Eve Vincent

Everyday and Cosmo-Multiculturalisms: Doing Diversity in Gentrifying School Communities

Gentrification is transforming the class and ethnic profile of urban communities across the world, and changing how people deal with social and cultural difference. This paper looks at some of the social consequences of gentrification in Sydney, Australia, focusing on local schools. It argues that in this urban Australian context, the influx of middle-class Anglo-Australians into traditionally working-class, migrant-dominated areas is significantly changing how people relate to each other within local schools, often fragmenting and dividing school communities. These shifts are intensified by the public policy of school choice, which has enabled some parents to bypass their local school for a more ‘desirable’ one. This paper presents a close local study of two schools within one gentrifying Sydney suburb, examining how the schools have become more polarised. In particular, we examine how this demographic polarisation has given rise to two distinct modes of ‘doing diversity’, namely, ‘everyday’ and ‘cosmo-multiculturalisms’. While the former is about daily, normalised encounters across difference, the latter is a form of multiculturalism based on strategic and learned ‘appreciation’ and consumption of difference, characteristic of gentrified communities.

Mining, indigeneity, alterity: or, mining Indigenous alterity?

ABSTRACT In this special issue on ‘extraction’, we think critically about two urgent and entangled questions, examining the political economy of mining and Indigenous interests in Australia, and the moral economy of Indigenous cultural difference within Cultural Studies and Anthropology. In settler colonial states such as Australia, Indigenous cultural difference is now routinely presented as commensurate with, rather than obstructive of, extractive industry activity. Meanwhile, the renewed interest in ‘radical alterity’ across these disciplines has seen a movement away from regarding authoritative claims about ‘others’ as morally suspect – as only extracting from or mining Indigenous worlds for insights and academic prestige. The ‘ontological turn’, however, leads us to question the empirical status of the ontologies circulating through academic discussions. What happens when Indigenous people disappoint, in their embrace of environmentally destructive industries such as mining, for example? We argue that in cases where ‘they’ are not as different as ‘we’ might hope them to be, scholars should be concerned to foreground the potential role of colonial history and processes of domination in the production and reduction of ontological difference. Second, we call for critical assessment of the political, epistemological, and social effects of both academic and societal evaluations of difference. We conclude by urging for a scholarship that does not pick and choose between agreeable and less agreeable forms of cultural difference.

‘Tutored within an inch of their life’: morality and ‘old’ and ‘new’ middle class identities in Australian schools

ABSTRACT This paper documents the self-positioning of a segment of middle class parents, whom we call ‘community-minded’, as they distinguish themselves from pedagogies and parenting practices for education often associated with ‘tiger parenting’ and ‘Asian’ practices in Australia. Increased public interest has scrutinised the growth of high achieving Asian-Australian students and commonly depicts ‘Asian success’ as being about ethnicity and/or race. As academics argue, such essentialism validates existing capitals among middle-class parents and feeds into a politics of racial hostility. Building on this literature, we focus on this site of tension as one of a struggle between ‘old’ and ‘new’ middle classes. Drawing on a small study in Sydney NSW, we deal with a fraction of the middle classes for whom particular educational strategies are disavowed as part of their self-positioning as moral, ‘community-minded’ citizens. This is analysed as a response to broader changes across education, the economy and migration trajectories which have emerged alongside what Watkins and Noble call the ‘ethnicisation’ of academic achievement. These tensions provide insight into how ‘old’ and ‘new’ middle classes are attempting to co-exist in Australian schools, as global political and economic transformations are negotiated within the micropolitics of parenting and cultural constructions of childhood.

Indigenous cultural studies: intersections between cultural studies and Indigenous studies

Like many first-time visitors to Borroloola, I went to the towns small museum shortly after arriving to begin anthropological fieldwork in mid-2007. Located in the Northern Territorys oldest surviving police station, which dates from 1887, the museum was created in the mid 1980s as a result of the loving efforts of an amateur historian named Judy Cotton.1 Inside the museum, amidst the flotsam and jetsam of the towns colonial history - weathered saddles, rusted stirrups, dingo traps, broken spectacles, glass bottles, moth-eaten uniforms, reproduced photographs, scraps of text - is the trunk of an ironwood tree (Erythrophleum chlorostachys) that was reportedly blazed by Ludwig Leichhardt during his first expedition from Moreton Bay to Port Essington in 1844 to 1845.2 Originally situated on the edge of the Calvert River, the trunk was moved to the Borroloola museum in 1985.3 Rooted in iron now rather than soil, its location in the museum draws attention to the politics of heritage and history in this small town. With the Northern Territory Police Forces involvement in the violence of colonial settlement, the placement of the tree in Borroloolas Old Police Station Museum is in some ways an aggressively political act, illustrative of conservative attempts to portray the explorers as heroic founders of modern Australia. In many ways, this tree is a paradigmatic example of what Paul Carter called spatiality as a form of non-linear writing; a form of history, the study of which reveals the process of transforming space into place in the intentional world of the texts.4 However, while seemingly amenable to such textual analysis manifesting a straightforward critique of the hegemony of nationalist imperial history, alternative responses to the Leichhardt tree emerged as I completed fieldwork in Borroloola. These pointed to a continuing struggle over the meaning of exploration, and colonisation, in northern Australia.History, Power, Text: Cultural Studies and Indigenous Studies is a collection of essays on Indigenous themes published between 1996 and 2013 in the journal known first as UTS Review and now as Cultural Studies Review. This journal opened up a space for new kinds of politics, new styles of writing and new modes of interdisciplinary engagement. History, Power, Text highlights the significance of just one of the exciting interdisciplinary spaces, or meeting points, the journal enabled. ‘Indigenous cultural studies’ is our name for the intersection of cultural studies and Indigenous studies showcased here. This volume republishes key works by academics and writers Katelyn Barney, Jennifer Biddle, Tony Birch, Wendy Brady, Gillian Cowlishaw, Robyn Ferrell, Bronwyn Fredericks, Heather Goodall, Tess Lea, Erin Manning, Richard Martin, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Stephen Muecke, Alison Ravenscroft, Deborah Bird Rose, Lisa Slater, Sonia Smallacombe, Rebe Taylor, Penny van Toorn, Eve Vincent, Irene Watson and Virginia Watson—many of whom have taken this opportunity to write reflections on their work—as well as interviews between Christine Nicholls and painter Kathleen Petyarre, and Anne Brewster and author Kim Scott. The book also features new essays by Birch, Moreton-Robinson and Crystal McKinnon, and a roundtable discussion with former and current journal editors Chris Healy, Stephen Muecke and Katrina Schlunke.

Fear and wonder out bush: engaging a critical anthropological perspective on indigenous alterity

Abstract When an Aboriginal family group called ‘Aunty Joan Mob’ travel ‘out bush’, they make contact with awe- and fear-inspiring country. In attempting to make sense of their wonder, I would be ill-served to rely too heavily on a kind of culturalism, which might attribute the source of this wonder to ontological precepts long shared by these (and other) Aboriginal people. Instead I seek to engage a ‘critical’ anthropological perspective in arguing that a range of factors are all crucial to understanding why Aunty Joan Mob engage in “wonder discourse”, through which they consider the primordial Aboriginal past and the alterity embodied by their own ancestors. I outline the role of settler colonial history, national political developments and the liberal promise of the recognition of Indigenous cultural difference, bitter local intra-Aboriginal conflicts, and the subordination of Aboriginal people within rural Australia’s racial schema. Taken together, these factors help explain that the bush today acts as a repository for latent powers, which are both marveled at and feared. Out bush Aboriginal people seek to escape the white gaze: this is a place where Aboriginal’s ability to survive, independent of white foodstuffs, is conjured up and relished. Wonder attends to Aunty Joan Mob’s experience of being in the bush, which becomes, albeit temporarily, a politically transformative imaginary space.

History, Power, Text : Indigenous Studies and Cultural Studies

Like many first-time visitors to Borroloola, I went to the towns small museum shortly after arriving to begin anthropological fieldwork in mid-2007. Located in the Northern Territorys oldest surviving police station, which dates from 1887, the museum was created in the mid 1980s as a result of the loving efforts of an amateur historian named Judy Cotton.1 Inside the museum, amidst the flotsam and jetsam of the towns colonial history - weathered saddles, rusted stirrups, dingo traps, broken spectacles, glass bottles, moth-eaten uniforms, reproduced photographs, scraps of text - is the trunk of an ironwood tree (Erythrophleum chlorostachys) that was reportedly blazed by Ludwig Leichhardt during his first expedition from Moreton Bay to Port Essington in 1844 to 1845.2 Originally situated on the edge of the Calvert River, the trunk was moved to the Borroloola museum in 1985.3 Rooted in iron now rather than soil, its location in the museum draws attention to the politics of heritage and history in this small town. With the Northern Territory Police Forces involvement in the violence of colonial settlement, the placement of the tree in Borroloolas Old Police Station Museum is in some ways an aggressively political act, illustrative of conservative attempts to portray the explorers as heroic founders of modern Australia. In many ways, this tree is a paradigmatic example of what Paul Carter called spatiality as a form of non-linear writing; a form of history, the study of which reveals the process of transforming space into place in the intentional world of the texts.4 However, while seemingly amenable to such textual analysis manifesting a straightforward critique of the hegemony of nationalist imperial history, alternative responses to the Leichhardt tree emerged as I completed fieldwork in Borroloola. These pointed to a continuing struggle over the meaning of exploration, and colonisation, in northern Australia.History, Power, Text: Cultural Studies and Indigenous Studies is a collection of essays on Indigenous themes published between 1996 and 2013 in the journal known first as UTS Review and now as Cultural Studies Review. This journal opened up a space for new kinds of politics, new styles of writing and new modes of interdisciplinary engagement. History, Power, Text highlights the significance of just one of the exciting interdisciplinary spaces, or meeting points, the journal enabled. ‘Indigenous cultural studies’ is our name for the intersection of cultural studies and Indigenous studies showcased here. This volume republishes key works by academics and writers Katelyn Barney, Jennifer Biddle, Tony Birch, Wendy Brady, Gillian Cowlishaw, Robyn Ferrell, Bronwyn Fredericks, Heather Goodall, Tess Lea, Erin Manning, Richard Martin, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Stephen Muecke, Alison Ravenscroft, Deborah Bird Rose, Lisa Slater, Sonia Smallacombe, Rebe Taylor, Penny van Toorn, Eve Vincent, Irene Watson and Virginia Watson—many of whom have taken this opportunity to write reflections on their work—as well as interviews between Christine Nicholls and painter Kathleen Petyarre, and Anne Brewster and author Kim Scott. The book also features new essays by Birch, Moreton-Robinson and Crystal McKinnon, and a roundtable discussion with former and current journal editors Chris Healy, Stephen Muecke and Katrina Schlunke.

History, Power, Text: Cultural Studies and Indigenous Studies

Like many first-time visitors to Borroloola, I went to the towns small museum shortly after arriving to begin anthropological fieldwork in mid-2007. Located in the Northern Territorys oldest surviving police station, which dates from 1887, the museum was created in the mid 1980s as a result of the loving efforts of an amateur historian named Judy Cotton.1 Inside the museum, amidst the flotsam and jetsam of the towns colonial history - weathered saddles, rusted stirrups, dingo traps, broken spectacles, glass bottles, moth-eaten uniforms, reproduced photographs, scraps of text - is the trunk of an ironwood tree (Erythrophleum chlorostachys) that was reportedly blazed by Ludwig Leichhardt during his first expedition from Moreton Bay to Port Essington in 1844 to 1845.2 Originally situated on the edge of the Calvert River, the trunk was moved to the Borroloola museum in 1985.3 Rooted in iron now rather than soil, its location in the museum draws attention to the politics of heritage and history in this small town. With the Northern Territory Police Forces involvement in the violence of colonial settlement, the placement of the tree in Borroloolas Old Police Station Museum is in some ways an aggressively political act, illustrative of conservative attempts to portray the explorers as heroic founders of modern Australia. In many ways, this tree is a paradigmatic example of what Paul Carter called spatiality as a form of non-linear writing; a form of history, the study of which reveals the process of transforming space into place in the intentional world of the texts.4 However, while seemingly amenable to such textual analysis manifesting a straightforward critique of the hegemony of nationalist imperial history, alternative responses to the Leichhardt tree emerged as I completed fieldwork in Borroloola. These pointed to a continuing struggle over the meaning of exploration, and colonisation, in northern Australia.History, Power, Text: Cultural Studies and Indigenous Studies is a collection of essays on Indigenous themes published between 1996 and 2013 in the journal known first as UTS Review and now as Cultural Studies Review. This journal opened up a space for new kinds of politics, new styles of writing and new modes of interdisciplinary engagement. History, Power, Text highlights the significance of just one of the exciting interdisciplinary spaces, or meeting points, the journal enabled. ‘Indigenous cultural studies’ is our name for the intersection of cultural studies and Indigenous studies showcased here. This volume republishes key works by academics and writers Katelyn Barney, Jennifer Biddle, Tony Birch, Wendy Brady, Gillian Cowlishaw, Robyn Ferrell, Bronwyn Fredericks, Heather Goodall, Tess Lea, Erin Manning, Richard Martin, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Stephen Muecke, Alison Ravenscroft, Deborah Bird Rose, Lisa Slater, Sonia Smallacombe, Rebe Taylor, Penny van Toorn, Eve Vincent, Irene Watson and Virginia Watson—many of whom have taken this opportunity to write reflections on their work—as well as interviews between Christine Nicholls and painter Kathleen Petyarre, and Anne Brewster and author Kim Scott. The book also features new essays by Birch, Moreton-Robinson and Crystal McKinnon, and a roundtable discussion with former and current journal editors Chris Healy, Stephen Muecke and Katrina Schlunke.