Imagining Sexual Health Futures with Dr Chase Ledin

There is simply no preparing you for how much of your student life will revolve around sex. Your flatmates will be ranking their best and worst shags of the week at every breakfast-table debrief, your lecturers will have you diving into research papers about Victorian pornography, and you’ll probably be up late dwelling on embarrassing encounters and worrying about your own sexual health and wellbeing more often than you’d anticipated. Of course, this is all perfectly natural – sex is exciting and scary and fun! But it can quickly become quite a lot to navigate. 

This is why Dr Chase Ledin, a lecturer in Social Science & Medicine at Edinburgh University’s Usher Institute, who specialises in HIV and sexual health, started Sexual Health Futures Scotland – a workshop-based project which enables and encourages people to explore their sexual health through creative methods and imagine better futures for sexual health in Scotland. We spoke to Dr Ledin about the inception of this much-needed project, the community around it and the sexual health resources in Scotland that students should know about.

What made you want to start Sexual Health Futures Scotland? Was it an idea that you had during your student years?

My previous education was very much concerned with how we improve health promotion practices in communities. My PhD was an investigation into what the end of HIV means or would mean to people in Scotland and England. How do we get people to think about how we could reach the end of HIV – is it about medical treatments? Testing? Stigma?

This project was started using that baseline of imagining potential sexual health presents and futures, which then led to thinking about “well, people actually have multiple presents, multiple futures, multiple ways that they think about their lives” and “how can we provide a space for people to explore that multiplicity?”

I think my idea for Sexual Health Futures was mainly to provide a space for people to discuss. It could easily be an art project where people create things but don’t talk about their ideas and feelings, or a focus group where people talk about their ideas and feelings but don’t create anything. I wanted to marry these practices and allow people to be empowered through that.

How important are history and sociology to the work you do as a whole and with SHFS?

Pretty fundamental! One of the core reasons I started the Sexual Health Futures project was that conversations surrounding sexual health in society tend to lean towards the biomedical – we think about treating STIs, how we get treatment, how do we have the ‘right kind’ of sex etc. The kind of work I’m interested in is acknowledging that there are so many different ways of experiencing pleasure and dealing with sexual health that have nothing to do with the biomedical lens that doctors and teachers use, and I aim to address how we experience relationships in society in fulfilling and meaningful ways.

What have the results of these workshops taught you? Does this visual/artistic data bring things to light that you’d never considered before, or do they make you see the needs of people in Scotland in a different way?

These workshops have enabled people to consider the present context of sexual health in Scotland and what could be its future. Using arts-based methods like zine-making, drawing and painting has enabled people to be like, ‘Okay, sex isn’t just about being in the bedroom or going to a clinic’. It’s also about how we interact with friends and family or the people we fancy and so on. I think having a space separate from everything else is important for people to be able to do that work that they maybe wouldn’t be able to do in their day-to-day lives.

We’ve had people who have seen their clinicians out in public and, in the workshops, have expressed a particular excitement, fear, anxiety, or whatever. They were asking “How do I tend to that kind of relationship?” and “Is it important for me to have a relationship with my doctor in order to get better treatment or a better kind of communication?” That was something I didn’t consider or set out to address – should you talk to your doctor about your endometriosis when you bump into them at the supermarket, or should that be saved for the clinic?

What has the feedback been like from the participants of these workshops?

Largely positive! I think the most resounding feedback is that people wish there were more spaces like this. Especially in Glasgow, people want stable spaces where they can talk about sex and sexual health openly and honestly. It’s difficult because these spaces can sometimes be very contested, gendered, sexualised spaces, and that’s one of the main reasons why I worked with the Glasgow Zine Library. They work often with queer individuals who are navigating these spaces and want to have conversations about them.

What are some of the best sexual health resources available in Scotland that you wish students knew about?

From the biomedical side, more students need to know about Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). If anyone thinks they are at risk of HIV transmission, they should absolutely be talking to their clinician about getting on PrEP, which is made available free by the NHS in Scotland.

There are lots of great health promotion resources that are provided by HIV and sexual health charity Waverley Care which is based in Edinburgh and Glasgow. They have lots of fantastic materials for HIV, sexual health, general wellbeing and mental health as well as counselling services.

There’s also quite a lot going on with the Glasgow Women’s Library and Zine Library that allow for queered sexual health/feminist sexual health conversations which I feel would be useful for students in the city.

In Edinburgh, there is an outreach service called ROAM which does some really brilliant health promotion work which serves gay, bisexual, trans and other men that I would highly recommend.

In terms of online resources, there is a fantastic social media website called SH24 which is based in London but has some of the best graphics and details about sexual health I’ve ever seen.

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The next Sexual Health Futures Scotland workshop is Imagining Digital Futures and Sexual Health, Fri 18 Oct, Glasgow Zine Library, part of the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) Festival of Social Science. Check Glasgow Zine Library’s online event list for updates and more info