New methods of relationship building for community and belonging

This presentation examines the temporality and geography of religious cultures involved with my current research on Interfaith Childhoods. Drawing on data from the ARC funded Future Fellowship project on Interfaith Childhoods FT160100293, I consider my empirical observations of how the temporality of prayer, religious and 'secular' schooling, and religious festivals shapes the ways in which young people and their parents are, and are not, able to build relationships with people from religions different from their own. I examine children and their parent's responses to discussions about the geography, and temporality of their religion, alongside my own observations of the social choreography undertaken by the geographical flows and the temporality/ies of religion. I bring this discussion together with an analysis of large collaborative artworks made by the children in my project, in which they paint 'interfaith futures'. These future cities are comprised of 'what really matters' for the future in the children's minds. The children are from a range of religious and secular backgrounds and their imaginative futures depicts the possibility for religious and secular social unity which current cultures struggle to achieve.  

Bio

Anna Hickey-Moody is Professor of Media and Communications, Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Vice Chancellor's Senior Research Fellow at RMIT University, Australia. She is based in the Digital Ethnography Research Centre where she leads a team of researchers working on the Interfaith Childhoods project: https://www.interfaithchildhoods.com. Her books include The Politics of Widening Participation and University Access for Young People (Routledge, 2016), Youth, Arts and Education (Routledge, 2013), Unimaginable Bodies (Sense, 2009) and Masculinity Beyond the Metropolis (Palgrave, 2006). Anna has also edited a number of widely-cited collected works and themed journal editions.