PROJECTS
YOUTH, RELIGION AND SEXUALITY: DIGITAL MEDIA, SCHOOL CULTURES AND EXEMPTIONS
This project aims to understand the knowledges and practices about sexuality and religion that form the everyday worlds of young people who are religious. This should provide significant new knowledge about a key time in the development of a young person’s identity via a nationwide, deep yet comparative approach. Expected outcomes include strategic health policy and curriculum development advice that responds to current debates around religious exemptions to anti-discrimination law and creates better education and health care for religious and LGBTIQ+ youth. Benefits will include increased wellbeing for religious LGBTIQ+ youth, conservatively religious and newly arrived youth communities in Australia.
YOUTH CARBON CULTURES
Australia’s transition into a low carbon economy will have a range of impacts on young people’s social, economic, and environmental futures. These impacts may look and feel very different for young people and communities living in different parts of Australia. It is essential that we listen to many different perspectives from young people on this issue, not just the loudest ones who make the headlines. This project is about starting new conversations by sharing young people’s stories about carbon in their everyday lives.
We want to hear your side of the carbon story. What role does carbon play in the things you love to do? How do your relationships with carbon help make you who you are? How do interactions with carbon help build and sustain your communities?
FAITH SENSITIVE KNOWLEDGES FOR DIGITAL HEALTH
Anna is working on Developing Faith Sensitive Knowledges for Youth Digital Health. This project identifies religious barriers to accessing digital mental health resources and develops faith specific community-based digital mental health promotion for marginalized youth.
Research shows young people are experiencing higher levels of mental health concerns than ever before (Mission Australia, 2017). Despite a wealth of knowledge on youth and digital healthcare, little is known about how faith shapes the digital worlds of marginalized youth. This project works with youth as co-researchers to develop a new knowledge base that will enable more effective, faith specific digital mental health support.
Please get in touch if you would like to be involved in this research.
VITAL ARTS
Skilling young people for their futures.
Anna is currently the Lead Investigator on the ARC Linkage Project "Vital Arts".​The skills and experiences of young people in arts programs will be captured and accredited as part of a new collaborative research project funded by the Australian Research Council. “Vital Arts: Skilling young people for the future” is a joint project with researchers at RMIT, Deakin University, RMIT Vietnam, and the Australia Council for the Arts that will engage with a range of partners across the youth arts sector to build micro-credentials that recognise the employable skills developed through youth arts activities, creating new pathways to employment in COVID-19 recession. ​The project has been awarded $900,000 over three years and will partner with the Australia Council for the Arts, The Push, The Australian Theatre for Young People, the Centre for Multicultural Youth, Future Foundations, Back to Back Theatre, and Work Advance.
INTERFAITH CHILDHOODS
ARTS PRACTICE AS METHOD, URBAN SPACES AND COMMUNITY
The Interfaith Childhoods project is funded by the Australian Research Council and RMIT University as a research project that explores relationships between faith communities and develops art based methods of research and communication. The research team are running a longitudinal, transnational series (2016–2021) of workshops for children that are designed to develop reflexive and critical faith beliefs and build interfaith community relationships between parents.
MAKING, MAPPING AND MATTERING
Arts and Research-Activism for Addressing Sexual Harassment in Pre-Teen Peer Cultures
The Academy of Finland funded gender studies research project Mapping, making & mattering: Arts and research-activism for addressing sexual harassment in pre-teen peer cultures (2019-2023) will bring together arts-based, research activist and feminist new materialist and posthuman methodologies to investigate and address sexual harassment and to co-create possibilities for ethically sustainable change in the peer cultures of pre-teen children.
In collaboration with ‘multi-agency assemblages’ of artists, scholars, teachers and children, the research team will co-compose arts-based workshops for addressing and communicating experiences of sexual harassment. A children’s conference will be organized where those experiences will then continue to be shared, sensed and felt by other children, teachers, academics and decision makers so as to potentially effect processes of change.
The research will be reported for both academic and public audiences through articles, policy briefings and multimedia presentations showcasing the children’s expressions and experiences related to gendered and sexual harassment in their peer cultures.