Imagining the Future: Young Australians on sex, love and community
Abstract
Do young Australians understand and live ‘equality’ and ‘difference’ differently from older generations? Is Australia the gender equal society that many claim it to be? How do we understand and explain growing economic inequality when our dominant ideologies are individualism and neoliberalism? What are or should be the limits of tolerance in our negotiation of cultural difference? Imagining the Future explores our contemporary complex equality narrative through the desires and dreams of 1000 young Australians and 230 of their parents from diverse backgrounds across Australia. This ‘extraordinary’ data set affords analysis of the impact of gender, socio-economic disadvantage, ethnicity, Aboriginality and sexuality on young people’s ‘imagined life stories’, or essays written about their future. An intergenerational comparison assesses how different young people really are from older generations. The book offers a compelling and subtle engagement with the sometimes ‘deeply moving’, sometimes ‘hilarious’ voices of young people to deliver insight into the challenges and complexity of gender and other social relations in early 21st Australian society.
Keywords
ethnicity; aboriginality; intergenerational comparison; socio-economic disadvantage; early 21st australian society; sexuality; social relations; gender; Adelaide; Adolescence; Female; Feminism; Middle class; Perth; Student; Working classDOI
10.1017/9781922064356ISBN
9781922064356OCN
820809840Publisher
University of Adelaide PressPublisher website
https://www.adelaide.edu.au/press/Publication date and place
2012Classification
Sociology