School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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ItemExperiencing and transcending a liminal condition : narratives of ailing Polish immigrants in Melbourne, Australia( 2004)In addition to facing problems typically associated with (re)location, migrants must often come to terms with changing bodily states due to disability, illness, ageing and other forms of ailments in locations that may be foreign culturally and linguistically. Ailing immigrants experience two forms of disruptions which result in a double condition of sustained liminality: spatial/social and bodily. Using narratives of ailing Polish immigrants to Australia, this thesis explores these disruptions as well as the strategies through which the participants (re)ground their transformed body/selves in new locations. The project is embedded in a constructivist approach which stresses the importance of the participants' subjective experience of spatial/social and bodily (re)locations, their experience of sustained liminality, and of the strategies they use to transcend this doubly liminal state. Theoretical and methodological concepts which guide this work are elaborated and expanded on in the first sections of the thesis. The next section is devoted to exploring the narratives of the ailing Polish immigrants in order to uncover their spatial social and bodily disruptions and uprootings from familiar locations, and their consequent alienation from their changing body/selves. The final section uses the narratives of the participants to reveal the frameworks within which they attempt to transcend the liminal condition of their ailing immigrant bodies in order to make their locations familiar and their transformed body/selves less alien. This project argues that making sense of new locations is a human experience. For the ailing immigrant, however, the experience is problematic because the transformative movements they are subjected to require a continuous effort to (re)locate their selves within monumentally different spatial/social and bodily contexts. (Re)grounding strategies are a way of making sense of the world and of doing away with the subjective alienation from the self. This thesis recognizes the process of (re)grounding as central to the experience of the ailing immigrants, and argues that the end results of (re)grounding strategies, whether successful or not, are in fact less important than the process itself. Through the (re)grounding process, the self becomes familiar, regardless of its spatial/social or bodily location
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Item'West side' stories: visible difference, gender, class and young people( 2012)The impetus for this thesis emerged from my job as a youth worker and my dissatisfaction with the dominant ways in which young people are discussed and managed as ‘at risk’ and ‘disengaged’. I argue that, far from being disengaged, young people in Melbourne’s western suburbs are engaged in reading the power structures that influence their lives and have developed a range of strategies to operate within and against these classed, ‘raced’ and gendered structures. Throughout this thesis I contend that young people have agency (that is, the ability to act), and argue for young people to be recognised as astute social actors, from whom we can learn much about the way power operates and the strategies people use to live with social inequality. ‘West side’ stories explores how young people experiencing social disadvantage are ‘managed’ in public policy and how they are represented in academia. The qualitative research presented in this thesis problematises the dominant representations, by illustrating the ways in which visible difference, gender and class intersect and how these social divisions shape the lives of young people living in the west – a culturally diverse and economically disadvantaged region of Melbourne. It is argued here that whiteness is marked in the western suburbs and that Anglo-Saxon Australians are also visibly different because of their class location.
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ItemSchool closures, alienation and crime: an analysis of the social and economic implications of public secondary school closures in north-west Melbourne( 1995)Between 1992 and 1993 the Victorian State Government announced the closure or amalgamation of more than 255 publicly funded schools around the state (Parents & Friends, 1993; Marginson, 1994: 47). The Coburg/Preston area, located in the inner north-west of Melbourne, lost four public co-educational secondary colleges in the space of a year. 1135 students were affected (Parents and Friends, 1993). Coburg North Secondary College (here on referred to as Coburg Tech) was one of these schools.