practitioners to disseminate substantive findings and test how my innovative methodological techniques could be applied in RSE practice. Finally, I will work in partnership with the National Museum Wales (NMW) to further develop my innovative methodological techniques for examining digital sexual cultures, by exploring how botany collections urge us to re-think the relationship between digital technologies, young people and nature. The FIF? workshops will be co-developed with NMW and trialed with their Youth Forum: informing funding applications for future research examining how botany collections can be harnessed as stimuli for RSE.Popular fears around 'nature deficit disorder' in a digital age highlight how networked communication has been oppositionally positioned as a threat to our relationship with nature (Louv 2008). However, my study found that digital technologies played a role in supporting young people to connect with, learn about and advocate for nature in ways that reconfigured the gendered and sexual meaning of their bodies. By responding to illustrative case studies from my PhD and the fungi collections at NMW through a creative method of their choice (e.g cut-up speculative fiction, digital storytelling, photography, printwork), young people will explore how nature can be a site where the cultural imaginary around digital technologies, sexuality and gender is debated, elaborated and re-envisioned. Fungi have been described as the earth's natural internet due to their capacity for networked communication through underground hyphae networks (Tsing 2015). This capacity is already being harnessed to create fungal computers (Fungar 2020). While botanical science has historically been infused with and impeded by heteronormative interpretations, scholars are developing queer methodologies for attending to the non-binary, subversive and maligned facets of fungi and other organisms (Kaishian and Djoulakian 2020; Griffiths 2015). Thinking-with fungi offers a novel way of exploring sensitive RSE issues without focusing on individual experiences (Fisher, Grove and Langlands 2017). The FIF? workshops will consider: 1. How can thinking-with fungi open up creative and critical spaces for examining dominant gender and sexual norms?2. How can conceptual resources borrowed from nature (e.g rhizome) in science and technology studies be explored materially through botany