Contemporary teenagers (Gen Z) are exposed to diversity in ways that are unprecedented, through social media, school and peers. How do they experience and understand religious, spiritual, gender and sexual diversity? How are their experiences mediated by where they go to school, their faith and their geographic location? Are they materialist, secular, religious, spiritual, or do they have hybrid identities? How religiously literate are they? How is this shaping their worldviews?
Australia’s Gen Zs: Negotiating Religion, Sexuality and Diversity provides a powerful insight into how teenagers are making sense of the world around them. Drawing on rich data from a major national study, this book creates new ways of understanding the complexity of young people’s lives and the ways they are apprehending and dealing with diversity. The book argues that school education about worldviews is founded on ways of thinking about young people that do not reflect the complexities of Gen Z’s everyday experiences of diversity and their interactions with each other.
The project’s research team is made up of four members of the SOCEY community: Professor Mary-Lou Rasmussen (ANU), Associate Professor Andrew Singleton (Deakin), Associate Professor Anna Halafoff (Deakin), and Emeritus Professor Gary D Bouma (Monash).