Abstracts of all papers presented at the symposium are available here and appear in the order of scheduled presentations for Monday November 3rd and Tuesday November 4th. All presentations to be held in Room 2204, 2nd floor, South Social Sciences Building, UWA (Crawley Campus).
Life on the move: mobilities in the global age
Monday, Session 1, 9-10:30am
Professor Anthony Elliott, Director, Hawke Research Institute, University of South Australia
This presentation documents various patterns of mobilities, from automobilities to aeromobilities, and argues that the twenty-first century inaugurates a world where women and men are travelling further, faster and more frequently than in any time in human history. Mobilities, both voluntary and involuntary, are at the core of the global electronic economy, and pose huge challenges both for citizens and governments. The presentation sheds fresh light on the complex interconnections between extensive, hugely contested mobility systems on the one hand, and the advent of what Elliott terms “mobile lives” on the other. The final part of the presentation situates mobilities in the context of global futures, and reviews social science literature and social policy in terms of our possible (im)mobile futures.
Anthony Elliott is Director of the Hawke Research Institute, where he is Research Professor of Sociology at the University of South Australia. He is also currently Visiting Professor of Sociology at the Open University UK, and Visiting Professor of Sociology at University College Dublin, Ireland. From 2014 he will be Visiting Fellow at the Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin, and in summer 2014 he will hold a Visiting Professorship at the Graduate School of Human Relations, Keio University, Japan. Professor Elliott is a prominent social theorist, sociologist and public intellectual. He is the author and editor of some thirty-five books, which have been translated or are forthcoming in a dozen languages. His books include Social Theory and Psychoanalysis in Transition, Psychoanalytic Theory: An Introduction, Subject To Ourselves, The Mourning of John Lennon, Critical Visions, Social Theory Since Freud, The New Individualism (with Charles Lemert), Making The Cut: How Cosmetic Surgery is Transforming Our Lives, Mobile Lives (with John Urry), On Society (with Bryan S. Turner), Contemporary Social Theory: An Introduction, and Reinvention. He is best known for Concepts of the Self. Professor Elliott is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
Living in “the World of the Locally Tied”: Youth Mobilities and Immobilities in the Multicultural Neighbourhood
Monday, Session 2, 11:00-12:30
Assoc Professor Anita Harris, Monash University
Monday, Session 1, 9-10:30am
Professor Anthony Elliott, Director, Hawke Research Institute, University of South Australia
This presentation documents various patterns of mobilities, from automobilities to aeromobilities, and argues that the twenty-first century inaugurates a world where women and men are travelling further, faster and more frequently than in any time in human history. Mobilities, both voluntary and involuntary, are at the core of the global electronic economy, and pose huge challenges both for citizens and governments. The presentation sheds fresh light on the complex interconnections between extensive, hugely contested mobility systems on the one hand, and the advent of what Elliott terms “mobile lives” on the other. The final part of the presentation situates mobilities in the context of global futures, and reviews social science literature and social policy in terms of our possible (im)mobile futures.
Anthony Elliott is Director of the Hawke Research Institute, where he is Research Professor of Sociology at the University of South Australia. He is also currently Visiting Professor of Sociology at the Open University UK, and Visiting Professor of Sociology at University College Dublin, Ireland. From 2014 he will be Visiting Fellow at the Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin, and in summer 2014 he will hold a Visiting Professorship at the Graduate School of Human Relations, Keio University, Japan. Professor Elliott is a prominent social theorist, sociologist and public intellectual. He is the author and editor of some thirty-five books, which have been translated or are forthcoming in a dozen languages. His books include Social Theory and Psychoanalysis in Transition, Psychoanalytic Theory: An Introduction, Subject To Ourselves, The Mourning of John Lennon, Critical Visions, Social Theory Since Freud, The New Individualism (with Charles Lemert), Making The Cut: How Cosmetic Surgery is Transforming Our Lives, Mobile Lives (with John Urry), On Society (with Bryan S. Turner), Contemporary Social Theory: An Introduction, and Reinvention. He is best known for Concepts of the Self. Professor Elliott is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
Monday, Session 2, 11:00-12:30
Assoc Professor Anita Harris, Monash University
Young people who live in the most culturally mixed neighbourhoods of Australia’s cities are often at the frontline of new migration flows and the local handling of rapid change. Local place is critical in the lives of young people as the key site of contestation over inclusion and where belonging is first and most deeply enacted. While much is made of youth as the new globally mobile cosmopolitans, many are living in ‘the world of the locally tied’ (Bauman:1998:88): amongst those least likely to have access to opportunities for enabling kinds of movements and the cultivation of open dispositions, and yet are managing the effects of migration every day. This paper explores how disadvantaged young people manage the effects of mobilities and immobilities within multicultural Australian neighbourhoods in order to create productive intercultural relations. The paper suggests that young people's situatedness (and sometimes stuckness) in the local needs to be better accounted for in debates about multicultural citizenship and cosmopolitanism under conditions of globalisation and diversity.
Anita Harris is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Monash University and researches in the area of youth identities, cultures and citizenship in changing times. She currently holds an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship for a research program on ‘Young People and Social Inclusion in the Multicultural City’, which investigates young people’s intercultural relations and participatory practices in culturally diverse places across Australia, Italy, Malaysia and South Africa, and is also undertaking an ARC Discovery project on ‘The Civic Life of Young Muslim Australians’. She is the author/editor of several books in youth studies and girls’ studies, notably Young People and Everyday Multiculturalism (2013), Next Wave Cultures: Feminism, Subcultures, Activism (ed) (2008), Future Girl (2004), and All About the Girl (ed) (2004) (all through Routledge New York).
From puberty to ‘jihad’ – the mix-wired process of (un)becoming Australian
Monday, Session 2, 11:00-12:30
Dr Andrzej Gwizdalski, University of Western Australia
Anita Harris is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Monash University and researches in the area of youth identities, cultures and citizenship in changing times. She currently holds an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship for a research program on ‘Young People and Social Inclusion in the Multicultural City’, which investigates young people’s intercultural relations and participatory practices in culturally diverse places across Australia, Italy, Malaysia and South Africa, and is also undertaking an ARC Discovery project on ‘The Civic Life of Young Muslim Australians’. She is the author/editor of several books in youth studies and girls’ studies, notably Young People and Everyday Multiculturalism (2013), Next Wave Cultures: Feminism, Subcultures, Activism (ed) (2008), Future Girl (2004), and All About the Girl (ed) (2004) (all through Routledge New York).
Monday, Session 2, 11:00-12:30
Dr Andrzej Gwizdalski, University of Western Australia
This paper explores the impact of cognitive developmental processes and experiential environmental factors on ethno belonging to Australian society among young migrants. The study examines the decisive factors of becoming and ‘unbecoming’ (‘being rejected’) a member of broader Australian culture around two critical developmental periods: early and late adolescence. Building on previous research projects conducted over the last three years, this study involves first-generation Karen youth of refugee-background and ethnically diverse second-generation youth of Islamic faith. Various research methods, including individual and focus groups interviews, long-term community ethnography and qualitative media content analysis are employed. While the results support the popular view that various external factors shape migrants’ experience of (un)becoming Australian, they also underscore the significant influence of cognitive developmental processes on adolescents’ sense of belonging. The study calls for a stronger interdisciplinary integration of research on the study of migration.
Andrzej Gwizdalski is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Social Sciences at UWA. He conducts interdisciplinary research in the areas of globalisation, media and communication and development studies. His research deals with migration and ethnic identity, ethnographies of refugees in Australia, multiculturalism and media representations, visual communication, global culture and most recently artificial intelligence and identity. Andrzej’s research is collaborative and involves a network of scholars, NGOs, governmental bodies and communities across Australia and overseas. Andrzej is an award-winning teacher leading the way in the use of innovative technologies at UWA.
Resettling Refugees: precarity across the lifecourse
Monday, Session 2, 11:00-12:30
Associate Professor Farida Fozdar, University of Western Australia
This paper considers the experiences of refugees settling in Australia using a life course approach. Extending the notion of precarity, it argues that the ontological insecurity produced by the refugee experience complexly imbricates with structural aspects of Australian life and personal resources to generate differential outcomes. Using Judith Butler’s application of Levinas and his notion of ‘face’ the paper attempts to make real the experiences of settling refugees of different ages and life stages by giving them voice – through the use of direct quotations from a range of research projects, and images from a photovoice exercise. A particular focus is on issues for young people, and for families, particularly around employment and gender relations.
Farida Fozdar is Associate Professor in Anthropology and Sociology, at The University of Western Australia. After holding a position at Murdoch University for 8 years, she took up an ARC Future Fellowship at UWA in 2011, exploring national, transnational and postnational identities. Her research focuses on race relations and migration settlement issues, racism, citizenship and nationalism, and issues to do with refugees and asylum seekers. She has undertaken a range of research projects including topics such as refugees and employment; refugees and mental health; settlement issues for migrants generally; integration of asylum seekers in regional Australia; cross cultural interaction in educational settings; social exclusion of Muslims; Christianity in the public sphere; housing and refugees; the use of flags on cars for Australia Day; and issues of social cohesion and citizenship more broadly. She has also undertaken practical research including developing a cultural awareness tool for health professionals and developing a package on career and training options for new migrants and refugee young people; and evaluations of migrant settlement programs. Farida has published widely including 3 books and over 60 chapters or journal articles, as well as authoring reports to government and research consultancies.
MOOCs and the internationalisation of education in Timor-Leste: Learning to learn? Learning to stay
Monday, Session 3, 1:30-2:30 Postgraduate presentations
PhD Candidate, Monty King, University of Western Australia
The internationalisation of education has created limited opportunities for students in developing countries to study in Western universities, and scholarship places are often massively oversubscribed. In the case of Timor-Leste some of the most sought after scholarships are the Australia Awards, which were given to 35 students in 2014 for under or postgraduate study. Although the awards aim to provide opportunities for social mobility, in reality they often reinforce the status of the new elite which has developed since independence. The pedagogical innovations of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) could offer an alternate means of internationalising education for countries like Timor-Leste. My PhD project proposes to create open online resources to help Timorese students develop their digital literacy and English language skills. By accessing online education in country, this would create opportunities for larger student cohorts to become socially mobile without leaving the country.
Teacher mobility and belonging: Professional socialisation through migrant teacher networks
Monday, Session 3, 1:30-2:30 Postgraduate presentations
PhD Candidate, Katharina Bense, University of Western Australia, Department of European Languages/German Studies
Within the current climate of globalisation, there is a growing trend of international mobility and migration of educational professionals. However, research consistently reports of challenges for migrant teachers during theirprofessional acculturation. This presentation introduces migrant teacher networks as a new model in teacher education by drawing on a case study of a state-funded migrant teacher network in Germany. Using narrative interviews with network members and staff as well as direct observation, the study examined the concept of migrant teacher networks and their potential to assist migrant teachers’ professional transition. The study provides insights into the organisational structure and activities of the network, as well as illustrates how participation in a network can have a significant effect on migrant teachers’ sense of belonging. It concludes that, by providing a medium for interaction and exchange migrant teacher networks are able to support migrant teachers’ professional socialisation, consequently facilitating a successful professional integration.
Overheating liquid modernity: Fly-in fly-out migrant workers in Australia’s resources industry.
Monday, Session 3, 1:30-2:30 Postgraduate presentations
PhD Candidate, Marc Schmidlin, University of Western Australia
In Western Australia’s resources industry, highly skilled, casual fly-in fly-out migrant workers on temporary work permits experience unprecedented levels of mobility and precariousness. Zygmunt Bauman suggested 14 years ago that ‘we’ live now in liquid modernity where processes of globalisation lead to individualisation. If this is true, hyper-mobile migrant workers are now living in a highly intensified liquid modernity. I suggest that they experience a new social condition in late modernity - a frantic, relentless, overheated liquid modernity - which could be better described as vaporised modernity where little is tangible and mobility is pushed to new extremes.
Immobilities: Cycling Habitus in Australia - Restrictions on MovementMonday, Session 3, 1:30-2:30 Postgraduate presentations
PhD Candidate, Oliver Laing, University of Western Australia
According to Kuipers, governments or companies do not enforce national cycling cultures. Indeed, in Australia default transportation choices emphasising cars place restrictions on cyclists, and those interested in active transportation. Automobility relies on broad societal consent to maintain legitimacy, yet transportation policy failures and congestion erode support and spur interest in cycling. The concept of national habitus suggests that institutions, physical conditions, value orientations and people’s behavior all shape preferences — habitus formation is a dynamic social process. Existing cycle-promotion strategies encourage specific demographics in certain circumstances. However, both infrastructure and social mores currently restrict cycling from making a substantial contribution to the mode-share of Australian transportation. The burgeoning policy discourse on liveable cities will remain rhetorical in Australia until political support shifts away from the car-centric street. Until such a time, the development of an everyday, widespread Australian cycling habitus shall be restricted, both figuratively and practically.
Moving to Australia, a place of ‘vibrant multiculturalism’
Monday, Session 3, 1:30-2:30 Postgraduate presentations
PhD Candidate, Maki Meyer, University of Western Australia
In August 2014, the Economist Intelligence Unit's liveability survey of 140 cities reported that four of the best cities to live in in the world were in Australia. One of the reasons Melbourne was chosen as the top city is that people enjoy ‘vibrant multiculturalism’, according to the report. This resonates with what many of the migrant parents of intercultural/interracial family in my PhD research pointed out – that one of their major reasons for moving to Australia was because it is a good place to live and raise children. My research explores negotiations of cultural identity within intercultural/interracial migrant families in Australia. Part of my thesis deals with the influence of social structure such as multicultural policy. This paper examines one life-course aspect of such families, specifically the parents’ perspective on their motivations to move to Australia. Through analysis of the interviews with the parents, it explores the complex processes different families have gone through and the possible connection between these and social policies.
Imagining Home & Constructing Identity: Transnationalism & Diaspora amongst Filipinos
Andrzej Gwizdalski is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Social Sciences at UWA. He conducts interdisciplinary research in the areas of globalisation, media and communication and development studies. His research deals with migration and ethnic identity, ethnographies of refugees in Australia, multiculturalism and media representations, visual communication, global culture and most recently artificial intelligence and identity. Andrzej’s research is collaborative and involves a network of scholars, NGOs, governmental bodies and communities across Australia and overseas. Andrzej is an award-winning teacher leading the way in the use of innovative technologies at UWA.
Resettling Refugees: precarity across the lifecourse
Monday, Session 2, 11:00-12:30
Associate Professor Farida Fozdar, University of Western Australia
This paper considers the experiences of refugees settling in Australia using a life course approach. Extending the notion of precarity, it argues that the ontological insecurity produced by the refugee experience complexly imbricates with structural aspects of Australian life and personal resources to generate differential outcomes. Using Judith Butler’s application of Levinas and his notion of ‘face’ the paper attempts to make real the experiences of settling refugees of different ages and life stages by giving them voice – through the use of direct quotations from a range of research projects, and images from a photovoice exercise. A particular focus is on issues for young people, and for families, particularly around employment and gender relations.
Farida Fozdar is Associate Professor in Anthropology and Sociology, at The University of Western Australia. After holding a position at Murdoch University for 8 years, she took up an ARC Future Fellowship at UWA in 2011, exploring national, transnational and postnational identities. Her research focuses on race relations and migration settlement issues, racism, citizenship and nationalism, and issues to do with refugees and asylum seekers. She has undertaken a range of research projects including topics such as refugees and employment; refugees and mental health; settlement issues for migrants generally; integration of asylum seekers in regional Australia; cross cultural interaction in educational settings; social exclusion of Muslims; Christianity in the public sphere; housing and refugees; the use of flags on cars for Australia Day; and issues of social cohesion and citizenship more broadly. She has also undertaken practical research including developing a cultural awareness tool for health professionals and developing a package on career and training options for new migrants and refugee young people; and evaluations of migrant settlement programs. Farida has published widely including 3 books and over 60 chapters or journal articles, as well as authoring reports to government and research consultancies.
MOOCs and the internationalisation of education in Timor-Leste: Learning to learn? Learning to stay
Monday, Session 3, 1:30-2:30 Postgraduate presentations
PhD Candidate, Monty King, University of Western Australia
The internationalisation of education has created limited opportunities for students in developing countries to study in Western universities, and scholarship places are often massively oversubscribed. In the case of Timor-Leste some of the most sought after scholarships are the Australia Awards, which were given to 35 students in 2014 for under or postgraduate study. Although the awards aim to provide opportunities for social mobility, in reality they often reinforce the status of the new elite which has developed since independence. The pedagogical innovations of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) could offer an alternate means of internationalising education for countries like Timor-Leste. My PhD project proposes to create open online resources to help Timorese students develop their digital literacy and English language skills. By accessing online education in country, this would create opportunities for larger student cohorts to become socially mobile without leaving the country.
Teacher mobility and belonging: Professional socialisation through migrant teacher networks
Monday, Session 3, 1:30-2:30 Postgraduate presentations
PhD Candidate, Katharina Bense, University of Western Australia, Department of European Languages/German Studies
Within the current climate of globalisation, there is a growing trend of international mobility and migration of educational professionals. However, research consistently reports of challenges for migrant teachers during theirprofessional acculturation. This presentation introduces migrant teacher networks as a new model in teacher education by drawing on a case study of a state-funded migrant teacher network in Germany. Using narrative interviews with network members and staff as well as direct observation, the study examined the concept of migrant teacher networks and their potential to assist migrant teachers’ professional transition. The study provides insights into the organisational structure and activities of the network, as well as illustrates how participation in a network can have a significant effect on migrant teachers’ sense of belonging. It concludes that, by providing a medium for interaction and exchange migrant teacher networks are able to support migrant teachers’ professional socialisation, consequently facilitating a successful professional integration.
Overheating liquid modernity: Fly-in fly-out migrant workers in Australia’s resources industry.
Monday, Session 3, 1:30-2:30 Postgraduate presentations
PhD Candidate, Marc Schmidlin, University of Western Australia
In Western Australia’s resources industry, highly skilled, casual fly-in fly-out migrant workers on temporary work permits experience unprecedented levels of mobility and precariousness. Zygmunt Bauman suggested 14 years ago that ‘we’ live now in liquid modernity where processes of globalisation lead to individualisation. If this is true, hyper-mobile migrant workers are now living in a highly intensified liquid modernity. I suggest that they experience a new social condition in late modernity - a frantic, relentless, overheated liquid modernity - which could be better described as vaporised modernity where little is tangible and mobility is pushed to new extremes.
Immobilities: Cycling Habitus in Australia - Restrictions on MovementMonday, Session 3, 1:30-2:30 Postgraduate presentations
PhD Candidate, Oliver Laing, University of Western Australia
According to Kuipers, governments or companies do not enforce national cycling cultures. Indeed, in Australia default transportation choices emphasising cars place restrictions on cyclists, and those interested in active transportation. Automobility relies on broad societal consent to maintain legitimacy, yet transportation policy failures and congestion erode support and spur interest in cycling. The concept of national habitus suggests that institutions, physical conditions, value orientations and people’s behavior all shape preferences — habitus formation is a dynamic social process. Existing cycle-promotion strategies encourage specific demographics in certain circumstances. However, both infrastructure and social mores currently restrict cycling from making a substantial contribution to the mode-share of Australian transportation. The burgeoning policy discourse on liveable cities will remain rhetorical in Australia until political support shifts away from the car-centric street. Until such a time, the development of an everyday, widespread Australian cycling habitus shall be restricted, both figuratively and practically.
Moving to Australia, a place of ‘vibrant multiculturalism’
Monday, Session 3, 1:30-2:30 Postgraduate presentations
PhD Candidate, Maki Meyer, University of Western Australia
In August 2014, the Economist Intelligence Unit's liveability survey of 140 cities reported that four of the best cities to live in in the world were in Australia. One of the reasons Melbourne was chosen as the top city is that people enjoy ‘vibrant multiculturalism’, according to the report. This resonates with what many of the migrant parents of intercultural/interracial family in my PhD research pointed out – that one of their major reasons for moving to Australia was because it is a good place to live and raise children. My research explores negotiations of cultural identity within intercultural/interracial migrant families in Australia. Part of my thesis deals with the influence of social structure such as multicultural policy. This paper examines one life-course aspect of such families, specifically the parents’ perspective on their motivations to move to Australia. Through analysis of the interviews with the parents, it explores the complex processes different families have gone through and the possible connection between these and social policies.
Imagining Home & Constructing Identity: Transnationalism & Diaspora amongst Filipinos
Monday, Session 3, 1:30-2:30 Postgraduate presentations
PhD Candidate, Charmaine Lim, University of Western Australia
As Basch, Glick Schiller and Blanc have argued, “those who must live across borders may come to see themselves as perpetually unauthentic” (1994: 242). The ethnic and racial diversity of the Philippines, along with its history of colonisation and global participation, means that the implications for belonging become pluralised. As factors such as language, ethnicity, race and class coexist and intersect within the individual in the Philippines, one may consider the implications for those who choose to settle in another country. A further complication arise from the dispersal of kinship networks. What happens when the family becomes dispersed, driven by global, macroeconomic and local factors? I argue that diaspora is a suitable framework and approach in the exploration of home, belonging and identity amongst Filipino migrants in Australia, due to the pluralised context of the Philippines and the diversity of Filipino emigration and immigration flows.
Postcoloniality, mobile cultures and the politics of Indigenous mobilities in Australia
Monday, Session 4, 3:30-4:30
Assoc Professor Sarah Prout, University of Western Australia
The recent ‘mobility turn’ in the social sciences has emphasised the increasing and variously scaled and enacted nature of movement in our modern world. Postcolonial scholars interested in such movements have been particularly attentive to the often dueling dynamics of nation-building and diasporic identities and practices that emerge from increasing human movement. Such dynamics have direct relevance to, and rich application in, postcolonial nations such as Australia. However, one of the surprising absences from this considerable and rapidly growing literature is a focus on ‘mobile cultures’: those ethnic minorities whose epistemologies and socio-cultural and economic realities have historically been directly underpinned by deliberate, seasonal, territorial movement. In particular there have been few attempts to - both geographically and intellectually - situate the experience of mobile cultures within the context of modern nation states grappling with the issues of national identity, border management and security, and multiculturalism, that inevitably follow from modern mobility practices. Such mobile cultures include nomadic pastoralists, and hunter-gatherer based societies such as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This paper firstly explores the utility of the distinction between ‘Indigenous’ and non-Indigenous’ Australians in our contemporary postcolonial reality. It then outlines and unpacks the policy implications of four persistent frameworks that are often discursively applied to contemporary Indigenous mobility practices in Australia by the modern nation state.
PhD Candidate, Charmaine Lim, University of Western Australia
As Basch, Glick Schiller and Blanc have argued, “those who must live across borders may come to see themselves as perpetually unauthentic” (1994: 242). The ethnic and racial diversity of the Philippines, along with its history of colonisation and global participation, means that the implications for belonging become pluralised. As factors such as language, ethnicity, race and class coexist and intersect within the individual in the Philippines, one may consider the implications for those who choose to settle in another country. A further complication arise from the dispersal of kinship networks. What happens when the family becomes dispersed, driven by global, macroeconomic and local factors? I argue that diaspora is a suitable framework and approach in the exploration of home, belonging and identity amongst Filipino migrants in Australia, due to the pluralised context of the Philippines and the diversity of Filipino emigration and immigration flows.
Postcoloniality, mobile cultures and the politics of Indigenous mobilities in Australia
Monday, Session 4, 3:30-4:30
Assoc Professor Sarah Prout, University of Western Australia
The recent ‘mobility turn’ in the social sciences has emphasised the increasing and variously scaled and enacted nature of movement in our modern world. Postcolonial scholars interested in such movements have been particularly attentive to the often dueling dynamics of nation-building and diasporic identities and practices that emerge from increasing human movement. Such dynamics have direct relevance to, and rich application in, postcolonial nations such as Australia. However, one of the surprising absences from this considerable and rapidly growing literature is a focus on ‘mobile cultures’: those ethnic minorities whose epistemologies and socio-cultural and economic realities have historically been directly underpinned by deliberate, seasonal, territorial movement. In particular there have been few attempts to - both geographically and intellectually - situate the experience of mobile cultures within the context of modern nation states grappling with the issues of national identity, border management and security, and multiculturalism, that inevitably follow from modern mobility practices. Such mobile cultures include nomadic pastoralists, and hunter-gatherer based societies such as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This paper firstly explores the utility of the distinction between ‘Indigenous’ and non-Indigenous’ Australians in our contemporary postcolonial reality. It then outlines and unpacks the policy implications of four persistent frameworks that are often discursively applied to contemporary Indigenous mobility practices in Australia by the modern nation state.
Sarah is a Human Geographer whose research expertise concerns the socio-spatial dimensions, and social policy implications, of Indigenous temporary population mobility practices in Australia and other settler-states. In her previous appointment at the Australian National University¹s Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR) Sarah worked on a national Indigenous demography project that engaged directly with Federal and State social policy agencies to develop better understandings (quantitatively and qualitatively) of Indigenous mobility practices). She also works with local Indigenous communities and organisations on applied policy research. She currently teaches in Social Geography and Development Studies at the University of Western and continues to develop her research agenda on Indigenous social demography and policy through local, national and international collaborations.
Conceptualising work and belonging of temporary skilled labour migrants (Visa 457) in Australia
Monday, Session 4, 3:30-4:30
Assoc Professor Donella Caspersz, University of Western Australia
A close connection between immigration selection and labour market matters has traditionally existed in Australian public policy. While operating on a settler model, it has been the case that since the mid-1990s, industry demands for labour market flexibility have led to a shift in the emphasis of selection policies towards temporary work visas. This re-orientation was accompanied by changes in labour market regulation, which provided greater scope for employers to use temporary migrant workers to make cost-savings. These policy shifts coincided with an emerging public discourse around the issue of labour migration. While this initially targeted changes to the status of temporary migrant workers to be on par with that of local workers (including the availability for temporary labour migrants to secure permanent residency); increasingly hostile public attitudes towards government immigration policy (as measured by opinion polls) motivated by concerns about the effects of temporary labour migrants on work opportunities for the broader community have since emerged. The trade union movement, which in recent decades has supported or remained neutral towards labour immigration policies, has become prominent in this negative discourse.
A close connection between immigration selection and labour market matters has traditionally existed in Australian public policy. While operating on a settler model, it has been the case that since the mid-1990s, industry demands for labour market flexibility have led to a shift in the emphasis of selection policies towards temporary work visas. This re-orientation was accompanied by changes in labour market regulation, which provided greater scope for employers to use temporary migrant workers to make cost-savings. These policy shifts coincided with an emerging public discourse around the issue of labour migration. While this initially targeted changes to the status of temporary migrant workers to be on par with that of local workers (including the availability for temporary labour migrants to secure permanent residency); increasingly hostile public attitudes towards government immigration policy (as measured by opinion polls) motivated by concerns about the effects of temporary labour migrants on work opportunities for the broader community have since emerged. The trade union movement, which in recent decades has supported or remained neutral towards labour immigration policies, has become prominent in this negative discourse.
The aim of this paper is to review recent policy developments to explore two questions. The first is how is the work of temporary skilled labour migrants in Australia conceptualised? Using Schmidt’s (2008) concept of discursive institutionalism (2008), which is described as the ‘turn to ideas and discourse’ to both understand and untangle events, it is suggested that three waves of conceptualisation of the work of skilled temporary labour migrants can be noted: the pursuit of an exclusionary approach that emphasised temporariness from the period 1996-2007, an emphasis on ‘inclusion’ during the period 2007-2012 that tantalized Visa 457 workers with the opportunity to attain ‘permanence’ of residency in Australia, and a return to an exclusionary phase from 2010 onwards, which while not reneging on the opportunity of permanency, has shifted the discourse away from temporariness of Visa 457 work to that of being viewed as a ‘gap filler’ to meet production needs in key industry sectors, which demographic and skill deficits have prevented domestic labour from being able to meet.
However, the paper further focuses around a second question, which is how do these conceptualisations of their work influence the lived experience of Visa 457 workers in Australia? To present this discussion the paper draws on semi-structured interviews with Visa 457 workers. It is suggested that the re-affirmation of ‘temporariness’ or the conceptualisation of their work as a ‘gap filler’ to mainstream domestic labour market supply in more recent times in Australia reinforces the view in workers themselves of belonging to the Other. This holds implications not just for workers themselves, but broader issues related to work in Australia.
References
Schmidt, V (2008) Discursive Institutionalism: The Explanatory Power of Ideas and Discourse. Annual Review of Political Science. 11: 306-26.
Donella Caspersz is in the Management & Organisations discipline at the UWA Business School. Donella¹s research is in service-learning, family business and temporary labour migration. Donella is a reviewer for journals, member of academic conference groups and attends conferences relevant to these areas.
The importance of mobility for young people’s transition regimes: the situation of young people living in Australia’s rural areas
However, the paper further focuses around a second question, which is how do these conceptualisations of their work influence the lived experience of Visa 457 workers in Australia? To present this discussion the paper draws on semi-structured interviews with Visa 457 workers. It is suggested that the re-affirmation of ‘temporariness’ or the conceptualisation of their work as a ‘gap filler’ to mainstream domestic labour market supply in more recent times in Australia reinforces the view in workers themselves of belonging to the Other. This holds implications not just for workers themselves, but broader issues related to work in Australia.
References
Schmidt, V (2008) Discursive Institutionalism: The Explanatory Power of Ideas and Discourse. Annual Review of Political Science. 11: 306-26.
Donella Caspersz is in the Management & Organisations discipline at the UWA Business School. Donella¹s research is in service-learning, family business and temporary labour migration. Donella is a reviewer for journals, member of academic conference groups and attends conferences relevant to these areas.
The importance of mobility for young people’s transition regimes: the situation of young people living in Australia’s rural areas
Tuesday, Session 5, 9:30-10:30
Professor Johanna Wyn, Director of the Youth Research Centre at the University of Melbourne
Johanna Wyn’s presentation explores the global emergence of ‘transition regimes’ for young people, involving the widespread investment in post-secondary education. Accessing education and using educational credentials in (increasingly urbanised and global labour markets) has meant that geographic mobility has become a feature of youth transitions. This presentation focuses on the impact of these developments on the lives of young people in rural areas in Australia. In the past, normative concepts of transition have focused on urban-based lives and obscured the significance of young people’s relationship to places and people and the ways in these elements are implicated in decisions about education, employment and residence. The focus on urban lives has tended to foster a stereotype of rural settings as backward and disadvantaged. Drawing on the Youth Research Centre’s longitudinal studies of young people, focusing on those living in rural settings, Wyn analyses how belonging is about mobility (and the capacity to be mobile); about the everyday practices that demonstrate connectedness to place; and about identity and new forms of collective identity. The concept of belonging provides a frame for understanding the constraints and possibilities taken up by young people, the trajectories that they forge, and the strategies that they use to build their lives, beyond the urban/rural dichotomy.
Mining Dispositions: Emergent Adulthood and the Sociology of Choice in a Resource Boomtown
Tuesday, Session 6, 11:00-12:30
Assoc Professor Martin Forsey, University of Western Australia
Late modernity heightens interest in the transitions out of school into the worlds of further education or work. Reflecting on decision-making processes undertaken by young people in Karratha, a booming resource town in the North West of Western Australia, I draw on Arnett’s (2000) well-known and much debated term ‘emerging adulthood’ as a means of comprehending the choices made by persons who were in their late teens when the fieldwork for this study was conducted. The individuals in the spotlight here are at a point in their lives where they are exploring a variety of possible futures, when at least some different directions are possible and ‘the scope of independent exploration of life's possibilities is greater ... than it will be at any other period of the life course’ (p.469). The preponderance of blue-collar affluence in Karratha, creates interesting dilemmas for those exploring their possible futures, quandaries that form the basis for sociological considerations of life-choices among emerging adults in late modern Australia.
Professor Johanna Wyn, Director of the Youth Research Centre at the University of Melbourne
Johanna Wyn’s presentation explores the global emergence of ‘transition regimes’ for young people, involving the widespread investment in post-secondary education. Accessing education and using educational credentials in (increasingly urbanised and global labour markets) has meant that geographic mobility has become a feature of youth transitions. This presentation focuses on the impact of these developments on the lives of young people in rural areas in Australia. In the past, normative concepts of transition have focused on urban-based lives and obscured the significance of young people’s relationship to places and people and the ways in these elements are implicated in decisions about education, employment and residence. The focus on urban lives has tended to foster a stereotype of rural settings as backward and disadvantaged. Drawing on the Youth Research Centre’s longitudinal studies of young people, focusing on those living in rural settings, Wyn analyses how belonging is about mobility (and the capacity to be mobile); about the everyday practices that demonstrate connectedness to place; and about identity and new forms of collective identity. The concept of belonging provides a frame for understanding the constraints and possibilities taken up by young people, the trajectories that they forge, and the strategies that they use to build their lives, beyond the urban/rural dichotomy.
Johanna Wyn is Director of the Youth Research Centre, University of Melbourne. Professor Wyn specialises in longitudinal research on young people, documenting their transitions across the dimensions of education, work, wellbeing, relationships and family life. Her research is policy-focused and she is interested in developing new research and policy approaches to chronic patterns of disadvantage amongst youth.
Mining Dispositions: Emergent Adulthood and the Sociology of Choice in a Resource Boomtown
Tuesday, Session 6, 11:00-12:30
Assoc Professor Martin Forsey, University of Western Australia
Late modernity heightens interest in the transitions out of school into the worlds of further education or work. Reflecting on decision-making processes undertaken by young people in Karratha, a booming resource town in the North West of Western Australia, I draw on Arnett’s (2000) well-known and much debated term ‘emerging adulthood’ as a means of comprehending the choices made by persons who were in their late teens when the fieldwork for this study was conducted. The individuals in the spotlight here are at a point in their lives where they are exploring a variety of possible futures, when at least some different directions are possible and ‘the scope of independent exploration of life's possibilities is greater ... than it will be at any other period of the life course’ (p.469). The preponderance of blue-collar affluence in Karratha, creates interesting dilemmas for those exploring their possible futures, quandaries that form the basis for sociological considerations of life-choices among emerging adults in late modern Australia.
Martin Forsey is an anthropologist/sociologist at the University of Western Australia where he teaches units in Australian studies, as well as introductory classes. His research has focused mainly on schooling and he has published work on neoliberal reform, school choice and supplementary education. He also researches and writes about qualitative research methods. Recent interest in mobility studies has generated research and writing on mobile modernities and the impact of educational opportunity family decision making. Cross-disciplinary work with historians on the social shaping of “The good parent” is about to take on a whole new meaning as Martin prepares to become a Dad for the first time.
‘Dar Said Orl Acklan Kam Fram…?’ Circular migration and emplacement from afar among mainland-resident Norfolk Islanders
Tuesday, Session 6, 11:00-12:30
Dr Mitchell Low, University of Western Australia
Since at least the turn of the 20th Century, generations of Norfolk Islanders have made the journey to live in Australia for the purposes of education, work and family, visiting Norfolk during holidays, and (often) returning to live in later life. These practices of circular migration raise questions concerning the bases of belonging to Norfolk for mainland and island-dwelling Norfolk Islanders alike; such belonging has historically been ascribed at birth according to genealogical connection to the original Pitcairn settlers to the island, but is challenged by long-time residents not connected to this founding group. Using an ethnographic account of the contradictions generated by a deterritorialised commemoration of emplacement, this I examine contemporary reconfigurations of belonging and the meaning of Pitcairn descent among Norfolk Island young people in the context of a life split between island and mainland.
Tuesday, Session 6, 11:00-12:30
Dr Mitchell Low, University of Western Australia
Since at least the turn of the 20th Century, generations of Norfolk Islanders have made the journey to live in Australia for the purposes of education, work and family, visiting Norfolk during holidays, and (often) returning to live in later life. These practices of circular migration raise questions concerning the bases of belonging to Norfolk for mainland and island-dwelling Norfolk Islanders alike; such belonging has historically been ascribed at birth according to genealogical connection to the original Pitcairn settlers to the island, but is challenged by long-time residents not connected to this founding group. Using an ethnographic account of the contradictions generated by a deterritorialised commemoration of emplacement, this I examine contemporary reconfigurations of belonging and the meaning of Pitcairn descent among Norfolk Island young people in the context of a life split between island and mainland.
Mitchell Low is a social anthropologist at the University of Western Australia. He is interested in migrant belonging, place-making and place attachment, identity politics, and social responses to community resettlement in the Pacific region. His current research interests include understanding native and settler statuses on Norfolk Island, geographic imaginaries among study-abroad students, and the student reception of new online teaching technologies.
Aging, death and dying in a mobile world
Tuesday, Session 6, 11:00-12:30
Professor Loretta Baldassar, University of Western Australia
This paper examines the crisis of acute and chronic illness, death and dying in transnational families. These are the stages in the family life course when physical co-presence is required to deliver hands-on care and intimate emotional support for the sick family member. It is a time when distant kin feel they need 'to be there', including for their own sense of well-being. This period of 'crisis’ (in the anthropological sense) makes visible all of the impediments to transnational family caregiving that often remain hidden during those periods when ‘routine’ forms of distant care are adequate. Of particular relevance are the macro-level factors generated by national borders and the policies that define them, including those that govern employment, travel, visa, health and aged care provisions. It is in these family life phases of crisis that nation-state structures can work to constrain individual agency and rights, making compellingly evident the growing need for transnational structures and policy. At issue are the largely invisible (in a policy sense) but increasingly common micro-level responses of family and individuals that characterize ‘crisis distant care’, which are characterized by the urgent need to visit and to intensify use of ICTs. The paper examines the experiences of migrants living in Australia who are trying to care for acutely unwell family members abroad.
Loretta Baldassar is Discipline Chair of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Western Australia and Research Fellow at Monash University. Loretta has published extensively on migration and settlement issues with a particular focus on ageing, the second generation and the social uses of new communication technologies. Her most recent works include, Transnational Families, Migration and the Circulation of Care: understanding mobility and absence in family life (with Merla, Routledge, 2014); Conflicting Identities: Refugee Protection and the Role of Law (with Kneebone & Stevens, Routledge, 2014); Intimacy and Italian Migration (with Gabaccia, Fordham Press, 2011) and Families Caring Across Borders (with Baldock & Wilding, Palgrave, 2007).
This paper examines the crisis of acute and chronic illness, death and dying in transnational families. These are the stages in the family life course when physical co-presence is required to deliver hands-on care and intimate emotional support for the sick family member. It is a time when distant kin feel they need 'to be there', including for their own sense of well-being. This period of 'crisis’ (in the anthropological sense) makes visible all of the impediments to transnational family caregiving that often remain hidden during those periods when ‘routine’ forms of distant care are adequate. Of particular relevance are the macro-level factors generated by national borders and the policies that define them, including those that govern employment, travel, visa, health and aged care provisions. It is in these family life phases of crisis that nation-state structures can work to constrain individual agency and rights, making compellingly evident the growing need for transnational structures and policy. At issue are the largely invisible (in a policy sense) but increasingly common micro-level responses of family and individuals that characterize ‘crisis distant care’, which are characterized by the urgent need to visit and to intensify use of ICTs. The paper examines the experiences of migrants living in Australia who are trying to care for acutely unwell family members abroad.
Loretta Baldassar is Discipline Chair of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Western Australia and Research Fellow at Monash University. Loretta has published extensively on migration and settlement issues with a particular focus on ageing, the second generation and the social uses of new communication technologies. Her most recent works include, Transnational Families, Migration and the Circulation of Care: understanding mobility and absence in family life (with Merla, Routledge, 2014); Conflicting Identities: Refugee Protection and the Role of Law (with Kneebone & Stevens, Routledge, 2014); Intimacy and Italian Migration (with Gabaccia, Fordham Press, 2011) and Families Caring Across Borders (with Baldock & Wilding, Palgrave, 2007).
Travelling with and unraveling Bourdieu: Elite schools and the cultural logics and limits of trans-nationality
Tuesday, Session 7, 1:30-2:30
Professor Jane Kenway, Monash University
Bourdieu’s work is a constant touch-stone for those scholars around the world who study elite schools, although too few critically examine how well Bourdieu’s ideas travel to elite schools in locations beyond France (see however, Kenway and Koh, 2013) and their purchase in increasingly globalizing circumstances (see however Wang, 2014). More and more, elite schools’ clients (parents, students and ex students) are on the move around the globe and such schools are increasingly globalizing their practices (Kenway and Fahey, 2014) Hence some scholars are trying to adapt Bourdieu’s thinking to assist them to theorize the schools’ and their clients’ links to and practices of transnational mobility. The conceptual moves here are often predictable and largely involve the multiplication of capitals; ‘cosmopolitan’, ‘transnational’ and so forth. Such work too infrequently engages the deeper logics of Bourdieu’s, largely national, oeuvre in the relation to the global. Although she only briefly deals with elite schools, Aiwa Ong’s (1999) work is different. She tellingly asks ‘What are the effects of cultural accumulation in a cross cultural transnational arena where there is not one but many sets of competing cultural criteria that determine symbolic value in multiple class and race-stratified settings?’ (89). She argues that even though ‘the world is the arena of strategies of accumulation’, Euro American cultural hegemonies are still at work and invite navigation and emulation by those who hail from beyond the so-called West but who are hailed by it. These people navigate the cultural hierarchies of their old and new locations as well as those of transnational spaces and adopt, what she calls ‘flexible accumulation strategies’. In their spaces of relocation, she argues, they are weighed down by their ‘symbolic deficits’ (e.g. race, colour, accent, taste), which make it difficult for them to convert their economic capital to other capitals even when they have accrued the appropriate modes of cultivation, taste and accomplishment. In developing these arguments in relation to wealthy diasporic Chinese from China, Hong Kong and Singapore, Ong claims that the consumption of elite schools and universities is often a central accumulation strategy. However she does not get inside any such schools to identify the fine grain of such strategies and neither does she show how these schools respond to them in the context of their own cultural logics. As a consequence, I suggest, she tends to over-simplify these strategies and their reception. My paper will put Ong’s work under empirical pressure through an examination of inter-nationalising practices of an elite school in Melbourne and the relationship of such practices to the various cultural accumulation strategies of its ‘international’ students and families. In so doing I will seek to further develop the trans-nationalising of Bourdieu.
References
Kenway, J and Fahey, J (2014) Staying ahead of the Game: the globalising practices of elite schools, in Globalisation, Societies and Education, Special issue Elite schools in globalising circumstances: New Conceptual Directions and Connections, Eds Kenway J. and McCarthy, C. Vol 12, Number, 2. June. 177-196
Kenway,
J and Koh, A. (2013) The elite school as a ‘cognitive machine’ and
‘social paradise’?: developing transnational capitals for the national
‘field of power’; Forthcoming in Bennett, T. Frow, J. Hage, G and Noble,
G. Eds, Journal of Sociology, Special Issue ‘Working with Bourdieu:
Antipodean Cultural Fields’ vol 49, issues 2-3.
Ong, A. (1999) Flexible Citizenship: The cultural logics of transnationality, Durham and London, Duke University Press.
Wang,
Y. (2014) The complex cultural logics of self making: Chinese
background youth in an elite Australian school, Monash University, PhD.
Jane Kenway is a Professorial Fellow with the Australian Research Council, a Professor in the Education Faculty at Monash and an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences; Australia. Her specialist field is the sociology of education with a particular focus on educational power, politics and injustice. She leads the international team conducting the five year research project called Elite independent schools in globalising circumstances: a multi-sited global ethnography. See the website
Mapping the Educational Trajectories of the Children of Internationally Mobile Families
Tuesday, Session 7, 1:30-2:30
Dr Danau Tanu, University of Western Australia
Children’s education and future career trajectories are of paramount concern for many transnational families. Educational concerns impact upon whether and when families decide to move internationally together or stay apart. This paper focuses on teenage and young adult children of Asian and African backgrounds who experience a high degree of international mobility while they are growing up and are popularly referred to as “Third Culture Kids” (Useem & Downie 1976). It explores how they experience and articulate their internationally mobile upbringing in relation to their schooling and future. Some make multiple international moves with their families due to their parent(s)’ job placement, while others are sent overseas by their parents to one or more countries on their own for educational purposes. Decisions about their schooling are tempered by their parents’ and their own economic, social and cultural capital in the context of national and international economic and cultural inequalities. Given that international mobility is the norm for the cohort I studied, their experiences offer insight into the complexity of transnational family lives and its impact on children. Data is drawn from a yearlong ethnographic research conducted in Jakarta, Indonesia in 2009 at an international high school catering to foreign expatriate and local elite families.
Young Australian Travellers: At Home in the World?
Tuesday, Session 7, 1:30-2:30
Dr Amie Matthews, University of Western Sydney
This paper examines the issues of mobility, identity and belonging from the perspectives of young Australian travellers (aged 18-30). Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the international backpacking scene and interviews with young Australian travellers engaged in extended overseas journeys, my presentation focuses in particular on the centrality of mobility to these young peoples’ experiences of transition (to and through different stages of adulthood). With the freedom of travel often tied (at least discursively) to the accumulation of experience, and the accumulation of experience tied to increased knowledge about the world and about self, being a backpacker becomes crucial to their identities. At the same time, many of these young people, by virtue of the length of their trips and the working holiday visas they carry, become more than backpackers while abroad. Occupying a status somewhere between traveller and expatriate, their experiences shed light on some of the complexities of mobility and belonging, identity, home and nationality in the 21st century.
Dr Amie Matthews is a lecturer in the School of Social Sciences & Psychology, at the University of Western Sydney, where she teaches in sociology and tourism studies. Amie has conducted extensive research into the backpacking culture, focusing in particular on the role of travel in the lives of young people and the influence it has on their self and world perceptions. In addition, she has research interests in the ethics of tourism and tourist practices; tourism, media and the tourist imaginary; and the intersections between tourism, mobilities and everyday cosmopolitanism.
Tuesday, Session 7, 1:30-2:30
Dr Danau Tanu, University of Western Australia
Children’s education and future career trajectories are of paramount concern for many transnational families. Educational concerns impact upon whether and when families decide to move internationally together or stay apart. This paper focuses on teenage and young adult children of Asian and African backgrounds who experience a high degree of international mobility while they are growing up and are popularly referred to as “Third Culture Kids” (Useem & Downie 1976). It explores how they experience and articulate their internationally mobile upbringing in relation to their schooling and future. Some make multiple international moves with their families due to their parent(s)’ job placement, while others are sent overseas by their parents to one or more countries on their own for educational purposes. Decisions about their schooling are tempered by their parents’ and their own economic, social and cultural capital in the context of national and international economic and cultural inequalities. Given that international mobility is the norm for the cohort I studied, their experiences offer insight into the complexity of transnational family lives and its impact on children. Data is drawn from a yearlong ethnographic research conducted in Jakarta, Indonesia in 2009 at an international high school catering to foreign expatriate and local elite families.
Young Australian Travellers: At Home in the World?
Tuesday, Session 7, 1:30-2:30
Dr Amie Matthews, University of Western Sydney
This paper examines the issues of mobility, identity and belonging from the perspectives of young Australian travellers (aged 18-30). Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the international backpacking scene and interviews with young Australian travellers engaged in extended overseas journeys, my presentation focuses in particular on the centrality of mobility to these young peoples’ experiences of transition (to and through different stages of adulthood). With the freedom of travel often tied (at least discursively) to the accumulation of experience, and the accumulation of experience tied to increased knowledge about the world and about self, being a backpacker becomes crucial to their identities. At the same time, many of these young people, by virtue of the length of their trips and the working holiday visas they carry, become more than backpackers while abroad. Occupying a status somewhere between traveller and expatriate, their experiences shed light on some of the complexities of mobility and belonging, identity, home and nationality in the 21st century.
Dr Amie Matthews is a lecturer in the School of Social Sciences & Psychology, at the University of Western Sydney, where she teaches in sociology and tourism studies. Amie has conducted extensive research into the backpacking culture, focusing in particular on the role of travel in the lives of young people and the influence it has on their self and world perceptions. In addition, she has research interests in the ethics of tourism and tourist practices; tourism, media and the tourist imaginary; and the intersections between tourism, mobilities and everyday cosmopolitanism.