Newcastle Youth Studies Centre Seminar Series: Lived Experiences of LGBTQ+ Religious Youth in a hostile policy landscape - Digital Media, Wellbeing, and Visual Methods

Wednesday 16 Sep 2026 from 3:00pm - Wednesday 16 Sep 2026 until 4:30pm

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Led by the School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Sciences and delivered through the Newcastle Youth Studies Centre, this webinar series brings together researchers working with young people to understand their lives and the social, cultural and economic forces shaping them. The series foregrounds youth-centred research that challenges simplistic or risk-based perspectives, presenting young people’s experiences of inequality, digital technologies, labour market change, housing and climate futures. It highlights the importance of social science research in amplifying young people’s perspectives and informing public debate, policy and practice.

Lived Experiences of LGBTQ+ Religious Youth in a Hostile Policy Landscape: Digital Media, Wellbeing, and Visual Methods presents empirical and theoretical insights from the Australian Research Council Discovery Project Youth, Religion, and Sexuality: Digital Media, School Cultures, and Exemptions. The panel features Professor Anna Hickey-Moody (Maynooth University), Dr James Gardiner (RMIT University), and Dr Taghreed Jamal Al-deen (La Trobe University), and explores how LGBTQ+ religious youth navigate the affective entanglements of gender, sexuality, and faith across institutional, digital, and everyday contexts. Drawing on arts-based digital ethnography, photovoice, participatory interviews, and visual mapping, the discussion centres emotion, attachment, and embodied experience to examine wellbeing practices, the strengths of visual methods, the spiritual and community resources drawn upon by Muslim participants, and the policy implications of religious exemptions within Australia’s state and federal anti-discrimination regimes.

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Event Information

  • Date:  Wednesday 16 September 2026 from 3:00pm - 4:30pm

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Digital Media, Wellbeing, and Visual Methods

Lived Experiences of LGBTQ+ Religious Youth in a hostile policy landscape: Digital Media, Wellbeing, and Visual Methods

This panel discussion will share the empirical and theoretical insights developed from the Australian Research Council Discover Project ‘Youth, Religion, and Sexuality: Digital Media, School Cultures, and Exemptions’. This project explores how LGBTQ+ religious youth navigate the affective entanglements of gender, sexuality, and faith within institutional, digital, and other everyday contexts. We have employed arts-based digital ethnography and photovoice methods to centre emotion, attachment, and embodied experience to understand young people’s subjectivities as well as the effects that religious exemptions from the Federal Sex-Discrimination Act have on spiritual and school cultures. The research responds to the shifting legal and cultural landscape of religious freedom in Australia, where exemptions to anti-discrimination laws justify exclusion. Through participatory interviews and visual mapping, the study foregrounds affect as both method and analytic, revealing how young people sustain themselves through moments of joy, conflict, and transformation. In this panel, we will share our findings pertaining to wellbeing practices and strategies developed by LGBTQ+ religious youth in challenging contexts, the particular strengths of visual methods and analysis in this field of inquiry, the powerful spiritual and community resources drawn upon by Muslim participants, and reflect upon the policy implications this research has on state and federal anti-discrimination regimes.

Professor Anna Hickey-Moody (Maynooth University)

Professor Anna Hickey-Moody is Director of the Arts and Humanities Institute at Maynooth University and the inaugural Senior Academic Leadership Ireland (SALI) Professor of Intersectional Humanities. A qualitative and theoretical researcher, she examines intersecting angles of disadvantage through philosophical and creative approaches, developing interdisciplinary research cultures across the humanities.

Dr James Gardiner (RMIT University)

Dr James Gardiner is a Research Associate at RMIT University and Western Sydney University whose research focuses on issues of youth wellbeing, gender and sexuality, digital media, literacy practices, and participatory, creative, and qualitative methods.

Dr Taghreed Jamal Al-deen (La Trobe University)

As a lecturer at the School of Education at La Trobe University, Taghreed’s dedication to advancing equity and social justice in education is central to both her teaching and research endeavours. Her commitment extends to cultivating culturally responsive teachers equipped to navigate diverse classrooms. Taghreed’s research journey spans various areas, including educational inequalities, neoliberalism, cultural diversity, migration, class, gender and ethnicity. More specifically, her scholarly work examines approaches geared towards promoting equity for students from refugee and migrant backgrounds in light of the current migratory and neoliberal climate, and the consequential ever-growing multiculturalism in Australia and many nations across the globe.