1,720,987 research outputs found
Living one visa at a time: experiences of permanence among Brazilian migrants in Australia
No full textThe migration from Brazil to Australia is a relatively recent and understudied phenomenon. Brazilians are one of the diasporic communities in Australia that grew the most between 2000 and 2020, and Brazilians have become an increasingly visible presence in urban and coastal cities of Australia. This influx primarily comprises highly educated middle-class migrants who initially arrived in Australia as international students. Their relatively cosmopolitan and privileged profile contrasts with the Brazilian diaspora in other parts of the world and challenges representations of Latin American migrants in wider scholarly literature.
The rise in Brazilian migration to Australia coincided with a major shift in the country's immigration landscape - the emergence of 'temporary migration' as a predominant pattern. Historically, from the post-war period until the 1990s, most migrants who entered Australia to reside in the country were granted permanent visas upon selection and arrival, conferring them the status of 'permanent residents'. However, since the 1990s, there has been a notable shift towards temporary visas. Embedded in this transformed paradigm, most Brazilian migrants in Australia hold temporary visas and the legal status of 'temporary residents'. The term 'temporary resident' can be misleading, as it implies residency of a short-term and transient nature. In reality, many migrants find themselves living in Australia with temporary status for several years. This state of legal temporariness is generally imposed by restrictive migration policies. Australia tightly controls the number of permanent visas granted each year, making the process of obtaining one highly competitive and challenging. Consequently, many migrants live in Australia for years as de facto permanent residents but are officially categorised as temporary. 'Temporary residents' occupy a precarious position in Australian society. Despite their contributions through work and tax payments, they are denied many 'universal' rights and services, such as public healthcare, social security, educational funding, and electoral rights.
Nevertheless, as explored throughout this thesis, migrants are not passive recipients of these restrictions. When confronted with restrictive migration policies, they exercise agency to navigate imposed temporariness and 'enact permanence', negotiating their temporariness and attempting to transition to more secure visas and statuses. This thesis, therefore, asks: How do migrants negotiate permanence in a context of imposed temporariness? [...]Thesis (PhD Doctorate)Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)School of Hum, Lang & Soc ScArts, Education and LawFull Tex
Calibrating Care: Migration and Military-Humanitarianism at Brazil's Border and Beyond
No full textThe recent political and economic crisis in Venezuela has fuelled an exodus of people in search of refuge and opportunity. By 2021, there were an estimated 6 million Venezuelans who had left the country as a result. The majority have travelled to countries within Latin America and the Caribbean, sparking a regional response involving international humanitarian support. While many travel to Spanish-speaking countries, including Colombia and Peru, a number of people journey by land across the shared border with Brazil. Many enter the country as temporary migrants, although Brazil's adoption of the Cartagena Declaration (exclusive to several Latin American states) has meant that many also gain recognition as refugees. In response to the increase in Venezuelan arrivals and the vulnerabilities that many experience, Brazil's federal government launched a humanitarian task force in 2018. This structure is comprised of several state agencies, international organisations and national civil society groups. Together, these entities perform under the banner of the 'Operacão Acolhida' or 'Operation Welcome' task force. Situated in the relatively isolated northern state of Roraima, bordering Venezuela, this research explores the response to Venezuelan migration. While many government agencies are involved, the military plays a particularly important role on the ground. Working alongside humanitarian actors, military personnel deliver aid supplies, construct and manage shelters, as well as enhance security at the border. This collaboration between the state, the military and the humanitarian realm raises questions about the logic underpinning the response and the implications this has on the lives of Venezuelan migrants and refugees. Upon investigation, a logic emerges that reveals a tension between the ways in which vulnerable mobile groups are offered support, while at the same time, they are tightly governed for the protection of state security. This thesis explores this logic by considering the legacies of militarism and violence within Brazil's distinct postcolonial context. Nestled under the umbrella of social and cultural geography, this research engages feminist political geography as a frame to connect scholarship from critical humanitarianism, mobilities, and Jasbir Puar's (2017) seminal work on debility. Drawing on a range of methodological approaches, including volunteer-research with humanitarian organisations and spatial ethnography, this research investigates the myriad infrastructures, actors and environments that work to govern migrant mobility. I visited the state of Roraima in November 2019, where I stayed for two months volunteering with a humanitarian group focused on supporting urban Venezuelan migrants living without adequate shelter. During this time, I conducted several indepth semi-structured interviews with key actors, engaged in multiple informal conversations, and made ethnographic observations across urban sites and formal spaces of care. By triangulating data and pulling together literature across various fields, I offer a different pathway for thinking about mobility governance in Brazil. I argue that the management of migrant mobility is founded on the logic of debilitating mobilities, which emerge through subtle forms of violence. This logic permeates Brazil's military-humanitarian intervention and manifests through multiple practices, infrastructures, spatialities and temporalities. Consequently, debilitating mobilities reinforces migrant vulnerabilities, keeping them in a cyclical loop of exclusion. This mobility governance and the subsequent implications occur across a range of geographical scales, including cross-border, urban and the intimate scales of the body and the personal. Rather than attending to the militarised security efforts of the Global North against mobilities streaming from the Global South, this research contributes to knowledge by addressing South-South mobilities and emergency governance. This approach provides an insight into the different, and equally significant geographies of Brazil and Latin America more broadly.Thesis (PhD Doctorate)Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)School of Hum, Lang & Soc ScArts, Education and LawFull Tex
Transnational feminist solidarity and lessons from the 2011 protests in Tahrir Square', (by) Sally J. Scholz:Reply by Wendy Harcourt
No full textOn the Trail of Counter Radicalisation: An Examination of Strategies to Prevent the Threat of Islamist Extremism
No full textThe problem of Islamist inspired terrorism is a challenge that states around the world are struggling to deal with. This thesis focuses on the process of Islamist radicalisation that leads to this form of terrorism. It analyses strategies and programs that seek to counter or reverse the process of Islamist radicalisation. This thesis provides an explanatory model of radicalisation, a key component for first understanding how this process emerges and for analysing policies and programs. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in order to solicit best practices, lessons learned and challenges from key practitioners and policy makers in the area of counter radicalisation and deradicalisation in the United Kingdom, The Netherlands and Morocco. Also, this thesis provides new data concerning Australian Islamist terrorists and their educational status. These data show an overrepresentation of Australian terrorists in the STEM fields, particularly engineering. One of the key findings of this thesis is that radicalised individuals tend to lack particular epistemic skills, which have implications for pedagogy in general, and particularly counter radicalisation and deradicalisation programs. This thesis concludes with recommendations for counter radicalisation and deradicalisation policies and practice in Australia, drawn from broader contexts.Thesis (Masters)Master of Arts Research (MARes)School of Hum, Lang & Soc ScArts, Education and LawFull Tex
Interrupting the Middle: Doing and Undoing Gender of Nepalese Students in Australia
No full textThis research aims to explore gender relations in the course of student migration from Nepal. It enquires into how Nepalese migrant students in Australia continue or discontinue traditional gender roles by disclosing the lived experiences of a small cohort of Nepalese female students in Brisbane, Australia. A review of the relevant literature indicated that, despite significant development in the field of gender and migration research worldwide, the gender aspect of Nepalese student migration is still under-researched. Responding to this gap, I have developed a study that investigates the ways in which Nepalese female student migrants are negotiating gender relations between home and abroad. This study revolves around their changing perspectives on traditional gender relations as a result of living in the changed socio-cultural settings of host country, and the inherent challenges of implementing the changes in conventional interpretations of gender- based roles after returning their home country. Importantly, I share the same ethnic background and similar migration history with the research participants. Furthermore, my several years of professional experiences in education consultancies became the primary motivation for commencing this study from the position of an ‘insider researcher’ utilising both ethnographic observation and autoethnographic reflection as research tools. Six married Nepalese female students, studying in different institutions in Brisbane, were requested to participate in a qualitative semi-structured interview. In addition, I draw from autoethnographic observations and reflection on my personal encounters as a student migrant in Australia, as well as professional engagement as an education consultant. The semi-structured interviews provided the primary data for the research. Interview transcripts were manually coded based on their affinity with two distinct themes: negotiating in-betweenness in gender relations in the course of living in a different context; and circumstances of mobility either in the origin country or in the host country. At the same time, whether playing the role of passive observer or interviewing the participants as a researcher, their activities, as well as personal experiences and stories, were at times similar to my own. The most revealing and common experiences of all the participants after living in Australia was the feeling of emancipation from the yoke of patriarchy, which required them to play traditional gender roles in their country of origin. In spite of their commitment to make people aware of this new-found freedom, even after returning to their country of origin, the lack of confidence to continue to live with this changed philosophy of life was equally evident in their responses. Moreover, mixed opinions about the metamorphosis of their male counterparts regarding doing and undoing gender also posed a question on whether or not the Nepalese males would continue to cooperate with their wives in introducing changes in the traditional gender roles upon returning to their home country.Thesis (Masters)Master of Arts Research (MARes)School of Hum, Lang & Soc ScArts, Education and LawFull Tex
CRUISING A DISPUTED SEA: The Geopolitics of Tourism in the South China Sea
No full textTerritorial disputes in and over the South China Sea (SCS) are often regarded as a dangerous flashpoint in the Indo-Pacific with potentially serious global consequences. In the context of this territorial rivalry, tourism has been deployed by several littoral countries as a soft, civilian tactic to enact maritime territorialisation. Situated against this backdrop, this thesis serves as the first empirically-grounded and theoretically-engaged research to analyse the dynamic nexus between tourism and geopolitical territorialisation in the SCS. The thesis takes China’s tourism in the Xisha region as a case study and applies an ethnographic approach. More specifically, by moving away from a state-centric focus, this thesis integrates multiple scales of analysis to comprehensively examine tourism’s entanglements with the state’s practical and formal geopolitics and explore how tourism territorialisation is played out and experienced in an everyday context. For the territorial role and effect of tourism, this thesis presents a theoretical argument that tourism ought to be treated as a performative force of producing nationalised space and as an assemblage element affecting individuals’ geopolitical subjectivation in daily life. In a practical sense, I suggest that tourism should be considered as a constitutive dimension of the geopolitical restructuring processes in the SCS and as a dynamic geopolitical process on its own, which is informed by, and at the same animates, the multiple scales of geopolitical relations.
The research findings presented in this thesis show that tourism is more than an enterprise monopolised and unilaterally pursued by Beijing to achieve the narrow pursuit of state-led territorialisation of the SCS. A range of state, substate, non-state, and even non-human, actors are found to participate in and inform maritime territorialisation through tourism. These diverse actors generally have their own agendas, interests, and pursuits in tourism development, which are not always in line with the state intentions and official prescriptions. Through process-tracking the development history of tourism, this thesis shows that China’s launch of tourism in Xisha is precisely a product resulting from domestic political and economic imperatives and stimulations of the then regional geopolitical tensions. Domestically, the Hainan provincial government is found to be an important sub-state actor who introduced the tourism territorialisation idea into the state’s maritime policy and continues to exert significant influence on the implementation and operation of Beijing’s tourism strategy in the region. Notably, the research demonstrates that China’s SCS tourism is not a static undertaking by identifying a prominent evolution of the roles of tourism in state maritime policy. Since the implementation of the ‘One Belt and One Road Initiative’ in late 2013, Beijing has gradually positioned tourism as a potential peacemaker for facilitating pan-SCS economic cooperation.
Investigating how tourism is concretely practised and performed on the ground by state-owned tourism enterprises, another important substate-actor, the research sheds light on how territoriality and sovereignty are enacted, materialised, and performed on a daily basis. The research reveals Xisha tourism has been largely normalised as a self-sustaining corporate operation with government intervention decreasing over time. Despite being subordinated to governments, these state-owned tourism enterprises are far from docile policy-undertakers, but are calculating entities seeking to maximise their corporate interests through the tourism industry. Through a closer study of specific tour structures and patterns of organisation, the discourses, representation, performances, materiality, and spatial-temporal techniques of control employed by tourism operators, the thesis illustrates that Xisha tourism is carefully vetted, politically oriented, highly regimented, deliberately managed, elaborately designed, and performatively constituted in order to better curate tourists’ experiences and, in doing so, better produce territory. Tourism operators politicise the tourism landscape of the SCS, thereby choreographing the entire destination to be a complete geopolitical stage.
Furthermore, the thesis interrogates the micro-geopolitical experiences and encounters of tourists, investigating the territorial effects and affects of tourism on the personal level. For this, a specific concept, ‘territorial socialisation’, is developed to capture such an effect. The research demonstrates that tourists are pragmatic geopolitical actors rather than passive pawns of the state. Their geopolitics experiences through tourism are connected to, and embedded in, their extensive daily perceptions and experiences of the benefits of China’s national rising and of the unjust international orders on handling territorial disputes. By translating the remote ‘imagined homeland’ into real existence and enabling an intimate, tangible, and affirmative encounter with national territories, tourism works on the emotional, embodied, and cognitive dimensions of territorial socialisation. Importantly, the vast and flowing physicality of the sea is found to complicate tourists’ maritime territorial identity. In addition to the more apparent political and economic schemes behind the development and maintenance of SCS tourism, and in view of the intimate relations between everyday tourism practices and geopolitics, this thesis suggests that tourism is a mundane and intimate way in which people regularly live geopolitics in their daily lives.
Together, the empirical discussion of the thesis demonstrates the agency of tourism in configuring the geopolitical process and shows the mutual constitution of tourism and geopolitics in general and the interdependence of tourism and territorialisation in the SCS in particular. By unravelling the multiple facets of the geopolitics of China’s SCS tourism, this thesis contributes to the scholarship on tourism geopolitics, maritime territorialisation, territorial nationalism, and the SCS dispute. It also offers practical insights into the potential ramifications of tourism development, and its implications for our understanding of the geopolitics of the SCS.Thesis (PhD Doctorate)Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)School of Hum, Lang & Soc ScFull Tex
Is austerity coming? The new politics of public debt after Covid-19
No full textThe old politics of public debt is austerity - aggressive spending cuts to repay debt. Intuitively, the post-pandemic environment is an opportunity for progressive political-economic change, although the same was true after the 2008 global financial crisis. After 2008, many countries saw the increase of austerity ideas, with governments restricting spending to avoid public debt. Blyth argues 'we were all temporary Keynesians' during the 2008 recession, but the 'dangerous idea' of austerity returned. Graeber also argues debt creates 'moral confusion', which causes voters to accept the logic of repaying debt and consequential spending cuts. With significant increases in debt occurring during the pandemic, we can ask whether we are again only temporarily Keynesians, whether austerity politics will return, or whether a new politics of public debt is emerging that aims to avoid class-based resistance to spending cuts but grow the economy so that debt is less of a problem.
While research cannot predict future developments, it can explore the factors that have influenced previous austerity policies. This thesis conducts a content analysis of government and opposition speeches on annual government budgets in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia to test how rhetoric has evolved since the late 1980s in response to increased public debt caused by the early 1990s, 2008 and 2020 recessions. It argues political parties have gradually reframed the urgency of repaying debt and softened spending restriction rhetoric since 1990. The analysis demonstrates a long-existing trend of parties reframing rhetoric about the causes and proposed solutions to increased debt. With the benefit of a longer-term view of the 2008 crisis, evidence indicates it was austerity that was temporary, rather than Keynesianism.
The thesis builds upon previous work that has highlighted factors that encourage parties to repay debt, including the power of capital interests and moral anti-debt or austerity ideas. It does so by aligning existing theory with other recession-crisis problem-solving theories, such as those of Streeck and Hall. Together, these perspectives help to develop theoretical explanations for the tendency of governments to expand debt. [...]Thesis (Masters)Master of Arts Research (MARes)School of Hum, Lang & Soc ScArts, Education and LawFull Tex
An Ethnographic Exploration of the Contemporary Indian Electronic Dance Music Culture (EDMC)
No full textIn India, the past two decades have been crucial for the growing popularity of Electronic Dance Music (EDM). This is largely due to the burgeoning presence and significance of EDM festivals as performative sites of contemporary Indian youth culture, spaces where questions of identities, belonging and community-building practices are continually articulated and negotiated.
Thus, the purpose of this project is to achieve three main objectives. First, to map the histories and beginnings of EDM in India to capture the timeline of EDM and its development since the 1960s to build a historical context of modern-day EDM in India. Second, to investigate what it means to be a member of Electronic Dance Music Culture (EDMC) in present-day India. Third, this study proposes the concept of vibe as a new conceptual and methodological framework for engaging with EDMC narratives. [...]Thesis (PhD Doctorate)Doctor of PhilosophySchool of Hum, Lang & Soc ScArts, Education and Law GroupFull Tex
Roots and Routes: Kurdish Literature as World Literature
No full textOver the last two decades, the literary world has seen many new works by Kurdish writers and poets who have authored works of fiction, memoir and collections of poetry in the English language. This thesis, Roots and Routes: Kurdish Literature as World Literature, is the study of this body of work. As the first comprehensive study to cover the existing and emerging Kurdish Anglophone writings, this study introduces these writings into the arena of world literatures in English. However, it also identifies these works as a new literary canon in the realm of Kurdish literature. This study is an attempt to investigate why and how these Anglophone Kurdish writings emerged, who their intended readers are, and what roles these writings play or can play. To find answer to these questions, this study examines both the contexts out of which and in which these writings have emerged. It positions them in the historical and geopolitical contexts they have emerged from and examines the new and broader cultural, literary and socio-political contexts in which they have been produced, circulated and received. Looking at these two contexts, this study finds that these writings have created and can continue to create new spaces of global engagement with the Kurdish question(s) and Kurdish people. It asserts that these writings entail a kind of activism and create an arena of struggle and Kurdish voice of resistance beyond their imposed national borders, in the wider context of the world. It is within this context that this study argues for this body of work as a new discursive space of negotiation and recognition of the Kurdish questions and Kurdish people in global and transnational contexts. In its reading of the texts, this study, drawing on various theoretical frameworks and taking a reception-based or readerly pragmatics approach, aims to explore how these texts interact with their implied readers and the ways they might be read. It seeks to explore not only why but also and more significantly how these writings of different genres bear witness to Kurdish traumatic history and act as testimony. In short, it looks at both politics and poetics of witnessing and testimony in the emerging Anglophone writings by Kurdish diaspora authors.Thesis (PhD Doctorate)Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)School of Hum, Lang & Soc ScArts, Education and LawFull Tex
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