Women’s everyday places, encounters and storytelling in a hyper-diverse neighbourhood
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2023-05
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Melbourne Authors
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School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
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PhD thesis
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Open Access
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© 2023 Imogen Carr
Abstract
Pervasive discourses about social identities, often characterised by moral panic and fear of strangers, impact women’s everyday experiences in public places. The hyper-diverse North Richmond-Abbotsford neighbourhood in Melbourne’s inner east is culturally and socioeconomically diverse and has pervasive street drug trade and public injecting. The thesis examines how women make sense of and negotiate identity and difference in their everyday lives in this neighbourhood. It explores the interplay between discourses about social identities and imaginaries about the neighbourhood which construct and reinforce difference, and women’s everyday relational negotiation of this difference by employing a discursive-relational framework. I develop an ethnographic place-based case study combining field observations, narrative interviews, participant-led walking interviews, news reports and testimonials from two residents’ groups relating to public injecting. Drawing from geographic literatures on encounter and intersectionality, this research attempts to maintain critical attention to hierarchies of power while interrogating the specificity and nuance of women’s everyday relations. This thesis combines narrative analysis with discourse analysis to develop insight regarding how women engage with the discourses they hear and express. In doing so it situate women’s accounts of the everyday and their broader life stories in relation to broader social discourses and imaginaries. The key finding of this research is that while discourses inform how women negotiate difference, through their everyday practices and reflective processes women can affirm or challenge these discourses and at times disrupt the status quo. I argue that in relational everyday moments opportunities emerge to shift broader discursive conceptualisations of risk and difference over time. This finding is supported in discussion of three empirical threads. First the thesis focuses on how women’s perception of fear and trauma, mediated through their physical and emotional proximity to others, is shaped by and shapes their experience of everyday places in this neighbourhood. This highlights an interdependence between risk and care which to date has not received significant scholarly attention in geography. Second the thesis focuses on how the transformative impact of women’s encounters with difference was dependent on the reflective processes through which they made sense of sameness and difference in encounters. This highlights how analytical attention to the enfolding of past, present and future provides a more nuanced understanding the transformative impact of encounters. Third the thesis focuses on how women engage discourses as they tell stories about their identity and everyday experiences, and about others. This highlights that the stories people tell shape and are shaped by their engagement of social discourses. By acknowledging that difference is socially constructed and reproduced but also potentially disrupted through everyday relational and discursive practices, the thesis encourages further engagement with the reflective processes through which people make sense of difference. It offers insight into how the stories people tell about their everyday experiences can inform policy and planning in hyper-diverse contexts. Because storytelling renders difference as always complex and multifaceted and underscores overlapping and intersecting issues, it can be used to inform meaningful outcomes that reach toward more just and respectful places.
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Urban geography, Everyday places, Hyper-diversity, Encounter, Contact hypothesis, Conviviality, Temporality, Intersectionality, Storytelling, Life-story narrative, Narrative inquiry, Discourse, Stigma, Risk, Trauma, Geographies of care