Kath Albury (Swinburne) presented the fifth ‘First Fridays’ seminar on ‘Digital Sexual Citizenship’ at Deakin Downtown on 1 June 2018.
Listen to Professor Kath Albury on ‘Digital Sexual Citizenship’
Digital sexual citizenship and ‘sext education’: building new theoretical toolkits to help adults engage with young people’s digital cultures
As Ken Plummer argues, rights and responsibilities are not simply given, but ‘have to be invented through human activities, and built into notions of communities, citizenship and identities’ (1995, 150). While young people’s right to freedom from sexual coercion and abuse is increasingly accepted as a central narrative within Australian sexuality education and health promotion policy, sexuality education – particularly as it is delivered in secondary schools – seldom addresses young people’s positive rights to sexual self-expression. Despite this relative absence of a ‘sexual citizenship’ framework in sexuality education more broadly, there is an emerging language of ‘digital citizenship’ being applied to young people’s participation in online and mobile mediated spaces, particularly in educational content that seeks to address online bullying and harassment (including behaviours relating to sexting and pornography). For example, the Alannah and Madeline Foundation’s e-Smart program offers a ‘Digital Licence’ program through which young people can assert their citizenship (see https://www.digitallicence.com.au/). The eSmart Digital Licence is an online cyber safety program teaching children critical digital skills to be smart, safe and responsible when online. However, the intersection of sexual citizenship and digital citizenship has not been articulated in either sexuality education and sexual health promotion or in ‘cybersafety’ education policy and practice. This paper considers the ways that a theory of digital sexual citizenship might be productively deployed in the context of sexuality education and sexual health promotion, and how the concept of ‘participatory culture’ (Jenkins et al. 2016) might offer a means of applying this framework in practice.
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About the Series
Deakin University Gender and Sexuality Studies holds a public monthly seminar series on the first Friday of each month at Deakin Downtown in Melbourne’s CBD.
Find out more and register for future seminars.
Monthly postgraduate masterclasses are also open to Deakin University students.
