One of the young women who took part in this project was Sophia Rosen-Fouladi. For Sophia, taking part in the reanimating data project was personally and professionally transformative, offering her the opportunity to talk about topics that she rarely had the opportunity to explore.
‘The Reanimating Data Project helps encourage discussions that are so open and encouraging for young women to see they aren’t alone in their circumstances….Sophia’s involvement in [the reanimating data workshops] has gone on to define parts of her career as well as her own confidence in her personal life. She was struck by how little she had previously talked about sex and sexual experiences before the workshops. The workshops offered her a space to learn, grow and discover tools that have improved her personal relationships and her confidence as an adult in many aspects of her life.‘
Several years later, Sophia dreamed up the idea of recreating similar kinds of creative and transformative spaces for others. Together with friend and fellow creative Ottilie Nye, Sophia founded Sexy Pigeons – A sex positive collective hosting workshops for women and non binary people in London. Sexy Pigeons first venture has been to develop the Cum on Down workshop series – imagined as a series of playful, creative spaces where women and non-binary people could come together to be creative, find new communities, build confidence and learn together about sex and sexuality.
Cum on Down!
Between April 2024 and January 2025 the Sexy Pigeons hosted 5 creative workshops in London. You can read about each of them in their own words on the Sexy Pigeons website.
Workshop one: The start of something special…
In April 2024, Sophia and Ottilie facilitated their first workshop with 15 women and non-binary people at the Albany Theatre in Deptford, South London. The focus of the workshop was VIRGINITY, which was explored using a mix of silly games and energisers, focussed discussions, mind maps, exploring WRAP data extracts, creative exercises and zine making.
This was an opportunity ‘to experiment with ideas. To try things out, be bold, and see what sticks’. You can read more about this workshop here in Sexy Pigeon’s own words: Focus Group: Virginity.
Workshop 2: The Sex Education System
A few months later, and now with a little financial support from the University of Sussex, Sexy Pigeons hosted their second workshop: The Sex Education System. Located at the Music Rooms in New Cross, South London this workshop also featured ice breakers, focussed discussions, zine making and creative world building exercises – this time in the form of acrostic poems. The struggle for this workshop was recruiting participants. The event was open to all and marketed online but Sexy Pigeons were disheartened by the small numbers of sign ups. In the end seven participants turned up and took part in what ended up being an intimate workshop with time and space for everyone to explore and express their thoughts and ideas.
We were inspired by the idea of the anonymous question box you might have at the end of a sex ed class, and encouraged participants to write down as many questions they could think of, either that they wished would have been answered during their time at school, or that would be beneficial to someone going through school right now. We then turned a question each into an acrostic poem. We had ‘discharge’ ‘contraception’ and ‘masturbate’ [and] the Ten ‘Cum’andments was a highlight of this workshop. 10 self love and educational points to wholeheartedly stick to. And of course we were proud of the name! (Sexy Pigeons 2024)
In November 2024, Sexy Pigeons hosted their third creative workshop in the Palmer studio at Hoxton Hall in East London. This time, the workshop took on a different structure using different creative exercises to gradually construct a timeline that hung across the workshop space. We had a solo participant turn up, however ended up being able to try out material in a really personal and honest way. We had some really cathartic moments reading out free writing material we’d written to our past selves, and got to know the women from the archive in greater depth.
By the end we had a huge variety of materials hanging on the timeline: questions, segments from the interviews, data poems and free writing to name a few. Circling back to the idea that multiple times are existing at once, we wanted to round the workshop off by making personal time capsules. Participants were allowed to deconstruct the timeline however they wished and add material to their time capsules. We focussed on the ‘message in a bottle’ idea using glass bottles which could be filled up and decorated on the outside. (Sexy Pigeons, 2024)
When developing the RAD project the project team were inspired by Elizabeth Freeman’s work on queer time. Freeman talks about the need to make visible the ‘imperfect sutures between past and present’ (p.111). Freeman highlights the example of artist and film-maker Elizabeth Subrin’s work, Lost Tribes and Promised Lands’. Here, Subrin shows two reels of silent footage of the same neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, taken nearly a decade apart, and sutured together. The first is taken in the weeks following the New York September 11th attacks and the second nearly a decade later. In suturing two times together like this, Freeman argues, we can see the anachronisms at play. This is how we can ‘‘unsituate viewers from the present tense they think they know, and to illuminate or even prophetically ignite possible futures in light of powerful historical moments’. (Freeman, 2010).
In this workshop, the Sexy Pigeons take up these themes, playing creatively with time and making spaces to make multiple times present.
‘What makes the concept of Reanimating Data so exciting for us is the idea of multiple timelines being in conversation with one another. By exploring a selection of interviews from the WRAP Project Archive we are reanimating these words within the context of the present day and giving them a liveness upon which to create new work and initiate new discussions.’ (Sexy pigeons, 2024)
On the 25th January 2025 the Sexy Pigeons facilitated their 4th and 5th workshops at the Palmer Studio at Hoxton Hall – ‘experimenting with structure and pace through trialling two hour-long workshops this time round.’ The groups – each with 10-12 participants – worked with extracts from the Women Risk and AIDS Project archive, creating body maps and discussing the homophobia and biphobia that surfaces in the interview and talking about the politics of sex education, before finishing up with a letter-writing exercise. You can read all about these workshops here: The Past, Present and Future
‘We wanted to round off the workshops with a letter-writing exercise to bring in an element of the future, looking towards a brighter future of sex education, and our relationships with our sexual identities. We love the wind-down/reflective time this gives participants to chat with us and amongst each other about any topics explored in the workshop, as well as promoting individual creativity. We encouraged participants to write a letter to their future selves, with the aim of opening it in 2 hours/days/weeks even years!!! We wanted to draw an invisible thread between the women from the interviews in the 1980s, the participants in our workshop in 2025, and whoever those participants may become in the future, to span decades of sex education. It brought a lighter feel to the end of the workshops after some fairly heavy content, and brought an atmosphere of peacefulness into the space.’
New directions…
After 10 months of experimenting with the structure and length of the workshops, trialling different venues, materials, activities and ways of advertising and recruiting participants, the sexy pigeons decided to try some new directions… more coming on their interactive exhibition and reanimating data filming day soon!
A few weeks ago we posted a blog by Charlotte Bagnall who shared how she and her colleague had used data from the WRAP archive as teaching materials for a series of sessions on thematic data analysis. Since Charlotte and Claire delivered these sessions, Corona Virus has arrived in the UK. We are in lockdown and educators across all sectors are working out how to facilitate teaching and learning online and from a distance. In these unfamiliar times we are realising that digital archives of sociological studies, like the WRAP, offer new possibilities for students and educators who want to research, teach and learn during lockdown. There are possibilities for students to do secondary data analysis, comparative historical work and data reanimation and possibilities for educators who may want to use the data, as Claire and Charlotte did, to guide students through more structured programmes of learning about research methods, feminist sociological research, sexuality studies, creative methods, Relationships and Sexuality education and much more. With this in mind we are sharing details of a session we ran in September last year with a group of students at Manchester Metropolitan University, when we had never heard of Corona virus and could sit and talk, learn, think and create together. In the session we used collaging as a method for engaging with and exploring the WRAP data and thinking about sexuality and social change. Although this was an offline, group session its simple creative methods of reflect, free-write, read, think, stick, paste and share could be transferable to different spaces and contexts.
Collaging sexual learning
On the 30th September 2019 lecturer and former youth worker Jayne Mugglestone, Ali Ronan and I facilitated a workshop for third year undergrad students studying on an Early Years and Childhood Studies programme undergraduate programme at MMU. Ali and I met Jayne early in the morning in the teaching room to set up for the session. Jayne had been feeling concerned that our decision to do a workshop on sexualities in week two of the module was not a good idea. In week two students wouldn’t know her, or each other, very well or have got used to working together as a group. The previous week Jayne had introduced the topic and let students know what would be happening. A few of the students had come to talk to her after the session to say that they were concerned about the topic, because of their religious values – some Christian, some Muslim. Jayne was feeling nervous about doing the workshop and concerned that some of the students wouldn’t turn up. This mirrored the nervousness of another of the youth workers we have worked with in this project who was concerned about how the young women in her group – from ‘strict’ Muslim and Christian backgrounds – would respond to the WRAP material. As we were setting up for the session however some of the students who had approached Jayne the previous week turned up and she could relax.
What jars you?
We started with an activity called What Jars you? (Taken from the AGENDA resource created by Emma Renold). We hadn’t planned to do this but decided to as Jayne noted some nervousness the previous week about talking about sexuality. The task was to write ‘what jars you about talking about sex and sexuality’ on post it notes and stuff these into a jar. There weren’t enough jars so the students had to share. This was a large group of over twenty students – all female except one and all born between 1997 and 1999 (We know this because our intro-starter involved talking about the year you were born!). The group is mixed in terms of race and ethnicity.
I went round and spoke to two tables at this point. At the first table the students told me that nothing jars them. They said they are very open about the topic and they are happy to talk about it. They talked about the importance of RSE and of talking about these issues both as students and young people and as future youth and childcare practitioners. On the other table two of the girls talked about the fact that they don’t talk about sex and sexuality at home or with friends. The silence around sex and sexuality was referred to in relation to upbringing and family. It took a while for us to name culture and religion as important factors. There was reference to the protests in Birmingham at the time around the teaching of LGBT relationships to Muslim children. I wasn’t quite clear if these were evoked as an example of why its difficult to have these conversations or as a polite message to me that we shouldn’t really be having these conversations anyway.
Students weren’t asked to share the contents of their jars. They could choose to take their jars with them or leave them on the tables if they were happy for us to read their contents. Most, if not all, left them. I read them after the workshop, expecting to find examples of what the students find difficult about talking about sex and sexuality in a classroom or professional context (as this was the context of our conversation prior to the activity). Students took up the activity in a different way, sharing examples of their own fears and concerns about sex and sexuality – their own ignorance, experience of abuse and fears of being touched, not enjoying sex or of getting pregnant. They also wrote what jars them about the politics of sexuality – the lack of education, social taboos around sex, restrictive religious and cultural norms, gender inequality.
We used young people’s reflections on the activity, and what they find jarring about sex and sexuality to think about how we were going to create a safe space for working. We created a set of ground rules and talked about confidentiality and how we were documenting the session that day.
For Jayne this activity opened up thinking about what support childhood and youth practitioners need before they can go out and deliver RSE.
‘We expect people to go and work with young people/all ages, in different roles – teachers, community workers, family support, etc. and support them around RSE subjects and issues when they have had no information or support themselves. It’s challenge as there is so little space even in our quite open curriculum to work on this kind of thing. The rooms, the group sizes, the course fees and related pressure on assessment and jobs, all gets the focus and the students themselves get missed in it all.’
Jayne Mugglestone, Lecturer and youth worker
Partner discussion and individual free write
We started the creative work by asking students to talk to a partner about how and what they learnt about sex, sexuality and relationships (and also perhaps what they didn’t learn or wasn’t said). Once pairs had finished their conversations they were asked to individually speed write for 2 minutes about ‘sexual learning’. They could write about their own experiences or reflect on their conversation with their partner. The free writes were anonymous and confidential, although many of the students said they were happy to share them and let me take some photos. Together they capture what has been well documented in youth sexualities research – that young people learn about sex and sexuality from a range of different sources and that sexual learning starts long before children start school. We also see that young people are critical of the education they get at school, that conversations with parents are limited and many young people do not have a trusted or reliable source of information about sex and sexuality or a place to go to explore the topics that interest them in more detail.
Engaging with the WRAP data on sexual learning
Next we put the written reflections / speed writes to one side and then looked at some extracts from the WRAP study on sexual learning. Students were asked to choose an extract and read it several times, underlining things that stood out to them. Next they discussed the extracts with a partner and then with the wider group. There was a feeling that the extracts ‘could have been today’. One pair were confused because they thought that the extracts were from today, and not from the past. This has happened across the projects we have done in Manchester. Young women read the material as if it were from today. At first I saw this as our failure to provide enough historical context around the archive but I have since come to see this as what the WRAP material does. It glows and speaks to the young women who read it today. Rather than seeing the data as a historical document they see the data as an invitation to tell their own stories or to take advantage of a rare moment to hear another woman tell their story, with an intimacy they tell us they rarely hear. They don’t seem to see the interviews and the extracts as historical documents or ‘archive material’ but rather as a collection of women’s voices that they can often relate to, or that they feel inspired by. After this the task was to create a collage that captured their thoughts about what is changing for young people when it comes to learning about sex and sexuality. Students could use the extracts, their own free writes, or create new material. They were given coloured paper, glue, coloured pens, scissors and crayons.
Creating collages
Students worked quickly and creatively, responding to the invitation to explore sexuality and social change in different ways – one created paper jigsaw pieces to piece together the different ways that young people learn about sex, others created columns to show what has changed and what has remained the same. When I went around and talked to young people in their small groups two south East Asian young women told me that they only really learnt about sex and sexuality and relationships from social media – Instagram and snapchat – as they rarely discussed the topic with friends (and never with family). They said that they would see articles pop up on their news feed or in the discover / explore section of the app and would sometimes click on them. We looked at their phones to see what kinds of articles were there on that day. We saw two examples that appeared on their news feeds – ‘How experienced are you really?’ and ‘things girlfriends do that secretly annoy their boyfriends’. The young women said they found these kind of articles useful and interesting as a way of learning about sex and relationships. We talked about the fact that they had no choice over what appeared in their news feeds but choice over what they clicked on, open and decided to read. This wasn’t the same at school, where they had no choice over whether they could take part in an RSE session or not.
In another discussion with a West African and south east Asian young woman the West African young woman describe how she learnt about sex and relationships from her friends, her parents, school sex education and her church. For her these different sites were different, but complementary. She never had a burning question inside her that she couldn’t get an answer to because if church wasn’t telling her, she would ask her mum, if her mum couldn’t answer she would ask her friends. She said that all these different messages and information would bump up against each other and sometimes contradict each other but ultimately she would always come back to what her mum said. You always come back to where you lie at night. She explained that a teacher can’t slap you or punish you like your mum can – you live in her house so you ultimately have to listen to her rules and her way of seeing things. When I asked if that meant that the other messages and learning didn’t matter, she said no – that she heard them all, they passed through and lodged in her brain somehow, even if she settled for now with what her mum tells her. She later had a go at representing this through her collage. Her friend said that things were similar for her, even though her religion was different (Islam).
When the collages were finished we stuck them on to the wall and asked the students to gather round and talk about their collage. Through their collages and the discussion, the students made the following points about sexual learning and social change:
Friends are still a key source of information about sex for some young people. There is more openness between friends for some young people but for others sex is never discussed. Or as one young woman commented – there are some friends I would say anything to and some I wouldn’t talk to about sex at all.
Relationships and Sex Education is still largely scientific – focussing on the biological aspects of sex and not discussing other areas such as emotions, relationships, consent and bodies. It is also still mainly heterosexual. It is still largely taught by female teachers.
The legal and policy framework around the teaching of
homosexuality in schools has changed in the UK. There used to be ‘section 28’
and now there the Love is love movement. There is more openness around
homosexuality now but it is still largely excluded from RSE which still
focusses on heterosexual relationships. LGBT young people have to find out
their own information. As M (young gay man) said – I felt like there was no
space for me within RSE.
Parents still don’t really talk about sex to their
children, although this varies between families and across cultures. One white
young woman commented that her family would never talk about sex but that her
boyfriend’s mum is really open. They all walk around naked! – she told us.
Gender. It
remains the case that women are judged more harshly than men for having sex.
Clinics. There are more sexual health services and
charities to support young people and sexual health clinics are confidential
for young people.
Media. One young woman commented
that young people have always learnt about sex and sexuality from the media but
we talk about this as if it is a ‘new’ phenomena. In 1989 young people were
learning about sex from television adverts about HIV and AIDS and today young
people learn from digital and social media, as well as television. The range of media and the content of media
has changed however. She commented that AIDS would no longer be talked about in
the media as a ‘gay disease’, but that female pleasure is still side-lined as it
was in the 1980s. There are more media sources for learning about pleasure now
(previously just women’s magazines) but – she said – we don’t learn about it.
In a patriarchal society it is more accepted that men have sex.
Others in the group talked about other ways in which young
people learn through the media. For example, through documentaries and
YouTubers. One young person gave the example of Stacey Douley’s documentary
about brothels in Turkey where men visit sex workers because they don’t know
where to put their penis when having penetrative sex with a woman. Here the sex
workers are the sex educators. Shan Boody [Shan Boodram) was mentioned as a
YouTuber that some young people watch.
The group reflected that now there is so much more media to
learn from – particularly from social media. This can be a pressure but it is
an important source of information. For some this is their only source (see
above). There is more about female pleasure in the media now and so many more
sources than previously (just a few women’s magazines). Porn is a source of
education now for some young people.
Religion remains influential and important to how young people learn about sex, sexuality and relationships. Young people felt that things are changing within many faith communities, even though it can be hard to see this. One group said that a sexual health worker had started to come to their Mosque after lots of men started getting STIs from the extra-marital relationships they were having. The young women said that these men can’t talk to the Imam about these relationships or about condom use as the men shouldn’t be having these relationships in the first place.
After the session Jayne spoke with the students and asked them for feedback. She found that students had taken things away from the session for themselves and for their practice as future childcare / youth practitioners. In particular, the importance of access to information about sex and sexual health and the need to not be judgemental and understand difference. Students commented a lot on the creative methods we used, noting that they didn’t feel like they were taking part in research and rethinking what it means to do research with young people.
Six weeks later we returned to do another session using the WRAP data, this time exploring what we find in an archive and what we find missing. The students drew their ‘many selves’ and looked through the archive to think about what stories about women’s lives they wanted to be heard by future generations. Then some of them gifted us stories of their own.
‘The effects of both the sessions were felt throughout the rest of the time I worked with them and after that. Some of them told me that it had really helped to think more about it all and to be in a space where they felt that they could explore different views. It seemed to give them much more confidence in their ability to talk about issues and to feel taken seriously in their feelings and discussions was really important. Several said that they had previously thought about RSE as quite a narrow subject where they now thought that it was much wider and much more important for all ages than they had thought.’
Jayne Mugglestone, Lecturer and youth worker
Click here to explore the archive further and to use the selected extracts on sexual learning use the link above.
Research methods are a core component of most degree-level programmes, but nonetheless renowned for being students’ least favourite component of their course. Tasked with the role of developing new content to teach qualitative research methods, within the Faculty of Education at Manchester Metropolitan University, I was keen to demonstrate the usefulness and real-world implications of key qualitative methods and analysis to inspire my students. In doing so, I came across the ‘reanimating data project’ funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (for more information see: http://reanimatingdata.co.uk/about/), which gave my colleague Dr Claire Fox and I what we needed and ‘reanimated’ our students.
We had three weeks to work with the students on this project. Week One, students firstly learnt about the importance of archival data-digitising, sharing and re-using data, in addition to ethical considerations to take into account when conducting such work. This led on to Weeks Two and Three, where, following lectures on qualitative data analysis and more specifically Thematic Analysis, the students had the opportunity to conduct their own Thematic Analysis on real-world extracts taken from two interviews collected as part of the Women, Risk & AIDS Project (WRAP) social research study conducted in Manchester in 1989-90. Each student worked with three pages of data. Their research question was:
‘What are young women’s perceptions and experiences of sex education in the 1980s?’.
Prior to delivering the sessions, Claire and I had analysed the data ourselves. We were working with two interviews from the WRAP archive: The interview with Simone, 18, White British, working class, Roman Catholic (Ref: NMC12) and the interview with Stacey, 20 – 21, White British, working class (Ref: MAG12). Two main themes emerged from our analysis: Basic or limited sex education and Gendered Double standards.
Basic or limited sex education was a semantic theme, in other words it described explicit, surface-level meaning within the data. This theme included talk about the basic and limited sex education the young women received within the 1980s. For example, sex education lessons were selective, passive and detached, with teachers only focussing on the biological aspects of sex and discussions about emotions and the relational aspects avoided. These gaps were in part shaped by teacher embarrassment and their assumptions of hopelessness, which meant that, as a result, sex education lessons had little impact, students instead having to take their education into their own hands and seek out magazines as a source of better information.
In
contrast, Gendered
double standards is a latent theme and looks beyond what is said to
identify deeper-level implicit meaning within the data. Gendered double
standards were evident in that boys and girls faced different pressures in
relation to sex in the 1980s, girls particularly fearful about being labelled
as ‘loose’, a ‘slag’ and acquiring a negative reputation if they engaged in
sexual behaviour or discussed sex. This ultimately
underpinned young women’s perceptions, experiences and relationships during
this time.
In the session with students we presented our analysis findings by sharing one table for each theme with the codes and supporting quotes. We also shared a short write-up of the theme Gendered double standards as an example (You can read this here). Students were then asked to write up the other theme.
It was clear through the students’ write up of the Basic or limited sex education theme that they had engaged well and become immersed within the data. Here is an example from one of our students.
The young women detailed the amount and depth of the sex education they received within Catholic schools in the 1980s. The idea of basic or limited sex education was shown by mentions of few lessons given, e.g. ‘we got a lesson once’ (Simone) and ‘there was no sex education at all’ (Stacey). Teachers would rush over lessons, or miss out crucial information. ‘She didn’t really go into detail; she just went very fast. So we didn’t have much time to think’ (Simone) and ‘she just said – you can’t get AIDS from this, you can get it from this’ (Simone).
Sex education largely had a biological focus, as opposed to informing students about safe sex. ‘Yeah, just like how babies are made, and that’s it’ (Simone), ‘Q: Did they talk about contraception? A: No’ (Simone). Students were not informed about the ways to prevent pregnancy or transfer of STIs: ‘Q: So did she say that if you use a condom you’ll be protected? A: No way’ (Simone) and ‘Q: Did they talk to you about contraception and STDs at school? A: No, nothing like that’ (Stacey). Furthermore, teachers did not explain relationship dynamics, or what emotions may arise when a student became sexually active, e.g. ‘nobody ever talked to you about the problems and the entanglements, and what it means to be in a relationship when you start having sex’ (Stacey). The girls also noted that any sex education they did receive only involved the teacher giving a short session of ‘just the basics’ (Simone), with no time allotted for further discussion or an opportunity to ask questions. ‘All we did was read from a book. We didn’t really discuss it or anything’ (Simone).
Sex education for the general student population was described to be a bare minimum. Some further education would be given if students opted to study biology; ‘only if you took biology in the fourth or fifth year, we did quite a bit’ (Simone). The feelings towards sex education within biology in later school years seemed to be more positive, with more extensive education on how the body works: ‘I learnt a lot from biology, you know, about sort of …and the insides and things’ (Stacey). However, this more detailed teaching was reserved only for those who chose to study biology, and was not offered to other students.
The basic or limited sex education led to students having to take their education into their own hands. Girls would seek out magazines as a source for better information, namely ‘man and woman’. Stacey explained that ‘we read them all! I think I learned a lot off that’. School sex education sessions left large gaps that the girls filled independently outside of school. Overall, the girls explained that they received quite poor sex education. Between teachers rushing lessons, and only providing factual information, to more information being kept back from the wider student body, and only being taught to fulfil the exam curriculum, students’ sex education was basic and limited.
Angel Mellor-Davis, Year 1 Educational Psychology, MMU
There was such a depth to the data, that we were able to give students just three pages of data and a simple but constructive task to get them enthused and engaged in qualitative data analysis. They can take this learning with them and apply it to a different dataset for their assignment. Students discussed similarities and differences between the sex education they received and that of the young girls within the transcripts. However, with hindsight we could have done more of this and perhaps used it to teach students about ‘reflexivity’.
It has been great to be part of this project and use the WRAP data to the benefit of our students, and I am looking forward to involvement in further projects stemming from the reanimating data project archive.
