Natascha Klocker

Who's Driving the Asylum Debate?: Newspaper and Government Representations of Asylum Seekers

The welfare and future of asylum seekers in Australia have been very contentious contemporary issues. Findings based on content analysis of media releases in 2001 and 2002 reveal the unrelentingly negative way in which the federal government portrayed asylum seekers. While the governments negative tenor was constant during the study period, the specific terms of reference altered, from ‘threat’ through ‘other’, to ‘illegality’ and to ‘burden’. The negative construction of asylum seekers was clearly mutable. Analysis of newspaper reporting during the same period indicates that the media largely adopted the negativity and specific references of the government. The media dependence upon government statements and spokespersons in part explains this relation. The findings generally support the ‘propaganda model’ that holds a pessimistic view of the news medias critical abilities. However, the media departed somewhat slightly from the governments unchanging stance following some key events and revelations. Clearly, there is scope for disrupting the flow of negative constructions from government to media, and ultimately to audiences.

Living together but apart: material geographies of everyday sustainability in extended family households

In the Industrialized West, ageing populations and cultural diversity—combined with rising property prices and extensive years spent in education—have been recognized as diverse factors driving increases in extended family living. At the same time, there is growing awareness that household size is inversely related to per capita resource consumption patterns, and that urgent problems of environmental sustainability are negotiated, on a day-to-day basis (and often unconsciously), at the household level. This paper explores the sustainability implications of everyday decisions to fashion, consume, and share resources around the home, through the lens of extended family households. Through interviews with extended family households in Australia, we explore the potential for these living arrangements to reduce resource use, and thus improve sustainability outcomes. In these households, a desire to care for and support family members in hard times (rather than an overt sustainability agenda) has promoted particular modes of extended family living, including unique forms of sharing and pooling material goods. But cultural values of privacy, space, and independence—and the sanctity of the nuclear family—have led to duplication (and even multiplication) of household spaces, appliances, and resources, under one roof. The potential environmental and economic benefits of resource sharing within larger households are thus mediated by deep cultural values and exigencies of everyday life.

Negotiating change: working with children and their employers to transform child domestic work in Iringa, Tanzania

This paper documents the practical and action-oriented findings of an investigation into child domestic work undertaken in Iringa, Tanzania from 2005 to 2007. It provides an overview of the experiences of both child domestic workers and their employers, before discussing their suggestions for how child domestic working arrangements may be improved. The latter sections of the paper relate the attempts to regulate child domestic work that emerged from such dialogue. In providing detailed information on that process, the paper is positioned within the field of action research and resists the boundary frequently applied between academia and activism. It also moves beyond the tendency – observed in many existing studies of child (domestic) work – to document problems without proposing solutions. The regulatory focus of the project is theoretically supported by a social constructionist reading of the situation facing (child) domestic workers in Iringa (and elsewhere). Domestic workers have been discursively constructed as ‘one of the family’ rather than employees. This paper posits that the exploitation of child domestic workers relies on such constructions, and that improved regulation of this employment sector may offer an opportunity to discursively and tangibly reconstruct child domestic work as ‘real work’. Although formulated in the Tanzanian context, the recommendations are of broader geographical relevance.

Commentary: Career progress relative to opportunity: how many papers is a baby 'worth'?

Career progress relative to opportunity: how many papers is a baby ‘worth’? How many papers is a baby ‘worth’? We were prompted to ask this provocative question by recent experiences, working on appointment committees and writing research grants in Australia, where provisions to quantify research track-records ‘relative to opportunity’ call for applicants to explain how fl uctuations in their publication outputs have been impacted by ‘career interruptions’ such as childbearing. In this age of the increasingly neoliberal university—where every activity, output, and impact is audited (Castree, 2000; 2006)—our commentary seeks to question how decision makers account (or not) for the career impacts of having children. Our interest in this issue is both personal and political. We are both female early-career researchers and each of us had our fi rst (and currently, only) child within one year of attaining our doctorates. One of us has a continuing/tenured position at an Australian university; the other is on a fi xed-term contract. The demands on our time have been stretched considerably since starting our families; and an acute watchfulness of output and productivity is never far from our minds. We worry about not being able to keep up with the expected pace of publishing, gaining grants, and teaching in between, thus remaining competitive and employable. Of course, we are not the fi rst academics to feel like this. Well-documented coping strategies adopted by female (and some male) academics include: waiting until tenured before having children or not having children at all, timing children to fi t the academic calendar, working part-time, increasing research collaborations, hiding caring responsibilities, sleeping less, sacrifi cing personal lives and, for some, moving into the ‘second tier’ (1) or opting out of academia altogether. It is against the backdrop of such prospects, and in the spirit of fi nding ways to incorporate parental responsibilities into the expectations of academic labour, that we fi nd ourselves taking seriously the seemingly callous question of how many outputs childbearing might be ‘worth’ within the academic workplace. Although we are interested in the parenting experiences of female and male academics, childbearing and childrearing undoubtedly remain key sources of gender inequity in the academy. The underrepresentation of women in academia (particularly at the professorial level) has been explored by academic feminists since at least the 1970s (McDowell, 1979; Monk et al, 2004). Our concerns are positioned within a more recent body of scholarship that considers the gendered implications of neoliberalism, particularly for academics with caring responsibilities (Berg, 2002; Crang, 2003; 2007). Notwithstanding the neoliberal audit culture of contemporary Western universities, academia does enable valuable fl exibility around work times and locations, not found in (many) other professions. However, policies designed to assist with ‘work – life balance’, and achieve greater gender equity, have had limited success (Bailyn, 2003; Berg, 2002). Important progress has been made in terms of increased access to paid parental leave, increasingly fl exible working arrangements and (in the United States) scope to extend/stop the tenure clock to account for childbearing. But such policies remain inherently problematic: when academics (usually women) make use of them, they may be shooting themselves in the foot.

Doing participatory action research and doing a PhD: words of encouragement for prospective students

Participatory action research (PAR) carries the promise that academics can make a difference, an appealing prospect for many postgraduate students. This paper is written by an early career researcher who ‘survived’ a PAR PhD. Despite acknowledging the unique challenges faced by students attempting PAR, it argues that these have been overstated in much of the literature. This paper offers a detailed personal insight into the ways in which PAR and PhDs do (and do not) mix, and argues that successful PAR PhDs can be undertaken, contra the prevailing despondent rhetoric. It concludes with suggestions for ‘energizing’ PAR in graduate geographical education.

Re-thinking climate change adaptation and capacities at the household scale

The reality of anthropogenic climate change has rendered adaptive responses at all scales an imperative. Households are an increasing focus of attention, but more in the developing world than the developed world, because of the presumed lesser vulnerabilities and stronger adaptive capacities of the latter. Critiques of such presumptions, and the quantitative, macro-scale focus of much adaptation research are emergent. How relatively affluent households, as complex social assemblages, may adapt to climate change impacts encountered in their day-to-day functioning remains unclear. There is, however, a sizeable body of research on household environmental sustainability in the developed world. That research has significant implications for climate change adaptation. This paper brings household environmental sustainability research into productive conversation with the climate change adaptation literature. The former shows that sustainability issues are refracted through social relations within households, and the demands of everyday life. This has three implications for how adaptation needs to be re-framed. First, climate change will not be experienced only via climatic stimuli and extreme weather events. It will be entwined in the complexity of everyday life. Second, knowledge of climate change is not a prerequisite for household adaptive capacity. Third, household-scale analyses show that assumed capacities and vulnerabilities may end up being quite different to those imagined or measured at a macro-scale. These insights invite consideration of how householders’ adaptive capacities can be better supported.

Diversifying ethnicity in Australia's population and environment debates

ABSTRACT Population–environment debates in Australia are at an impasse. While the ability of this continent to sustain more migrants has attracted persistent scrutiny, nuanced explorations of diverse migrant cultures and their engagements with Australian landscapes have scarcely begun. Yet as we face the challenges of a climate changing world we would undoubtedly benefit from the most varied knowledges we can muster. This paper brings together three arenas of environmental debate circulating in Australia—the immigration/carrying capacity debate, comparisons between Indigenous and Anglo-European modes of environmental interaction, and research on household sustainability dilemmas—to demonstrate the exclusionary tendencies of each. We then attempt to reorient them in productive ways, by attending to the complexity of environmental sustainability in a context of immense ethnic diversity. Attentiveness to ethnic diversity offers three important insights: (1) Anglo-European Australian understandings of nature and environmentalism are culturally specific, but other perspectives are possible; (2) tensions can arise when ethnic differences in environmental attitude or practice come into contact; and (3) cultural environmental research offers scope to identify ethnically diverse vernacular sustainability practices that should be supported. Each of these threads requires attention in a context where population–environment debates often overlook cultural complexity, and readily spiral into strident anti-immigration sentiments.

‘Reel love’ across ethnic boundaries? The extent and significance of inter-ethnic intimacy in Australian cinema

Abstract National cinemas play an important role in the construction of national identities, representing the ‘self’ to both domestic and international audiences. Evidence of the material impacts of media representations on individuals and society, and the pervasiveness of movie-watching as a cultural activity, underscore the importance of scholarly inquiry into film. Here, we are concerned with how ethnic diversity has been negotiated within the Australian national cinema – specifically at the scale of intimate interpersonal relationships. Our analysis of twenty-five recent Australian films considers how cinema alerts audiences to the possibilities and limitations of love within and across ethnic boundaries. We find cause for modest optimism in regard to the frequency of Australian cinematic representations of inter-ethnic intimacy, although the narrow range of ethnic groups permitted to participate in these encounters, and an apparent reticence to portray marriage, co-habitation and child-bearing across ethnic boundaries, remain cause for concern.

Gender, ethnicity and sustainable mobility: a governmentality analysis of migrant Chinese women’s daily trips in Sydney

Abstract The automobile is acknowledged as an urgent environmental sustainability issue in cities where it remains pivotal to everyday life and society. We explore the potential of migrants – from societies where urban spaces and everyday life are not centred on the automobile – to elucidate pathways for reducing car dependence. This paper explores the sustainability implications of everyday mobility decisions in Sydney, Australia, through the mobility discourses of female migrants from China. Our governmentality analyses suggest a preference, among female Chinese migrants, to initially walk and cycle after arriving in Sydney. Many expressed a fear rather than a love of driving. For these migrant women, the decision to eventually purchase and use an automobile – in the specific transport context of Sydney – was forced rather than chosen. We call for others to address the reciprocal relationship between gender and ethnicity in their thinking about sustainable transport.

Ethnically Diverse Transport Behaviours: An Australian Perspective

Rates of car ownership in Australia are among the highest in the world. Private cars have shaped the urban form of Australian cities and the daily routines of their residents, making it possible to fulfil geographically stretched responsibilities for work, family, and social lives. But the dominance of the private car in Australian lives and landscapes should not be confused with universality. Aggregate, population-wide statistics of car ownership and use mask the fact that not all Australians are equally car dependent. In this paper, we report on the results of a household sustainability survey conducted in metropolitan Sydney and Wollongong. Overseas-born persons, migrants, and (some) ethnic minority groups were found to own fewer cars – and to use them less – than their Anglo-Australian and Australian-born counterparts. These differences were not attributable to socio-economic or demographic factors. Our findings, which point towards the existence of diverse cultures of transport within the Australian population, are significant for transport planning and policymaking. Given profound concerns about the environmental implications of car use, the environmentally (more) sustainable transport behaviours of ethnic minorities and migrants should be supported. A shift in research focus away from the most car-dependent groups in Australian society may also be more widely instructive. The transport practices, experiences, and strategies of those who own and drive cars at below-average rates may indeed contribute practical lessons to inform planning for more environmentally sustainable transport futures.