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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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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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
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ItemA failed innovation?: General practitioners in community health centres( 1993)This paper seeks to examine central policy and practice issues arising out of the presence of doctors in community health centres. The community health program was shaped by the Whitlam era and there were great hopes for its success in delivering new forms of health services. Integral to it was the presence of G.P.'s working from community health centres. The research aims at discovering whether or not community health has successfully incorporated G.P.'s into the program. (From Introduction)
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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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ItemSingle mothers in society: a study of the causes and consequences of single motherhood for a Melbourne sample of single mothers who kept their children( 1979)Inspiration for the Study: This study draws its inspiration from two main sources. Firstly, from the experience of a new organisation, the Council for the Single Mother and her Child, through which single mothers have come together in an attempt to help themselves and each other personally, practically and through social action to reform their socio-legal position in society. The increasing self-reliance of women and ameliorating social attitudes to single mothers have disclosed what seems to be a new type of single mother, barely glimpsed in earlier research. This mother may be more likely to remain in the community and keep her baby, and less likely to contact the traditional social service agencies. Such mothers have been visibly active in C.S.M.C. The council has encouraged research into the situation and experience of members so that, as an organisation, it can adapt better to serve its members as a grassroots, participatory, self-help welfare agency, and so it can fill out the picture it presents to the community. The council takes the view that any factual evidence presented is likely to improve the community’s understanding of a stigmatised group. In accord with this policy, C.S.M.C. has made this project possible by allowing the sample to be drawn from its mailing list. Secondly, it was designed to help meet a research need. Most of the research that is influential among Australian social workers is based on overseas evidence, often drawn from 'captive' samples of clients of maternity shelters, public hospitals and adoption or casework agencies, clients who are close to what, as Bernstein pointed out, is an emotional upheaval in any circumstances -- birth. From the perspective of knowledge building, it is desirable that the findings and hypotheses to emerge from this research should be re-examined and tested to see how relevant they may be for a contemporary local sample of single mothers living in the community with their children. Many expectant single mothers and the social workers who counsel them about plans for their own and their babies' futures, feel they have insufficient information about what happens to mothers later, since most of the mothers do not return to the social work agency unless they have problems. Dr. Nan Johns' follow-up study of samples of babies adopted, and babies kept by their natural mothers, is designed to meet this need. It is hoped that the present study will provide useful supplementary evidence. In Australia, there has been no large-scale, comprehensive research on the single-mother population, and in the absence of this, as Meredith and Brotherton have pointed out, there is a need for small-scale, particularised studies to develop a general body of data on the characteristics of single mothers. Other studies in this latter category have drawn their samples from welfare institutions that assist single mothers with problems, such as maternity homes, casework agencies or public hospitals, which cater mainly for low-income patients. The present survey concerns a more varied sample, and it is hoped it will therefore contribute a useful extension of existing research knowledge. (From Introduction)
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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.