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This paper describes the process of engaging young people in a user centred, co-design strategy to define their perfect condom. Our aims were 1) to find a way to destigmatise discussions about sexuality and contraception and 2) to provide information about what characteristics a perfect condom might embody for adolescents. We used arts-based methods to introduce creativity and enjoyment into discussing sensitive topics related to sexual and reproductive health, which is often avoided in relation to youth and usually nuanced by themes of risk and danger. Using theories of objects becoming things through their sociality, we explored what a condom could be to young people through our method of embedding the condom design process into narratives of young people's lives and integration of these ideas into the development of a next-generation condom.

In the city of Newcastle on Australia’s east coast, murky distinctions between feral and native, public and private, domestic and wild are being delineated and firmed as the city rapidly gentrifies. The suburb of Stockton, a peninsula with deep working-class roots, has long been considered an urban frontier, a liminal zone for plants, animals and humans. Here, ferality is entangled with place, with frontier-ness. As the area undergoes changes in step with gentrification in Newcastle and coastal Australia more generally, species once tolerated are being identified as risky and then eliminated. In this article, we focus on two feral species subject to elimination in Stockton, the Thorn Tree and the Breakwater Cats. We argue that shifting nature-city boundaries impacts urban frontiers during periods of gradual, then rapid, gentrification, disrupting the relationship between frontiers and feral ecologies. Second, while literature tends to focus on feral plants or animals, we consider the ways that hardening nature-city boundaries can make both plants and animals vulnerable to elimination. Third, despite their elimination, the Thorn Tree and the Breakwater Cats are subject to memory practices in the community, suggesting that even as the urban frontier amalgamates with the rest of the city, memories of feral co-habitants remain for some members of the human community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young people form the primary target demographic of new 'buy now pay later' (BNPL) and digital credit services. Despite consistent data showing young people as a cohort are particularly vulnerable to unsustainable levels of indebtedness, little is known about how young people define and make sense of the experience of being in debt through consumer credit services. This paper explores how indebtedness is experienced and understood in relation to wellbeing through a qualitative study using interviews alongside arts-based participatory methods of bodymapping and sandboxing with 24 young people in the Hunter region of NSW, Australia. These methods enabled particular attention to the embodied and affective elements related to the experience of indebtedness to understand debt's significance for wellbeing for young people. The embodied and affective registers of indebtedness are integral for understanding the conditions informing how wellbeing is negotiated and felt in this context. This study considers the role of BNPL services in young people's economic lives as part of broader processes of financialisation, and the significance of extended and ubiquitous forms of credit for young people's wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How well do young people understand their developing sexuality and what this means? This paper reports on findings from the Our Lives: Culture, Context and Risk project, which investigated sexual behaviour and decision-making in the context of the everyday life experience and aspirations of Indigenous and non-Indigenous young people (16-25 years) in the Northern Territory, Western Australia and in South Australia. Using qualitative data, this paper focuses on what participating young people thought was necessary to improve the quality of sexuality education. Participants suggest that current forms of sexuality education are too clinical, didactic and unengaging, and are missing in relevant content. Young people requested more information on relationships, first sexual experiences and negotiating condom use. These requests indicate that young people realise that they need more knowledge in order to have healthy relationships, which conflicts with the popular belief that providing young people with open, honest information around sex will encourage them to have sex or increase sexual risk taking. Making sexuality education more of a priority and listening to the needs of young people could be a positive step towards improving sexual health and well-being.

This paper explores the aspirations of a group of young women in a remote Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory of Australia. It examines how their hopes and expectations are influenced by the reality of their everyday lives and the extent to which they are able to influence the course of their lives and become agents for change in their own communities. As with adolescents in lower socio-economic groups, the majority of young women in River Town have not developed life goals or clear strategies of how to achieve these goals. The choices that young women have are constrained by their narrow range of experience, which is characterized by early pregnancies and the potential threat of male violence. However, young women have articulated specific domains where they are able to control and structure their lives. This paper discusses the experiences of young women in this remote Aboriginal community. (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.)

In Australia, Indigenous young women are more likely to become pregnant while in their teens than non-Indigenous young women. Factors such as poverty, educational outcomes and unemployment play a major role; however, there is little understanding of the attitudes of young women themselves with regards to pregnancy. This paper explores young women's decisions regarding their sexual relationships and pregnancy in a remote Australian Aboriginal community, called River Town. It focuses on young women's motivations to pursue sexual relationships and the information about sex and male behaviour to women that informs their decision-making. "Walkin' about at night" is the term that River Town residents use to describe the nocturnal activities of adolescent females. The focus of this activity is for a young woman to find and maintain a relationship with a boy. Although it is considered by the young women to be one of the most exciting parts of their lives, it carries with it the risk of pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. Young women are very aware of the first of these risks, if not the second, as teenage pregnancy is the norm in the community. (Contains 3 notes.)