Greg Noble

The Discomfort of Strangers: Racism, Incivility and Ontological Security in a Relaxed and Comfortable Nation

This paper explores the increasing experience of discomfort amongst migrant Australians and their children, drawing on two sets of empirical data—one about a sense of home amongst migrants and the other about incidents of racism towards Arabs and Muslims since 2001. The idea of comfort captures what Giddens calls ontological security, or the trust we have in our surroundings, both human and non-human. This sense of security, built on mutual recognition, is fundamental to our capacity for social agency. Migrant home-building constantly negotiates the displacement thrown up by the act of migration as migrants attempt to settle in a new country. Experiences of racism, especially since 2001, however, undermine the ability of migrants to feel ‘at home’, and hence their capacity to exist as citizens.

Masculinities in place: situated identities, relations and intersectionality

It is the work of Peter Jackson in the early 1990s that is often attributed the status of being the first work within geography to focus explicitly upon the social and cultural constructions of masculinities. In his ‘programmatic paper’ (Berg and Longhurst 2003: 353), Jackson (1991: 209) observed that ‘the experience of men as men has scarcely yet been addressed’. As Rose (1993) demonstrates, much research within the discipline of geography is masculinist, seeing the world from the perspective of men but rarely bringing it to analytical attention. The consequence of this, of course, is that this perspective is universalised, whilst largely overlooking the experiences of women. The sense within much early feminist geographic scholarship was that geography had been written by men, for men and about men and therefore, women have been marginalised. As van Hoven and Hörschelmann (2005: 1) note, ‘geography has long been a discipline dominated by men and one about men’. It was not until the 1990s then that a more critical geographic scholarship started to develop that engaged with the concept of masculinities, especially the idea of hegemonic masculinity and of the place of men within the discipline (Berg and Longhurst 2003). Despite the proliferation of popular ‘books about men’ (Connell 1995: ix), Jackson’s comments were echoed almost 15 years later by van Hoven and Hörschelmann (2005: 5) who note that ‘while feminist geographers have critiqued the discipline’s neglect of women’s experiences effectively, there has been a notable lack of attention to the formation of masculine identities and spaces’. In stark contrast, there has been a rapid growth within the social sciences and humanities of the new field of ‘masculinity studies’ (Adams and Savran 2002). A number of scholars (Connell 1995, 2000; Kimmel 1995; Mac an Ghaill 1996; Messner 1997; Seidler Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 10, No. 8, December 2009

Everyday Cosmopolitanism and the Labour of Intercultural Community

The oft-proclaimed ‘crisis of multiculturalism’ has entailed a raft of both theoretical and political criticisms. Theoretically, the identity focus of multiculturalism is seen to be incapable of capturing the cultural complexity of contemporary societies. Politically, as a set of policies and programmes, it is seen to be inadequate for servicing that complexity, or addressing concerns around cultural division and the desire for social cohesion. In its place, a clutch of ideas has emerged to fill this void and offer alternative visions for grappling with the consequences of diversity in an increasingly globalised world. The interest in notions of cosmopolitanism is central here because they shift the focus away from a politics of identity, which reifies categories of ethnicity, towards an ethics of cohabitation. This shift, however, has not been without its problems — cosmopolitanism has been too often constrained by its philosophical and ethical orientation, and its preoccupation with elites, and rarely used to explore the pragmatics of living with difference in diverse settings.

‘Countless acts of recognition’: young men, ethnicity and the messiness of identities in everyday life

This paper engages with the ‘politics of recognition’ that inform much of our understanding of cultural diversity and young mens subjectivities. Drawing on data from several research projects on young people, gender and ethnicity, it explores issues around the nature of identity in everyday life. It argues that an emphasis on the primacy of ethnic or gender identity often embedded in the ‘politics of recognition’ fails to capture the complex nature of social being for young men. It argues that questions of legitimacy and competence arise in specific social settings and need to be addressed because they entail different logics of identification. Such an emphasis foregrounds the situated sociability of young mens identities: multiple and fluid attachments, the temporality of being, and the situated and provisional nature of subjectivity.

White Lines: The Intercultural Politics of Everyday Movement in Social Spaces

This article draws on research into racist vilification experienced by young Arab and Muslim Australians especially since 11 September 2001, to explore the links between public space, movement and national belonging, and the spatial regulation of cultural difference that functions in Australia. The authors analyse the way that the capacity to experience forms of national belonging and cultural citizenship is shaped by inclusion within or exclusion from local as well as nationally significant public spaces. While access to public space and freedom to move are conventionally seen as fundamental to a democratic state, these are often seen in abstract terms. This article emphasises how movement in public space is a very concrete dimension of our experience of freedom, in showing how incivilities directed against Arab and Muslim Australians have operated pedagogically as a spatialised regulation of national belonging. The article concludes by examining how processes associated with the Cronulla riots of December 2005 have retarded the capacities of Muslim and Arab Australians to negotiate within and across spaces, diminishing their opportunities to invest in local and national spaces, shrinking their resources and opportunities for place-making in public space.

Cosmopolitan Habits: The Capacities and Habitats of Intercultural Conviviality

Public debate around cultural diversity has been dominated by a focus on ‘panicked multiculturalism’ – those spaces which have been subject to social anxieties because of perceived conflicts around ethnicity. This article attempts to address the habitual ways cultural differences are transacted and reconciled in the daily conduct of people in culturally diverse settings. Although habit has been a central category for understanding racial prejudice, it has rarely impacted on an understanding of the practices and capacities which people develop for living with difference, the routinised ‘civic virtues’ of intercultural life. Cosmopolitanism and conviviality have become significant tools in framing this enquiry, though not without problems. The issue for this article is whether these terms are methodologically useful for the analysis of the habits of ‘civic virtues’. This article, drawing on the everyday interactions in and around a school, argues that we need to conceptualise conviviality as an object of empirical research. This requires that we think about habit as a pedagogical process, and the temporal and spatial elements through which ‘cosmopolitan’ behaviours are habituated.

Middle Eastern appearances : 'ethnic gangs', moral panic and media framing

This article details a moral panic in 1998–2000 about “ethnic gangs” in Sydneys south-western suburbs and analyses its ideological construction of the links between ethnicity, youth and crime. It documents the racisms of labelling and targeting of immigrant young people which misread, oversimplify and misrepresent complex and class-related social realities as racial, and the common-sense1 sharing of these understandings, representations and practices by “mainstream” media, police and vocal representatives in state, local and “ethnic” politics. The data used in this analysis are largely comprised of English-language media extracts, press, radio, television — both commercial and government-funded; and national, state and local in circulation, supplemented by interview material, from an ethnographic pilot study, with Lebanese-Australian youth, Lebanese immigrant parents, ethnic community workers, community leaders and police.

‘Intersections’ of Masculinity and Ethnicity: a study of male Lebanese immigrant youth in western Sydney

Abstract This article reports on an ethnographic study of teenage male secondary school students of Arabic‐speaking background in a working‐class suburb of Sydney. Interviews with friendship groups of migrant young men explored their identity formation in terms of ethnicity and masculinity. Their ‘intersections’ of masculinity and ethnicity, along with class relations, exhibit ‘contradictory consciousness’ characteristic of the ‘common sense’ of the socially subordinated. Forms of ideological ‘inversion’ provide ideational ‘resolutions’, in various contexts, of contradictions experienced in the lives of the youths. They deploy forms of ‘protest masculinity’ against injuries of racism, at school and in public spaces. The article examines the relationships of the young men with other groups of male teenagers, as well as with parents and teachers, showing how their masculinities are constructed within social relations of ethnicity and the experience of racism, and conversely how their ethnic identities are p...

Convivialities: An Orientation

Conviviality has become one of the latest groovy things. Along with cosmopolitanism and a host of other terms, it is (almost) everywhere (see, Hinchliffe and Whatmore 2006, Karner and Parker 2011, Hollingworth and Mansaray 2012, Noble 2013, Blommaert 2014, Wise and Velayutham 2014, Harris 2014, Heil 2014, Wessendorf 2014, Neal et al. 2015, Padilla et al. 2015, Da Costa 2016, Valluvan 2016) so much so that some scholars now talk of the ‘convivial turn’ (Neal et al. 2013), the latest in a series of ‘turns’ over the last 2–3 decades. It has become a preoccupation with good reason. In this special issue of the journal, we focus on the critical but productive possibilities of this ‘turn’ as scholars from around the world grapple with the challenges of intercultural relations in an increasingly globalised world, and the consequences this has for local relations of living together. We do not intend to offer a literature review of this ‘turn’ here as others have covered that territory (see, Heil 2014, Nowicka and Vertovec 2014). In what follows, we wish to map some of the reasons for this ‘turn’, and its methodological and conceptual consequences.

‘It is home but it is not home’: habitus, field and the migrant

This article explores the utility of Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and field in examining the experience of migrant resettlement. It draws on a speech spoken in two languages at a community organisation event to suggest that resettlement entails the transformation of the embodied capacities of migrants and the formation of a new set of bodily capacities which never quite become the dispositions of the citizen who ‘belongs’ unconditionally. It argues that, through a process of disorientation and reorientation, some migrants acquire a corporeal and social awkwardness which embodies the learning of the ‘difference of difference’. This differentiation is less about personal experience than social location, and it is less about some primordial ‘ethnicity’ deriving from the homeland than an ‘ethnicised’ habitus that reflects that location within Australian social fields. The article challenges Bourdieu’s insistence on the complicit relation between habitus and field, arguing that we need to draw on a micro-sociological language of ‘settings’ to account for migrants’ experiences of moving across and switching between social fields.