School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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ItemMoving identities: the lived experiences of skilled Filipino women immigrants in Melbourne( 2011)This research contributes to the emerging field of gender and skilled migration study. While studies of migrant Filipinas in Australia tend to revolve around their sexualised and vulnerable position as mail-order brides, the current study engages with highly educated professional women whose migration trajectories are linked either to middle-class maintenance or retrieval of a perceived declining class position. The thesis is a qualitative study that examines the diverse gendered dimensions of the lives of Filipinas who migrated to Australia over the past 25 years. It explores how the intersection of gender, race and class within the migration and resettlement process, enables and compels the women to reconfigure their lives and identities. The study makes visible for the first time the experiences of women who have been rendered largely invisible in skilled migration research and discourse. In-depth interviews with 20 skilled Filipinas in Melbourne resulted in rich, divergent, and sometimes, conflicting narratives. This study, a feminist analysis of the complex inseparability of work and family for these women, demonstrates how these influence their identity reconstructions. It reveals the women's encounters with challenges in the public realm, pertaining to workforce barriers, thwarted careers, racial and gender discrimination, while their altered class positions disturbed relationships in the household. I argue that the women utilised a range of personal resources to reconfigure their identities in both realms. Unlike skilled women immigrants of other non-English speaking backgrounds, the research participants were able to successfully reconstitute or shift their careers without succumbing to long-term underemployment or workplace abuse. Their personal dreams and motivations, social and human capital, and faith in political equality all coalesce for them to weather the severe difficulties faced, and subsequently revise their identities. Yet, the women did not easily achieve a sense of inclusion and ‘governmental belonging.’ I argue that complex social and structural barriers distress even those women who have sufficient human capital and personal resources, and privileged social status prior to migration. This unveils some of the deceptions in both the state's liberalism as well as in migrants' so called ‘success stories.’ For many, managing the household without the maids they used to enjoy in the Philippines was the most salient change. Career ambitions compelled them to modify their housework standards and to influence their spouses towards greater gender symmetry. Ultimately however, the migration process has had little transformative effect on the cultural expectations of them as women. Filipinas continue to valorize mothering as the apex of all their duties. The intersection of mothering ideology with institutional disadvantages curtailed their aspirations making their career goals difficult to achieve.
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ItemAustralian new left politics, 1956-1972( 2009)A study of the Australian New Left might not immediately appear pertinent to contemporary society. Adherents of New Right economics have been, until recently, unshakable in their global ascendancy over the past three decades. From Russia to Tanzania, discourses of neo-liberalism have become so deeply entrenched in world politics and trade that they have been adopted by the transitional states of Eastern and Central Europe, along with other less developed countries in the international system, despite the fact that all have very different cultural histories and levels of economic development. There have been few exceptions, with one example Hugo Chavez's Venezuela. The discrediting during the global oil crisis of the mid-1970s of the post-WWII orthodoxy of Keynesian economics, social democracy and the Welfare State has played its role in this paradigm shift. More pertinent to the radical left may be that the legacy of Soviet Communism's 'terrors and errors' still looms large in the consciousness of socialist thought, provoking disagreement over what can be salvaged from the cadaver of Marxist theory. The increasing specialisation and integration of world marketplaces since the 1960s has also led to questions over whether the notion of a working class - so essential to Marx's utopian revolution - still exists at all. The rise of 'identity politics' and the relativism of postmodernist thought, seen as at the cutting edge of academic theory since the 1970s, have represented further challenges to those desiring to rebuff the entrenched global logic of consumer capitalism. Capitalism is the only 'meta-narrative' left uncontested by postmodernists, while other ideologies - such as Marxism, feminism and even the discipline of history - are criticised for their failure to adequately address the realities of difference within the groups (i.e. workers, women) that they focus upon. This thesis re-examines a time when the left commanded a degree of mainstream popularity; when hundreds of thousands of Australians took to the streets to protest against the government, and when, however briefly, Marxist sympathisers constituted respectable numbers in academic circles, to ascertain what lessons, if any, might be learnt for 'socialist humanist' campaigns today. The anti-globalisation campaigns of the past decade and recent concerns regarding climate change represent hope as starting points for contemporary mass radicalism. Recently, I travelled beside a thoughtful and articulate man in his late fifties who had been a student at the University of Western Australia during the early 1970s. He had been acutely aware of radicals at other campuses such as Monash at this time, and laughed dismissively that student activists were still saying the same things nowadays. While my travelling companion was amused that contemporary student radicals continue to subscribe to what he sees as archaic and refuted ideas and philosophies, I believe that this constancy is due to the fact that New Left criticism remains highly applicable today.
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ItemMoral reform organisations in Australian: a political response to the sexual revolution( 1997)The 1960s and 1970s were a period of profound social change in Australia and throughout the Western world. One of the most obvious manifestations of cultural upheaval was the so-called 'sexual revolution', whereby several formerly tabooed behaviours including abortion, homosexual practices and the sale of pornography were publicly debated and progressively legalised. Governments which had previously supported traditional Christian standards of sexual morality suddenly seemed powerless to prevent the changes, and even encouraged some of them by actions such as the liberalisation of divorce and censorship laws. The denominational churches were deeply divided over many of these developments and failed to mount an effective campaign against them. Many conservative Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, were deeply disturbed by the advent of the 'permissive society', and banded together in voluntary organisations independent of ecclesiastical control in an attempt to save what was left of the old 'Christian' social order, to alter public attitudes and to reverse the legal changes which had already occurred. Among the better-known groups are the Australian Festival of Light, the Society to Outlaw Pornography and the Right to Life Association. Guided by outspoken leaders such as Fred Nile and Margaret Tighe, these bodies participate actively in politics and their opinions are frequently sought by the media on a wide range of public issues, from prostitution to in vitro fertilisation. Moral reform organisations of this kind have existed in Britain since the seventeenth century and in America since the early 1800s, but were comparative rarities in Australia until 25 years ago. While they have made little tangible impact on the increasingly secularised culture of this country - owing to their limited resource base and the sheer immensity of their actual target (namely, modernisation) - they are able to exert a degree of leverage in certain political contexts e.g. when parliaments are debating the abortion issue. Also, despite their distaste for major aspects of the modern world, many groups employ the language and technology of modernity in ways designed to enhance their prospects of success.
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ItemStolen generations: the forcible removal of aboriginal children from their families: identity and belonging( 2000)Stolen Generations: 'Identity and Belonging' explores the ways in which members of the Stolen Generations have sought to make sense of, and establish their sense of belonging and negotiate their Indigenous identities. In order to appreciate the uniqueness of the Stolen Generation experience and the challenges faced by individuals in forging their places of belonging, understanding the climate and context in which members of the Stolen Generations lived in is vital. Members of the Stolen Generations were confronted with and have had to come to terms with the paradoxes of history. Members of the Stolen Generations were taken away by, and raised in the very cultures and systems that damaged their societies of origin, and which continued to stigmatise Aboriginality as inferior. Within this context of analysis, the research gives attention to the various ways in which Aboriginal individuals in non-Aboriginal care came to their earliest sense of their Aboriginality. This exploration acts as a commentary of the construction of Aboriginality within the wider non-Aboriginal context - the stereotypes, the racism and the ignorance that informed those opinions. The ensuing search for a fuller understanding of what Aboriginality means to those members of the Stolen Generations is a highly complex and challenging one. For those trying to re-establish their ties with their birth families and communities, the years of physical and cultural isolation make it difficult for individuals to unproblematically find their place/s within the Indigenous families and to negotiate their Indigenous identities. Added to this, the experience of finding places of belonging and acceptance are inevitably shaped and determined by the attitudes and responses of the Koori community towards members of the Stolen Generations. The phrase "bringing them home", which in many ways has become synonymous with the issue of the Stolen Generations, carries with it the assumption that those who were 'lost' simply make their way back home, back to a recognizable and pre-existing community that is ready to welcome these individuals with open arms. The present research draws attention to the fact for most, there is no simple and straightforward route 'home'. This research explores the complexity of this journey - giving careful attention to the ways in which this rupture from cultural heritage and family base poses challenges for those trying to find that 'home' or 'belonging place' and intricacies involved in the negotiation of those Indigenous identities.