Dr Samantha Mannix

Graduated in 2022

Project Description

This thesis examined the ways young people come to understand and negotiate intimate relationships, beginning from the vantage point of everyday youth experience, not adult constructions of that experience. In doing so, I sought to interrogate widespread understandings of young people and intimacy that remain predominantly framed in terms of risk, danger, immaturity, and vulnerability. While not diminishing the very real difficulties and dangers experienced by some young people, the aim of this thesis was to open up other ways of understanding young people’s perspectives and experiences, looking particularly at how views on intimate relationships connected to their imaginings of the future and their sense of a ‘good life’ (Berlant, 2011). Engaging with feminist, participatory and arts-based methodologies, I conducted interviews and repeat group sessions with students from a secondary school located on the outskirts of Melbourne, Victoria. Informed by feminist and queer theories, and working with concepts of affect to analyse intimacy, I drew on participant narratives and visual artefacts to examine the ways young people learn about, experience, anticipate, and regulate intimate relationships. This included an examination of the role of digital social media, the place of ‘ordinary affects’ and ‘public feelings’, and in-depth exploration of the processes of meaning making in which young people actively engaged, arguing that these constituted powerful if sometimes uncertain and ambivalent forms of learning and becoming. I further argued that some of the most powerful learning was not in classrooms or via formal curriculum but took place in other spaces and interactions, which become evident when taking a youth-centred approach.

Supervisors

Professor Julie McLeod, Melbourne Graduate School of Education
Professor Cathy Vaughan, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health