Local Kids, ‘Refugees’ and Publics of Privilege: Children’s Mediated and Intercultural Lives in a Regional Australian City

ABSTRACT

This paper considers contradictions and complexities around mediated and intercultural relationships between local children, primarily of Anglo-Australian descent, and ‘refugees’, in a regional Australian primary school community. It examines two different spaces in which local children engage with asylum seekers on a daily basis – the prolific ’speech communities‘ around refugees which circulate in public culture, and lived practices of ’everyday multiculturalism‘. Young people are shown to draw on negative tropes around ‘refugees’ to anchor themselves in a local cultural order. These speech communities, however, differ significantly from the forms of everyday multiculturalism which take place between local children and asylum-seeker youth. This raises questions about how narratives around refugees, privilege and morality become embedded in local cultural identities, and what this might mean for children’s attempts to belong within such contexts. These practices are discussed here through long-term ethnographic fieldwork, the importance of which is highlighted for making sense of young people’s prejudices and racism towards refugees in economically insecure communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth
• insecurity
• refugees
• racism
• primary school
• everyday multiculturalism
• multiculturalism
• interculturalism
• media

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, and Anita Harris and Greg Noble for insightful responses to earlier versions of this paper, one of which was presented at the 2014 Interactive Futures Conference at Monash University.

Notes on contributor

Rose Butler is a Research Associate in the Centre for Social Impact at UNSW Australia. She researches the work of children, young people and families to adapt to changes in the economy, with a focus on class, intimacy, identity and cultural diversity. Her new book, The economic child: culture, class and identity, is forthcoming with Springer. Rose co-convenes The Sociology of Youth Thematic Group of The Australian Sociological Association (TASA) and has a Ph.D. from the Australian National University.

Notes

1. On 26 August 2001, the MV Tampa, a Norwegian freighter ship, rescued 438 asylum seekers from a sinking boat in international waters between Indonesia and Christmas Island. These asylum seekers were mainly Afghan Hazaras on their way to request Asylum in Australia. When the Tampa entered Australian territorial waters off Christmas Island, the Australian government deployed SAS troops who boarded the ship and transferred the asylum seekers to the small, impoverished island nation of Nauru for resettlement through the UNHCR (Marr and Wilkinson 2003, Every and Augoustinos 2007, Burnside 2015). While these actions were met with widespread international condemnation, they were manufactured to the Australian public as measures of ‘border protection’, with the Tampa’s arrival in Australia constructed as a threat to national sovereignty (Dimasi 2010).

2. The names of schools and regional locations have all been changed to protect privacy. The names of participants, as well as some identifying features and information, have also been changed to protect privacy.

3. Current Australian government policy states that no asylum seeker who attempts to arrive by boat in Australia will ever settle in the country. Instead, they are sent to the two offshore processing facilities on Manus Island, in Papua New Guinea and on Nauru, where they are processed and either repatriated or resettled in a third country (Davidson and Doherty 2016). These detention centres are being managed by private companies and agreements made with these neighbouring countries (Phillips 2014). The conditions of detention and offshore processing are widely regarded by medical experts as causing immense damage to people’s physical and mental health (Davidson and Doherty 2016), particularly for children (Australian Human Rights Commission 2014).

4. Also as an Anglo-Australian researcher.

Additional information

Funding

This research was undertaken with the support of an Australian Postgraduate Award while the author was a Ph.D. candidate in the College of Arts and Social Sciences at the Australian National University.