Raelene Wilding

Refugee youth, social inclusion, and ICTs: can good intentions go bad?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to anticipate the potential outcomes of efforts to promote social inclusion of youth from refugee backgrounds by considering diverse research conducted on information and communication technologies (ICTs), social inclusion, and young people of refugee backgrounds. It is argued that, while social inclusion programs might be successful at the local level, it is unclear whether they might actually do more harm than good in other, transnational contexts.Design/methodology/approach – Literature reporting on projects that use ICTs to facilitate social inclusion is critically examined, with specific attention to identifying the foundational assumptions underlying such projects. These foundational assumptions are considered in relation to findings of research that identifies the transnational character of the experiences, expectations and aspirations of young people of refugee backgrounds.Findings – The analysis highlights a conceptual disjuncture between the local aims of s...

Transnational Family-work Balance: Experiences of Australian Migrants Caring for Ageing Parents and Young Children across Distance and Borders

Abstract How are work and family balanced across national borders and distances? Are there unique features to these transnational balancing acts, or are they simply the same stories being reproduced on a global scale? We use qualitative interview data from migrants who live with their dependent children in Australia, and who simultaneously care for their ageing parents in Italy and Ireland, to explore points of similarity and difference in the balance of family and work at the local and transnational levels. We argue that, while the gendered dimensions are largely reproduced, there are some important points of dissimilarity in both the strategies adopted and the meanings attached to the negotiation of family-work balance in transnational contexts. These stories provide interesting new insights into the broader literature on the balance of family and work, highlighting the important role of culturally-specific models of family and care.

Romantic Love and 'Getting Married': Narratives of the Wedding in and out of Cinema Texts

In theories of mass popular culture, there remains a continuing assumption that the dominant messages encoded in media texts impact upon and influence their audiences. Thus, the question that is usually posed is one regarding the extent to which audiences are aware of and able to resist such domination by media messages. In this article, I use a comparison of narratives of romantic love in cinema texts and in the conversations of people ‘getting married’ to challenge such assumptions of unidirectional influence. I argue that both media texts and their audiences are part of a larger cultural logic, one that is not necessarily more dominating of audiences than of producers of texts, but which may nevertheless be used to reinforce prior unequal relations of social organization.

Mediating culture in transnational spaces: An example of young people from refugee backgrounds

Many young people with refugee backgrounds struggle to develop positive social and cultural identities in their new settlement locations and often experience disadvantage and marginalization. Yet, recent developments in low cost, accessible Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) potentially provide new opportunities for them to seek their sources of identity and identification elsewhere – through family, peer and cultural connections that transcend the limitations of place. But do youth from refugee backgrounds take advantage of these opportunities for cultural renewal and reconstruction and, if they do, what are the consequences for their local and transnational identities and social networks? As more young people experience mobility – either forced or voluntary – in the course of their early lives, virtual interactions become an important domain of social and cultural practice. In this paper, I explore the mediating effects of digital communications for a small group of young people from refugee backgrounds who currently live in Melbourne but conduct their lives across the globe, in order to reflect on what these experiences suggest about a new set of possibilities for creating trans-local cultures.

Aging in place in a mobile world: New media and older people’s support networks

This Focus Topic brings together an analysis of cross-cutting fields of critical importance for the future: aging, migrant transnationalism, and new media. While each of these fields has prompted vast literatures, their intersections remain surprisingly under-acknowledged. Yet, it is at these intersections that a significant social transformation is currently underway that requires attention from researchers, policy makers, and service providers engaging with older populations. It is now common knowledge that population aging is a significant and growing issue for many developed nations around the world, raising important questions about how to best accommodate the needs and opportunities of large numbers of older people, comprising a larger proportion of the population (Ezeh, Bongaarts, & Mberu, 2012; Lutz, Sanderson, & Scherbov, 2008). One common response to this issue by policy makers has been to explore strategies to promote and support “aging in place,” by improving the ability of older people to remain living independently in their own homes and local communities, regardless of age, income, or ability level (Hillcoat-Nalletamby & Ogg, 2014; Vasunilashorn et al., 2012). Studies of aging in place have demonstrated the benefits that can be gained from facilitating people’s engagement in their local neighborhoods and communities, including the prevention of social isolation that might result from reduced physical mobility. This has the advantage of reducing the costs of aged care and fulfilling the goals and aims of many older people to remain in their own homes, especially those living in western countries. However, the emphasis on what services and facilities are required in local neighborhoods or communities to support healthy aging in place tends to overlook the increasing role of migration, mobility, and new media in the lives of older people. It is now clear that more and more people are living “mobile lives” (Elliott & Urry, 2010) as a result of international and intra-national, permanent and temporary forms of migration and movement. Indeed, many of the developed nations that are experiencing population aging also have large – and aging – migrant populations. Aged migrants include both people who arrived in countries of settlement as young adults in the twentieth century as well as those relocating to establish new lives in their retirement in the twenty-first century. For these populations, “aging in place” is not a simple formula. It is not always clear in which “place” older migrants are willing or able to live as they age. While many elderly migrants

Communicating Across Borders

The recent and dramatic revolution in telecommunication technologies has transformed the ways in which people interact across distance. Many of the parents in our study are able to remember a time when it took several months for news and people to travel from one side of the world to the other. Now, entire family networks regularly and instantaneously share information across that same distance. This ‘death of distance’ (Cairncross, 1997) has important implications for transnational caregiving within family networks.

Ageing, migration and new media: The significance of transnational care:

The experiences of ageing for today’s older people present a striking contrast to those of the past. They are entering older age in a world that is characterised by complex mobilities and flows, in which large numbers of people are ageing in countries other than the one in which they were born and often at a distance from their closest family members. At the same time, new media are providing unprecedented opportunities to bring distant places and people together in new ways. These dramatic shifts are transforming the context within which older people provide and receive care. In this article, we argue that it has become both necessary and urgent for researchers and practitioners of ageing to reconsider their emphasis on the proximate care networks of older people, by incorporating closer attention to the increasingly global, transnational and virtual contexts within which ageing and aged care now routinely takes place.

Non-metropolitan productions of multiculturalism: refugee settlement in rural Australia

ABSTRACT In spite of the widespread backlash against multicultural policies, diversity remains a feature of globalized societies, requiring better understandings of how cultural difference is negotiated in rapidly transforming communities. Building on existing studies of multiculturalism in metropolitan contexts, we use interviews and ethnographic research to consider the transformation of a non-metropolitan community from a relatively homogeneous to an increasingly diverse place resulting from recent humanitarian resettlement flows. We argue that the new arrivals and established settlers in this regional city collaborate in the discursive and practical production of a form of multiculturalism that is shaped by the particularities of a rural imaginary, which they assert as distinct from urban experiences of super-diversity. At the same time, the local emphasis on rurality contributes to the reproduction of power inequalities that limit opportunities for eliminating discrimination and social exclusion in spite of evidence of conviviality in formal and informal encounters.

New Myths of OZ: The Australian Beach and the Negotiation of National Belonging by Refugee Background Youth

In this article, we consider the Australian beach as a material, imaginary and social arena in which different versions of national belonging are performed and contested. Focusing on two short films produced by young people from refugee backgrounds, we explore the negotiation of national belonging on the beach by people who occupy identity categories that are typically excluded from idealizing Australian beach mythologies. We argue that both the production and distribution of these films contribute to a reimagining of the Australian beach that creates new opportunities for people from migrant backgrounds to engage in the co-production of Australian identities in their own terms.

The Role of Visits

We concluded the previous chapter by highlighting how transnational caregiving is reliant on the exchange of communication. ‘Keeping in touch’ primarily took the form of ‘hearing’ from loved ones ‘voice-to-voice’ over the telephone, or via the virtual ‘voice’ and ‘presence’ of letters, emails, faxes and text messages. Our study raises the question, however, whether long-distance communication alone is sufficient to sustain satisfactory experiences and practices of care.