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

我的博士研究了社交媒体、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、材料的、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。利用女权主义后人类和新唯物主义理论，我的论文阐明了异性恋规范的持久力量，并阐明了性是如何在网上重新配置的。研究结果表明：(a)年轻人的数字关系继续以主动的男性/被动的女性二元性取向为导向，不请自来的“鸡鸡照片”被认为是女孩日常生活中一个不引人注目的特征(b)通过强调其固有的不稳定性，在网上宣传浪漫关系，复制和不稳定的异性恋幻想，如一夫一妻制、婚姻和家庭生活(c)非人类社交媒体内容(如食物、宠物、(d)社交媒体促进了参与者对环境活动的参与，暂时打破了他们在其他地方强烈感受到的性别身体调节。我的奖学金将通过与学者、政策制定者、从业者以及年轻人进行交流，并以我的博士研究结果为基础。我的第一个目标是建立一个强大的出版记录，以确保在该领域产生最大的影响。其次，我将与政策制定者和从业者举行利益相关者研讨会，传播实质性的发现，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，通过探索植物学收藏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，进一步发展我的创新方法技术，以检查数字性文化。插值函数?讲习班将与NMW共同开发，并与他们的青年论坛一起进行试验：为未来研究如何利用植物收集作为RSE的刺激提供资金申请。在数字时代，对“自然缺失障碍”的普遍恐惧突显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联系、了解和倡导自然方面发挥了作用，这种方式重新配置了他们身体的性别和性意义。通过对我博士的说明性案例研究和NMW的真菌收藏的回应，通过他们选择的创造性方法（例如切碎的投机小说、数字故事、摄影、版画），年轻人将探索大自然如何成为一个围绕数字技术、性和性别的文化想象被辩论、阐述和重新设想的场所。真菌被描述为地球的天然互联网，因为它们具有通过地下菌丝网络进行网络化通信的能力（Tsing 2015）。这种能力已经被用来制造真菌计算机（Fungar 2020）。虽然植物科学在历史上一直受到异性规范解释的影响和阻碍，但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性、颠覆性和恶意方面（Kaishian和Djoulakian 2020； Griffiths 2015）。思考真菌提供了一种探索敏感的RSE问题的新方法，而不关注个人经验（Fisher， Grove和Langlands 2017）。插值函数?讲习班将考虑：1。用真菌思考如何为审视主导性别和性规范开辟创造性和批判性的空间？如何通过植物学对科学和技术研究中从自然界借用的概念性资源（例如根茎）进行实质性的探索

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