This portfolio thesis of five interconnected articles examines the cultural and emotional dynamics of sex education within English secondary schools. While statutory Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) policy promotes inclusion and safeguarding, its implementation often involves navigating tensions around identity, belief, and belonging in culturally diverse school communities. Adopting a socio-emotional and interdisciplinary sociological lens, the thesis explores how cultural conflicts are experienced and negotiated by teachers and parents, and how these tensions shape their everyday engagement with sex education as a contested institutional practice.

Guided by three core research questions, the study investigates: the cultural conflicts experienced by teachers and parents; the pedagogical strategies teachers use to manage these tensions; and the emotions and emotion regulation practices that accompany stakeholder engagement with RSE. The portfolio includes a PRISMA-informed systematic literature review and four articles reporting research comprising qualitative interviews conducted with 24 participants (12 teachers and 12 parents) from diverse cultural backgrounds across England. Across these four articles, the analysis draws on symbolic interactionism, identity theory, debates on liberalism and communitarianism, and sociological and affect-based approaches to emotion, including emotional labour, affective economies, and perspectives on social emotion regulation and constructed emotion. These frameworks inform an exploration of how cultural conflicts emerge across intrapersonal, interpersonal, social, and institutional contexts and how they are interpreted and managed by stakeholders.

Across the articles, teachers and parents describe varied emotional responses—including (mis)alignment, distress, and ambivalence—and employ communicative, reflective, and relational strategies to navigate tensions. By attending to these experiences, the thesis offers a situated sociological account of how cultural conflict and emotion shape the everyday experience of sex education and highlights the importance of culturally responsive and emotion-attentive approaches for sustaining dialogue and trust between schools and families in pluralistic educational settings.