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In this article, I draw on my experiences as a non-binary researcher in a high school to interrogate the normative construction of adulthood. I centre the discussion on the concept of adulthood in ...

Prompted by shared discussions about our doctoral research, this paper focuses on two tensions we identified when applying to our university’s Institutional Review Board (IRB). The first tension relates to our discomfort with the assumptions about research participants as articulated in the IRB application. We detail how one of us sought to work with/in but also outside of the constraints we discuss. The second tension takes us into a more experimental space. We write ‘outside’ of the IRB boxes as a form of critique, but also as a way to produce more affirmative ways of thinking about what else can be thought and done within university IRB structures. We focus in particular on the ways that “data” is contained within IRB boxes. We conclude by offering some additional questions that this process of thinking/writing together have generated.

In this paper, I draw on observations from sexual health workshops in an elementary school classroom in Vancouver, Canada and friendship pair interviews with four boys who attended the workshops. I examine how the educators organising the workshops constructed sexual health, highlighting their reliance on both a ‘gay is okay’ and a scientific discourse. I argue that by locating their discussion of homosexuality within a values framework and striving to depict gay relationships as acceptable, they simultaneously constituted homosexuality as requiring acceptance. Likewise, by subsuming references to heterosexuality within their lesson on (hetero)sexual reproduction, they framed heterosexuality as an always already accepted scientific fact. Having set the scene in this way, I then explore the ways the boys both took up and deviated from these discourses when constructing their own narratives.