Ruth Fincher

Gender, age, and ethnicity in immigration for an Australian nation.

Since the Second World War, large-scale immigration has been promoted by successive Australian governments as vital to national development. Most accounts of the content and implementation of the resulting immigration policies, particularly until the demise of the White Australia policy in 1972, have emphasised their racism. The ideal immigrant under these policies, however, was not merely of particular birthplace and ethnicity, but also had specified gender and age characteristics. The author proposes that selection of immigrant settlers in Australia since World War 2 has been gendered as well as racialised, often combining particular sexisms with particular racisms and specifying the ways that ethnicity and gender should coexist in immigrants of different age groups. She notes implications for immigrants once in Australia (especially women) of the category under which they have entered the country. And she suggests that a new phase relating immigration to redefinition of the Australian nation, in which the temporary migration of skilled workers is preferred to their permanent migration, may be beginning; a phase whose modes of regulation and outcomes are as distinctively gendered as were those of their predecessors.

Measuring the external effects of public programs

This paper reports attempts to measure systematically the external effects of public programs. Specifically the paper focuses upon those intangible (that is, nonquantitative) externalities, which are such a potent force in generating community opposition. The general concept of external effects is reviewed, in order to clarify the requirements of any systematic analysis. Two approaches, one using multidimensional scaling, the other using the semantic differential technique, are described and demonstrated in a simple empirical example. These techniques should facilitate the development of cross-sectional and aggregate analyses of conflict situations.

At Home with Diversity in Medium‐Density Housing

Drawing on the narratives of housing providers (planners, architects and developers) this paper describes views of “home” attributed to medium‐density housing in the inner suburbs of Melbourne. The principal dimension of home envisaged for those living in medium‐density housing is their close encounter with diverse neighbours and environments. This contrasts with the “home” seen as appropriate for “families” (understood as adults with dependant children) which is the suburban house with surrounding bounded land, and with the form of belonging claimed for high‐rise apartment dwellers in the city, which is the exciting world outside the apartment, of lifestyle and cosmopolitan consumption. We explore three case studies of medium‐density housing developments in inner Melbourne, focusing on the ways the housing providers see the material, physical form of this housing as contributing to residents being at home with diversity in the inner city.

Space, Gender and Institutions in Processes Creating Difference

Along with a number of scholars in feminist, English-language geography, the author makes a case for renewed attention to be paid to causal processes of differentiation in the analysis of geographies of gender. In particular, she argues for a greater concern with the gendered spatiality of organisations and institutions themselves, rather than seeing them as ‘black boxes’, or unchanging and exogenous aspects of the contexts to be analysed. The paper discusses the manner and the extent to which feminist geographies have examined differentiating processes associated with three notional ‘sites’ examined closely in feminist geography: the city, the family and the nation.

Identifying Class Struggle outside Commodity Production

The question addressed in this paper is how to identify class struggle in conflicts outside commodity production in advanced capitalism. The paper has six sections, After a brief introduction (section 1), it is shown in section 2 why it is important to delimit class struggle theoretically and empirically. In section 3, the recent recognition that struggles outside the capitalist workplace can be class struggles is documented. Criteria to identify class struggles in empirical practice are presented in section 4, with the focus on the definition of class struggle as activities which increase class capacity (the capacity of a class to act in relation to other classes), In section 5, three recent conflicts in inner-city Montreal are assessed using the criteria proposed. In each conflict a local community and a working class confronts the state over the form of state-funded housing or health care. In section 6, the conclusion, problems which remain in the conceptual formulation of class struggle in community conflicts are described.

Temporalities in Adaptation to Sea-Level Rise

Local residents, businesspeople, and policymakers engaged in climate change adaptation often think differently of the time available for action. Their understandings of time, and their practices that invoke time, form the complex and sometimes conflicting temporalities of adaptation to environmental change. They link the conditions of the past to those of the present and the future in a variety of ways, and their contemporary practices rest on such linking explicitly or implicitly. Yet the temporal connections between the present and distant future of places are undertheorized and poorly considered in the science and policy of adaptation to environmental change. In this article we address this theoretical and practical challenge by weaving together arguments from social and environmental geography with evidence from small coastal communities in southeastern Australia. We show that the past conditions residents’ imagined futures and that these local, imagined futures are incongruent with scientific, popular, and policy accounts of the future. Thus we argue that the temporalities of adaptation include incommensurate and unacknowledged ways of knowing and that these affect adaptation practices. We propose that strategies devised by governments for adapting to environmental change need to make visible—and calibrate policies with—the diverse temporalities of adaptation. On this basis, the times between the present and the long-term future can be better navigated as a series of short and negotiated policy steps.

Cosmopolitan or ethnically identified selves? Institutional expectations and the negotiated identities of international students

The identities of young people, including students, are influenced by their institutional contexts. In central Melbourne over the past decade, international students largely from Southeast Asia have been presented with the expectations of universities in which they are enrolled and churches with which many are affiliated. But the subject positions offered to students by universities and churches diverge: universities expect of their students cross-cultural interaction and a forming global cosmopolitanism, whilst churches expect devoutness to be exhibited through close interaction amongst international students, often in national and ethnically specific groupings. Drawing from lengthy interviews with students and institutional service providers, this paper finds that the influence of religious organisations on the social forming of students is more direct and effective than the influence of universities. The churches draw their student members tightly and persuasively into ethnically identified groups, whose members enact a sociality almost entirely conducted in relation to those churches. The universities, in contrast, are less directive and insistent about their expectations of cosmopolitan interactions. Students whose sociality seems compliant with university statements are those whose plans to be cosmopolitan were developed independently of university expectations.

New Geographies of Disadvantage: Implications for Service Delivery

Shifts are apparent in the spatial distribution of disadvantage in Australia since the 1970s. Not only are new sites of disadvantage emerging (small rural towns, manufacturing centres, coastal welfare regions, some outer suburbs), but research suggests a possible spatial cleavage between best-accessed Melbourne and Sydney, and ‘the rest’ of the country. At the same time, examples of provision and delivery of services continue to occur locally andregionally that demonstrate lack of attention to the characteristics of the places in which those services are received. The paper calls for spatially conscious public policy in service delivery, and considers the possibilities of this occurring if governments form partnerships with other organisations to provide services for communities.

Occupational Mobility in Segmented Labour Markets: The Experience of Immigrant Workers in Melbourne

This paper presents the results of a survey of a sample of Greek, Yugoslav and Vietnamese born persons who have worked in man ufacturing in Melbourne. Despite individual differences in training and experience before arriving in Australia and differences in their time of arrival, almost all the men and women first obtained jobs here as operators, labourers or drivers. There is evidence about the informal processes that channel migrants into such jobs. But once in these jobs, mobility is very low: about one half of the respondents evidenced no occupational mobility at all while for another one third their only career path was to exit the labour force. Some of the reasons for lack of mobility are examined. Thus, the initial allocation of immigrants into low skilled jobs in manufacturing is of long run significance for their careers rather than being a phenomenon of transition.

The Choice Agenda in Disability Housing Provision

The notion of choice is emerging as fundamental to new approaches to the provision of housing for people with intellectual disabilities. In order to achieve a more coherent and informed understanding of choice as a basis for theory, policy and practice in housing for people with intellectual disabilities, what is necessary is a clearer understanding of the complexities and tensions inherent in the idea of choice and their implications. Therefore, this paper considers three main themes which give rise to a more critical conceptualization of choice: a tension between the formalist and the redistributive approach to social justice; a tension between the individuality implied by choice and the community-care ethos of disability housing; and the institutional implications of the choice agenda within and beyond state-administration. The manifestation of these tensions is illustrated using a case study: housing for people with intellectual disabilities in the State of Victoria, Australia.