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

我的博士学位探索了社交媒体，智能设备和游戏平台如何塑造年轻人的性文化。通过利用基于艺术的方法来解锁一系列具体的，物质的，空间的和情感的体验，我开发了一种创新的方法来参与年轻人的数字实践。我的论文借鉴了女权主义、后人类主义和新唯物主义的理论，阐明了异性恋的持久力量，以及性是如何在网上重新配置的。调查结果表明：（a）年轻人的数字关系继续以主动的男性/被动的女性性二元关系为导向，主动提供的“鸡巴照片”被认为是女孩日常生活中不起眼的特征（B）通过强调一夫一妻制、婚姻和同居的内在不稳定性，在网上宣传浪漫关系，（例如食物，宠物，粘液）取代了女性身体的学科目光，并为参与者带来了不同的身体特征（d）社交媒体促进了参与者参与环境活动的方式，暂时破坏了他们强烈感受到的性别身体调节我的奖学金将通过参与学术交流，并建立在我的博士研究结果的基础上，政策制定者和实践者以及年轻人。我的第一个目标是建立一个强大的出版跟踪记录，以确保对该领域的最大影响。其次，我将与政策制定者和从业人员举办利益相关者研讨会，以传播实质性的研究结果，并测试我的创新方法技术如何应用于RSE实践。最后，我将与威尔士国家博物馆（NMW）合作，通过探索植物学藏品如何促使我们重新思考数字技术，年轻人和自然之间的关系，进一步发展我研究数字性文化的创新方法技术。FIF？研讨会将与NMW共同开发，并与他们的青年论坛进行试验：为未来研究提供资金申请，研究如何利用植物学收藏作为RSE的刺激因素。在数字时代，围绕“自然赤字障碍”的流行恐惧突出了网络通信如何被对立地定位为对我们与自然关系的威胁（Louv 2008）。然而，我的研究发现，数字技术在支持年轻人以重新配置其身体的性别和性意义的方式与自然联系，了解和倡导自然方面发挥了作用。通过回应我的博士学位和NMW的真菌收藏的说明性案例研究，通过他们选择的创造性方法（例如切割投机小说，数字故事，摄影，印刷品），年轻人将探索自然如何成为一个围绕数字技术，性和性别的文化想象的场所辩论，阐述和重新设想。真菌被描述为地球的天然互联网，因为它们能够通过地下菌丝网络进行网络通信（Tsing 2015）。这种能力已经被用来创造真菌计算机（Fungar 2020）。虽然植物科学在历史上一直被灌输和阻碍了异规范的解释，学者们正在开发奇怪的方法来关注真菌和其他生物的非二元，颠覆性和恶意的方面（Kaishian和Djoulakian 2020; Griffiths 2015）。用真菌思考提供了一种探索敏感RSE问题的新方法，而不关注个人经验（Fisher，格罗夫和朗兰兹2017）。FIF？研讨会将考虑：1。真菌思维如何为研究主导性别和性规范开辟创造性和批判性的空间？2.如何从植物学中发掘科技研究中从自然界借用的概念资源（如根茎）

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