Upcoming events.
You can find The Sexploration Team and our partners at various upcoming events and conferences, as well as offering trainings, workshops, and a variety of skill-shares and educational programming.
Check out our community calendar of events to see where we are and register for upcoming offerings.
Research.
Our research team has active funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in the broad area of metascience and health data equity, to study the science of sexual orientation data collection and produce a community-developed toolkit of best practices and critical suggestions for future research, clinical practice, and electronic health records management. This funding allows us to hold community engagement studios (“focus groups,” ongoing through December 2024), conduct in-depth and cognitive interviews (January-May 2025), and launch a survey (N=10,000, tbd Fall 2025 launch). To build on this work, Dr. Ethan Coston has also joined a larger research team working to build a multi-dimensional scale of sexual health and wellbeing (which includes the holistic and comprehensive understanding of sexuality that our team is currently working on), funded recently by the NIH’s National Institute for Child Health and Human Development ($3.5 million across 5 years). Further, with another collaborative member, Dr. Shanna Katz Kattari (University of Michigan), and other Co-Is and community collaborators on the project, our research team is in the beginning stages of working on our own NIH R01 (June 2025 submission), to create a community-developed comprehensive sexual health re-education curriculum by and for trauma survivors.
We welcome any and all collaborators across these projects!
Education.
Our educational team has been working to develop a compendium of trainings and curricular modules for a range of diverse stakeholders (in and outside of academia), with the goal on preparing a large-scale grant to radically transform the next generation of sexual health educators, counselors, clinicians, and community organizers. You can find our current offerings, including our continued participation in conferences and convenings, in our calendar at the top of this page.
Together, we have run a four-part virtual roundtable series, which featured the voices and expertise of 19 individuals from the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., including representatives of The TransLatin@ Coalition, The Black Girls Guide to Surviving Menopause, CUNY Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO), Global Majority Wellness, and the Transgender Law Center; launched an 8-week sexual education series on our socials this past spring (@sexploreproject on Instagram and YouTube), entitled “What is Sex?”, which draws from our expertise and connections across the globe to break down sex, relationships, intimacy and wellbeing to their basic parts, to raise awareness and increase sexual literacies; and are planning a free unconference to take place in Summer 2025.
We hope to use the sexual health re-education curriculum produced by our community-led research team in a future train-the-trainer grant project, where we would bring in community health practitioners, university wellness resource officers, clinicians working in sexual and reproductive health, and family and relationships counselors (among others) to learn our curriculum and pilot it in their communities and practices.
Advocacy.
Our public engagement and advocacy team has been involved in a number of public-facing initiatives, co-editing a special issue of Spark, the online magazine for the National Center for Institutional Diversity, including collaboratively writing the introduction to that special issue; producing an inaugural season of a project podcast, aimed at bringing together a diversity of voices and perspectives on current sexual health and reproductive/bodily autonomy issues; advising on the Reconceptualizing Gender and Health Project (PI Anne Esacove, Penn Social Policy & Practice); and working with a team of folks from a number of sites across the U.S. and Canada to secure funding from PCORI to study the science of meaningfully engaging disabled and neurodivergent communities in gender and sexual health research and implementing said projects in the field.
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