91ÇéÉ«

Mobilising Matters: Staying with the political troubles in the field of Relationships and Sexuality Education

Drawing on Tess Lea’s book Wild Policy (2020) this multi‑modal presentation approaches policy not as a bounded, hierarchical apparatus "coming down from on high to “impact” communities in some totalizing way” but as an ambient and unruly force that "more often unfurls as a series of project stutters, misdirects, and meanderings” (2020, 15). Lea’s methodology of mapping policy ecologies and of attending to the human and more‑than‑human forces through which policy is made and moves, provides a conceptual frame for sharing a situated praxis of slow, creative coproduction across micro, meso and macro policy terrains within the landscape of relationships and sexuality education in Wales. Through spoken word, film and image, I explore how posthuman, artful methodologies have the potential to reconfigure policy texts as dartaphacts (arts‑activist objects), translating policy into eventful, response‑able resources to make policy matter otherwise.

Bio

EJ Renold is Professor of Childhood Studies at the School of Education, Manchester Metropolitan University. Their research investigates how gender and sexuality, in all their human and more-than-human diversity, come to matter in children and young people’s everyday lives across diverse sites, spaces and locales. Here, they have explored the affordances of how creative, coproduced methods, resources and events can engage micro and macro political change with young people, teachers, youth workers, educators, health professionals, policy-makers and politicians (see ). EJ was the winner of the UK’s ESRC Impact in Society Prize (2018), the Huw Owen Medal for Outstanding Educational Research in Wales (2021) and received the American Education Research Association’s Critical Posthuman and Postfoundational SIG’s Collaborative Excellence award in 2025. Their forthcoming edited collection (with Huuki, Pihkala and Taylor) Creative Research on Gender and Sexuality with Children and Young People: Making Methods Matter (Routledge) will be published in summer 2026.

Dr Sid Mohandas is a Montessori practitioner and childhood studies scholar, whose research in early childhood employs feminist, decolonial, anticolonial and more-than-human approaches. Sid has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and edited book collections. They are the author of the Bloomsbury Academic book Re-imagining Gender in the Early Childhood Workforce: Feminist and More-than-human Perspectives. More recently Sid co-edited the Special Issue on ‘Bewildering early childhood pioneers’ in the journal Pedagogy, Culture and Society, and is currently the co-editor for a Special Issue in British Education Research Journal titled ‘The state of gender(s), young people and education: inequities, inter/intrasectionality and inclusivity’. Sid also serves as an editorial board member for the journal Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology.

Warming climate, cooling relations: Geopolitics at the top of the world

Nowhere is the dual threat of climate change and geopolitical contest felt more strongly than in the Arctic. Sea ice is declining rapidly, wildfires are burning, and permafrost is thawing. All the while, global interest is gathering apace as the region transforms from being a frozen desert into an international waterway.   Growing geopolitical competition is accompanying environmental disruption. Countries including Russia, China, and the United States are investing in the Arctic and consolidating their interests in strategic access, resource exploitation, and alliance-building. The consequences of this emerging Arctic Anthropocene are truly global—from rising sea levels due to melting glaciers to tensions between great powers determined to protect their territory and resources, and the well-being of Indigenous Peoples who have fought for centuries for rights and recognition.

Bio

Klaus Dodds is Professor of Geopolitics and Faculty Dean of Science and Technology at 91ÇéÉ« University London. He is currently a Royal Navy Visiting Fellow and Senior Research Fellow with RAND Europe.

Klaus is the author of many books, including the co-written volume Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic (2025), Border Wars (2022), and the best-selling Geopolitics: A Very Short Introduction. His books have been translated into many languages and reviewed in leading newspapers, magazines, and social media platforms.

Beyond the academy, he served as a specialist adviser to several UK parliamentary select committees, including the House of Lords Select Committee on the Arctic and the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee. He has worked with NATO’s Strategic Foresight Analysis group, advising on future geopolitical trends. Dodds has also provided expert advice to the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, amongst other international bodies and companies.

Professor of Childhood Studies at the Centre for Education Research & Scholarship at 91ÇéÉ« University

Chair of Post Graduate Research Summer Conference 2026

is Professor of Childhood Studies based at the Centre for Education Research & Scholarship, 91ÇéÉ« University, London (UK). Her present methodologies and research practices are framed by critical feminist posthumanities. Her work foregrounds worldly justice by working directly with children and early childhood communities; and through critical engagements with early childhood policy, curricular frameworks and pedagogical approaches. For example, her current projects include and which both take up artful approaches to re-imagining childhood. She has over 150 publications: her books include Narratives from the Nursery: negotiating professional identities in Early Childhood (2012); Post-developmental Approaches to Childhood Art (2019); Feminists Researching Gendered Childhoods (2019) Postdevelopmental Approaches to Play (2025) and Gender Un/bound: Traversing Educational Possibilities (2025). She is book series editor of Feminist Thought in Childhood Research (Bloomsbury) and Key Thinkers in Education (Springer). She serves on several editorial boards including Childhood Art; Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, International Critical Childhood Policy Studies, recently retired as Editor at Gender & Education Journal; and continues to serve as Editor for Reconceptualising Education Research Methodology Journal.

She was winner of the 91ÇéÉ«SU Post Graduate Supervisor of the year, having successfully supervised seventeen doctoral researchers to completion and examined twenty-eight doctoral theses in the UK, Norway, Canada, USA, Australia, and Hong Kong. She is currently External Examiner for the taught PhD programme at Lancaster University. Jayne is thoroughly committed to ensuring that PGRs are well supported and can thrive by being active within research communities.