School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemInterstitial spaces of belonging: Refugee and migrant inclusion, and digitally networked communication( 2021)This project considers how digitally networked communication technologies are opening up interstitial spaces of belonging for people of refugee and migrant backgrounds after resettlement. The project draws on 35 interviews with 26 people from refugee and migrant backgrounds living in Melbourne, supplemented by photographs generated through a photo elicitation task. I contextualise the findings arising from this data by first considering the history of migrant inclusion in Australia, and the historical practice of migrant communication through letters. I argue that while digital platforms and global connections play an important role in supporting their social inclusion and sense of belonging, interaction in the physical, local world remains crucial nonetheless. I build this argument by drawing attention to the interstitiality of the three principal dyadic relationships underpinning the thesis: inclusion–exclusion, digital–physical, and local–global. I argue that digitally networked communication technologies are highly valued tools for connection which have greatest value in their capacity to include those who may otherwise be on the outer, to produce physical encounters through digital networks, and to localise the global regardless of physical location. But it must be acknowledged that this is only half the picture. By often prioritising the global and the digital, networked communications also have the potential to make people effectively absent from the local and the physical, and thereby lead to exclusion rather than inclusion. The notion of interstitial spaces of belonging opens up these opposing accounts to the reality of their interconnection, and in doing so allows a more authentic representation of the experiences of those people at the heart of this research. The significance of this research lies in foregrounding the nuances of situated lives and personal stories, and in advocating for a relational understanding of concepts such as social inclusion, social exclusion, and belonging; digital and physical sociality; and a local and global sense of place.
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ItemBeing in Place: Reimagining Relationships with History, Place and People( 2021)This creative writing project explores questions of belonging and place in settler-colonial Australia, through an historical and writerly lens. It first explores the interrelationship between writing and colonisation, and the construction of settler identity in relation to the control of landscapes, narratives and representations of Aboriginal people. Through an interweaving of critical and autocritical writing, I draw upon personal experiences-in-place from a settler Australian perspective and use Deborah Bird Rose’s philosophy of ‘writing place’ in an attempt to methodologically unsettle colonising narratives and discourses. The thesis documents an emergent, experiential and immersive writing process, which is focused around the following questions: If the act of writing has been crucial to the construction of settler identity, and Aboriginal misrepresentation, can writing—and more specifically the practice of ‘writing place’— respond to place and our presence here through invasion, rather than our anxiety over the absence of belonging? How might we write as settlers in ways that do not distance us further from our identities as colonisers, from our history and from our potential to take responsibility for our legacies of colonisation? These are questions that drive the work, rather than questions that are answered by the work. Part One traces the development of this thesis through an unsettling of questions of settler belonging to a focus on writing place. It locates the thesis in two places: an Aboriginal community in northern Australia and Melbourne in southern Australia. Part Two is a series of meditations on place that document my explorations of ways to read and write place. I draw on both published texts, place as text, and texts encountered in place, in an effort to consider place as an important academic and literary source. Throughout the thesis, I keep a sense of irresolution to the fore, in an effort towards unsettling, rather than settling (or re-settling) the meaning of experience. Through writing place, I look to place as a text that can reveal our own colonising identities to us, to encourage us to move away from an attempt to ‘indigenise’ to belong but instead to come into relationship with ourselves and to understand how colonisation informs our relationships with place, history and Aboriginal people.