School of Geography - Theses
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ItemChanging Vibes, Precarious Lives: The Experiences & Hardships of Melbourne 'Hospo-Workers' During the Covid-19 Pandemic( 2023)In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic engendered a series of economic and social crises along intersecting fault lines and through multiple spatialities. These crises impacted local and global economic flows, reshaped urban spaces, produced new (im)mobilities, and intensified the vulnerability and exploitation of precarious individuals and communities. This thesis seeks to explore how workers in Melbourne’s hospitality sector were impacted by the pandemic; how their work changed, the hardships they experienced as a result, and the tactics they developed to respond to these hardships. The thesis builds on pre-existing research on labour and precarity to affirm the affective nature of work, and the extent to which precarity has become a predominant condition of economic and cultural life. By conducting a series of in-depth qualitative interviews with individuals who worked in Melbourne’s hospitality sector during the pandemic, it expands geographic understandings of the cultural and economic geographies of hospitality and its labour-market. It also conceptualises how individuals identify and express affective attachment to hospitality work by developing a typology around respondents’ colloquial invocation of ‘hospo’ and ‘vibe’. This thesis also elucidates how respondents enacted a range of tactics which resisted oppressive and exploitive management strategies across embodied and digital spatialities. It concludes that, despite economic, emotional, social and embodied hardships experienced during the pandemic, ‘hospo-workers’ demonstrated individual and collective capacities for agency, enacting them in the hopes of destabilising the entrenched exploitation and flexibilisation of labour in the hospitality sector, and strengthening the networks of care and social connections that emerge amongst workers in Melbourne venues.
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ItemThird Culture Kids: Making Homes in Transient Lives( 2023)This thesis explores how third culture kids feel, experience and (re)create home throughout their transient and mobile lives. Geographic mobility, experiences of transition and relocation is at the core of third culture kids’ lives. Third culture kids are individuals who have spent a significant part of their developmental years outside their parents’ passport country due to their parents’ occupation and are often described as children of expatriate parents from relatively high socioeconomic groups. For many third culture kids, their sense of home is one marked by a certain collective disorientation—home is everywhere yet nowhere at once. Drawing on narratives collected from participant-driven photo-elicitation interviews, this thesis adopts a non-representational style of research to uncover the situated and embodied affective experiences of home for third culture kids. The relationship between mobility and home is explored through three empirical chapters of gaps, bubbles and lines. Gaps reveals how detachment—the process of withdrawing from previous sustained relations and attachment—characterises their affective relations to place. Bubbles shows how third culture kids actively create and maintain enclosed expatriate spaces that generates and nurtures affective atmospheres of safety, comfort and familiarity—one that resembles a sense of home. Lines suggest how habitual routines is central to the homemaking processes for third culture kids.
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ItemDigital Encounters with War Imagery: Making Sense of the 2022 Russia-Ukraine War( 2022)On 24th February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, triggering a war that is unfolding to be the largest in Europe since 1945 by its scale of destruction (BBC, 2022). This war continues to be broadcasted on a digitised stage that has allowed for intimate exposure of the conflict and its disastrous consequences to different publics worldwide (Coleman & Sardarizadeh, 2022). As this phenomenon of digitisation persists, there is a pressing need to explore the transformative power of digital media, as we increasingly encounter it as a window into the war throughout our everyday lives. Positioned within the sub-discipline of Cultural Geography, this thesis aims to explore how we make sense of war through digital media encounters, using the case study context of the 2022 Russia-Ukraine conflict. It will do so by addressing two research questions: (1) How is the Russia-Ukraine war represented through digital imagery? and (2) How do everyday encounters with digital media affect our capacity to make sense of the Russia-Ukraine war? Underpinned by Non-Representational Theory, this thesis utilises three methods of autoethnography, qualitative content analysis and semi-structured interviews. Though a ‘non-representational style’ of engagement, this thesis places a heightened attention on affect, embodiment and process in its analysis and presents its findings through various composite narratives. This thesis aims to challenge knowledge rooted in representational thought about how digital media affects us, and instead offer a non-representational understanding of digital media that acknowledges the affective, embodied and processual forces within these encounters that transform our capacity to make sense of the war it depicts.
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Item(re)Creating after the ‘Black Saturday’ bushfires: examining the role of creative disaster recovery projects in Strathewen, Victoria, Australia( 2021)Due to climate change-induced intensifications in bushfire frequency and magnitude, Australian recovery initiatives are experiencing unprecedented pressure to support individuals and communities who have been affected by or involved in bushfire events. In response, organisations across Australia have begun to promote alternative recovery avenues, including that of creative recovery. In the wake of the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, Regional Arts Victoria (RAV) provided funding to 42 creative recovery projects through its Arts Recovery Quick Response Fund (2010). While these creative recovery projects varied in artistic medium, participant type, and spatial and temporal scale, they were all community-led initiatives designed to aid in individual and community recovery journeys. Drawing primarily on 12 semi-structured interviews with individuals involved in creative recovery projects conducted or installed in the town of Strathewen, Nillumbik Shire, this research examines the function and effects of these projects following Black Saturday. Thus far, geographical analyses have addressed the role of the creative arts within mental health recovery (see Duff, 2016; Smith, 2021), place-making (see Hawkins, 2013; Hawkins & Price, 2018) and experimentations with therapeutic practice (see Boyd, 2015). Building upon the findings and theoretical bases of these works, this thesis offers a novel exploration of creative approaches to disaster recovery. Through a micro-political analysis, the scope of this research also extends to evaluate the potential for a complementary relationship to develop between creative recovery projects and established, conventional methods of bushfire recovery.