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.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugee resettlement
• multiculturalism
• rural imaginary
• non-metropolitan
• diversity
• Australia

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the many people in Hometown from Karen and non-Karen backgrounds who shared their insights into local dynamics and invited us to attend their events. We also thank the reviewers for their thoughtful engagement and suggestions for improving this article. Finally, we acknowledge the funding support that made this project possible, provided by a La Trobe University Transforming Human Societies Research Focus Area grant.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 By giving this location a pseudonym, our aim is to both protect the anonymity of research participants and emphasize that the issues encountered in this place are not altogether unique to the location, with similar processes being experienced across regional and rural Australia (see also Bryson and Thompson 1972; Dempsey 1990).