Pre-Conference Event

Ingrid Agud Morell (Grup d’Educació i Gènere i ATLAS – UAB, Angelina Sánchez Martí (Grup d’Educació i Gènere i ATLAS – UAB) 

This opening session explores feminist perspectives on childhood and youth to rethink education and gender research. It maps key critical themes and methodologies, links Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) to international debates and policy practice, and interrogates how children agentically navigate sexuality and gender framed in education and wider child-rights systems. The session highlights how diverse children and young people’s experiences challenge adult-centric approaches and reshape research, policy and practice agendas.

Members of the Grup d’Educació i Gènere (UAB) 

This session aims to support early-career researchers in developing and strengthening their work through collective feminist mentoring grounded in non-adult-centric, intersectional, and decolonial perspectives. It fosters collaborative reflection to address research challenges, refine ideas, and open new lines of inquiry within the socio-educational field. 

Imma Font Garcia (GRETA – UPF), Cristina Pradillo Caimari (GRETA – UPF) 

This workshop emerges from the most recent research of the Research Group on Gender and Inequalities (GRETA) at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, an interdisciplinary space dedicated to understanding how gender intersects with other axes of inequality, such as origin, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, or social class, in people’s everyday experiences. In this session, we will present a set of pioneering studies with children and adolescents in which the digital tool Relief Maps+ (reliefmaps.upf.edu) was used, an innovative methodology that enables the collection, visualization, and analysis of lived experiences from an intersectional, emotional, and spatial perspective.

The workshop will focus on the emerging insights and dilemmas of two current projects: Intermaps, aimed at understanding intersectional dynamics of inequality in Catalonia among people over the age of eight, and RASSIF, centred on the experiences of children and young people in mobility in northern Morocco. Drawing on these cases, we will address ethical and methodological tensions that are particularly relevant in research with children and adolescents, with special attention to two key challenges:

1. ensuring truly meaningful and voluntary informed consent

2. adapting research content to the interests and experiences of children and adolescents themselves.

We propose a collective and hands‑on working space to explore concrete strategies for addressing these challenges, sharing ongoing learning, and rethinking methodological tools from a critical and feminist perspective. The workshop will also invite reflection on researchers’ positionality and their role in shaping more sensitive and transformative practices.

Adriana Prexigueiro (AFIN – UAB), Bruna Alvarez (AFIN – UAB)

SexAFIN is a research project active since 2017, affiliated with the AFIN group and the Department of Anthropology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. It investigates a topic that is often silenced: what children and adolescents know about sexuality and how adults accompany them. From an anthropological perspective that recognises children as producers of their own cultural worlds (Marre, 2014), the project analyses how they construct meanings, practices, and questions around sexuality. At a time when children and adolescents are increasingly exposed to pornographic content in digital environments (Ballesteros et al., 2019), this anthropological approach challenges the social construction of childhood as asexual and highlights how taboo continues to craft sexuality and childhood as socially sensitive topics (Álvarez et al., 2022).

The aim of this workshop is to offer concrete and applicable tools for education professionals, both formal and non‑formal, to talk about sexuality with children and adolescents. We will share the participatory techniques used in the SexAFIN project to generate safe and meaningful conversations, and explore what emerges when children and adolescents themselves take the floor.

We will place particular emphasis on two key aspects:

1. how to ensure truly meaningful and voluntary informed consent

2. how themes and interests vary depending on the methodologies used.

The workshop will follow a participatory format, designed to foster debate and collectively build strategies that help transform how we approach sexuality education from a critical and situated perspective.