School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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ItemOn the Way Home: Christian Migrants and the Liturgical Self( 2019)This thesis tells the stories of Christian migrants who all go to church in the same suburb in the north of Melbourne. It explores the ways in which their faith journey and migration story are intertwined and seeks to show how the stories they tell echo the themes Christians rehearse when they remember, re-enact, and re-tell key biblical narratives. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and the work of theologian James K. A. Smith, I frame this remembering, re-enacting, and re-telling as ‘liturgical practice’. This liturgical practice is not limited to the formal wording of the church service but includes the habits of everyday church life and the faithful practices of Christians in their everyday lives. Smith’s articulation of liturgical practice owes much to Bourdieu’s conception of habitus, and I seek to draw the two concepts into conversation as I reflect on the migration stories my participants told me. The liturgical frame adds two facets to habitus; first, it is explicitly tied to a sacred text, and second, it is used to decode what people love and value rather than decoding power relations. I hope that this reading of the lives of migrant Christians contributes to re-shaping the way we talk about and ascribe value to the lived experience and emotional expressions of migrants in Australia. This thesis shows how the stories Christian migrants tell about their journeys reflect the stories they know from faithful practice: for example, that they learn how to wait through stories of waiting for Jesus’ birth and second coming, that they learn about the significance of the body through the story of the incarnation, or that they learn about valuing suffering through the stories of wilderness experiences. Using this native framework to interpret the everyday practices of church life and the life stories of migrants helps identify the differences and draw attention to the continuities between three very different congregations. It shows how Australia is not the final end point or resolution of these journeys, but that waiting, suffering, and joy continue. Every Christian, but perhaps most especially the Christian migrant, is always on the way home.
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Item'Swept off the streets': the substantive criminalisation of homelessness in Melbourne( 2017)Poverty, nomadism and itinerancy have always posed problems for settled societies, problems that only intensified with the upheavals to social organisation wrought by global industrialisation. The modern manifestation of these qualities is homelessness. Strategies for the successful minimisation of rates of homelessness and mitigation of the harms (both individual and social) that arise from it are well established, yet these remain politically untenable in capitalist (and increasingly neoliberal) societies, and so their effectiveness is limited. However, state abandonment of the homeless is similarly untenable, and this results in strategies of governance that are limited in their capacity to address the challenges that it poses. This longstanding political impasse gives rise to the prevalent social belief that systemic homelessness is inevitable and those who experience it are at best feckless and idle, and at worst criminally deviant. This thesis maps out various facets of the socio-legal regulation of homelessness and the people who experience it. In short, it identifies the associative bonds that link homelessness to criminality. To achieve this, the thesis examines four key facets of the production of the homeless subject as ‘criminal’ and the regulatory responses that flow from this. First, the discursive production of homelessness as an individualised phenomenon determined by internal moral forces is addressed. The carceral and exclusionary histories of the regulation of poverty (namely, the legacy of Britain’s Poor Laws) are established before considering contemporary manifestations of the excluded homeless subject. Second, the issue of representation is addressed. I demonstrate that homelessness suffers from both over- and under-representation as a small yet highly visible minority (the ‘visibly homeless’) determine social attitudes, prevalent stereotypes and thus the shape and tenor of regulatory regimes. Obscured by the spectacle of the rough-sleeper is the large, shifting and inchoate population of the invisibly homeless and precariously housed. The visibility of the condition of the larger population is, I argue, managed (at least partly) to maintain the conspicuousness of more visible manifestations and thus the hegemony of the stereotypes that attend them. Third, the spatial dynamics of homelessness are examined. How urban spaces are constructed for the benefit of the domiciled consumer-citizen and, more controversially, to the detriment of those without stable housing are revealed. The emplacement of social borders concerned with the propriety of certain types of mobility is analysed as is the policing of these borders. Lastly, the political isolation of the homeless subject is revealed through an analysis of various policies and political structures that, directly and indirectly, isolate, marginalise and penalise the homeless subject. This occurs through various methods such as laws criminalising begging, as well as through the legal sanctioning of certain lived modalities and ways of being and the corollary stigmatisation and regulation of others outside of this constructed hierarchy of value. This thesis thus identifies the hidden and dispersed means through which homeless people are subjected to coercive regulatory regimes. The severe alterity of the ‘homeless Other’ is not easily captured in a singular site of penality like laws banning begging. Instead, a more comprehensive account of the treatment of homelessness as a crimino-legal subject is required to explain the severe marginalisation, disenfranchisement and exclusion experienced by this diverse population.
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ItemProducing Melbourne’s farmers’ markets: local food, farming and 'feel-good' shopping( 2015)This thesis builds upon anthropological theories of modernity, production and consumption through ethnographic research, situated in the cosmopolitan city of Melbourne, the ‘foodie’ capital of post-industrial Australia. It examines how producers sold farming, good food and ‘feel-good’ shopping to their urban customers. Through storytelling about the hard yet idyllic farming way of life, producers also sold ’the good life’, based on aspirational urban constructions of a rural idyll, including attributes of honesty, simplicity, hard work and just reward.
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ItemMaking places, making subjects: the representation and experience of Melbourne's laneways( 2014)The gridded structure of Melbourne’s city centre was laid in 1837. Soon after, however, as everyday use generated a need for more complex forms of movement and access not facilitated by the straight lines and large sections of the grid, small laneways began to develop within the lattice of main streets. Now numbering over two hundred within the main central grid, the laneways play a significant role in the everyday life and image of Melbourne. This thesis takes as its focus the laneways of Melbourne’s city centre. The laneways are the frame through which broader questions about experience, particularly experience in and of cities, are explored. In particular, I am interested in how processes of place- making and subject-making are inextricably enmeshed with physical and sensory experience. That is, how it is that laneways both effect and affect experience, while themselves being created by experience. Ultimately, this thesis argues that the places and subjects of the city are never fully determined or fixed, and the order of relations of the city is contingent. Divided into three parts, there are three main aspects to the argument that there is immanent potential for otherwise-ness in the present moment. Part One explores the way in which experience is comprised of excess rather than lack, subtraction, or negativity. Importantly, this excess is the excess of potential in the present moment – the present moment can never be lacking. Potential is always now. In Part Two, I explore two different aspects of laneways figured as an escape from the city. Through this, I argue that it is the promotion of this image of escape that generates the marketability of the laneways, allowing them to participate in and reinforce the city’s current configuration of social and economic relations – the very relations that are supposedly being escaped. Thus this Part argues that potential must be recognised as existing here and not as accessed via escape. Part Three takes the notion of address as a positioning of space and bodies to show that for both space and subjectivity, an address can never fully fix form or capability. This Part demonstrates that while forms of address striate bodies and space, an address is always incomplete and can never fully produce a subject or place. These arguments move by way of an analysis of minute details of experience in the laneways. All chapters are interested in showing how sensory experience works alongside cultural representations and legal regulations to perpetuate certain forms of place- and subject-making. Using empirical experience collected through observation and qualitative interviews, I couple this with analyses of cultural representations to show both the force, but also the contingency, of the current processes of subject and place formation in Melbourne’s CBD. In doing so, I point to the way in which we might imagine and enact other forms of inhabitation