School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses

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End date: 2012 × Start date: 2010 × Type: PhD thesis × Subject: identity ×

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    Re-visualising new arrivals in Australia: journey narratives of pre-migration and settlement
    Phillips, Melissa Anne ( 2012)
    Prior to migration, migrants and refugees have complex and diverse lived experiences. These experiences form an intrinsic part of their migration journeys, affecting their settlement pathways and shaping their identities. In re-visualising migrants and refugees as ‘new arrivals’, I focus on their migratory journeys as part of a continuum spanning departure, journey and settlement. Honing in on pre-migration I contextualise the sites of departure that two groups of new arrivals, South Sudanese Australian former refugees and Indian Australian former migrants, have inhabited prior to arrival. In doing this I bring attention to the uniqueness of pre-migration and the important place it has in people’s lives. Drawing on qualitative interviews with twenty-five research participants I illustrate the significant resources, agency and networks that new arrivals bring with them from sites of departure. I highlight how issues of mobility; the maintenance of family links as expressed through remittances, transnational marriages and the desire to return; and community transformation, influence the settlement terrain in ways not previously understood. This thesis connects pre-migration with settlement to show the ways in which pre-migration remains a continuous presence in people’s lives as they settle in Australia. Re-visualising new arrivals demands reciprocity, recognition and improved understandings of the unique role and prevailing influence of pre-migration.
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    Epistemological blind spots and the story of I: returning the vulnerable i to the rational I
    Lewis, Brigitte ( 2011)
    In prioritising the use of the rational “I” we limit what we can know both about ourselves and about the world around us. I trace the history of the scientific revolution that turned its gaze from the Christian God and installed man (sic) as his replacement, the history and the philosophy of science that critiqued the way we use reason, postmodernism that asks why prioritise reason at all, poststructuralism that questions the very significance of language and meaning, the feminist movement that identified the rational I as a masculinist self and the New Age movement that forwarded the creation of a spiritual self amidst a modernist outlook. I explore these schools of thought so as to engage my modernist rationalist self and yours in conversations and practices, that author ways to understand, feel, be and do my body that are not necessarily condoned by my culture, the modern Western philosophical tradition, or this current moment in history. I use three autoethnographic case studies to access new ways to be, feel and do in the world that were foreign to me as a rationally situated human being. These are set in an ashram in India – to access the spiritual dimension I marginalised by turning toward science; an acting course – to access the emotional dimension I marginalised by practicing the so-called impartiality of reasonable being; and Tantric bodywork – to access my body as a site of epistemology that I marginalised by prioritising my rational mind.