- Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation
Building C, Level 6
Deakin University, Burwood Campus VIC
- University of British Columbia, English, Graduate StudentUniversity of Melbourne, Arts Faculty, School of Culture and Communication, Graduate Studentadd
- Community Arts, Performativity, Affect (Cultural Theory), Contemporary Art, Multiculturalism, Philosophy, and 10 moreRace and Ethnicity, Judith Butler, Cultural Studies, Digital Storytelling, Jacques Rancière, Everyday Multiculturalism, Cosmopolitanism, Critical cosmopolitanism, Critical Race Theory and Whiteness theory, and InterCultural Studiesedit
- I was jointly-awarded a PhD in Cultural Studies in 2016 by The University of Melbourne and the University of British ... moreI was jointly-awarded a PhD in Cultural Studies in 2016 by The University of Melbourne and the University of British Columbia. My dissertation analysed the intersection of everyday multiculturalism and digital storytelling. Specifically, it asked: what are the ways in which Australian digital storytelling projects engage with concepts of “cultural diversity” & “everyday multiculturalism” to create material possibilities for the ethnic subject?
After completing my dissertation, I worked for the Research Unit in Public Cultures (RUPC) at The University of Melbourne, first as the Special Projects and Research Grants Officer, and then as a Research Fellow. During my time at the RUPC I managed two significant interdisciplinary research projects on the role of art and culture in urban environments. The first, Refuge, was an interdisciplinary project with Melbourne’s Art House that examined the role of art in the discourse of climate change. The second, From Ethnic Enclaves to Cosmopolitan Cultures, was an evaluation project for the Greek Centre for Contemporary Culture. This project investigated the changing nature of the Greek diaspora and associated cultural precincts in the city of Melbourne. While here, I also coordinated the Masters topic MECM90003 Mobility, Culture and Communication. I have been an assistant editor of the Journal of Intercultural Studies since 2014.
In August 2017, I began a two-year postdoctoral project at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation. My research interests include critical cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, and diaspora studies, and I have an overall interest in exploring how community-based arts practice and digital interactions can be used to disrupt whiteness in neo-colonial contexts.
The path to these postdoctoral positions has not been linear, and I have found myself working in various areas under various “hats” over the years. After my undergraduate degree at Flinders University I worked in Programming for the Queensland Folk Federation’s Woodford Folk Festival and its sister festival The Dreaming. This work heightened my interest in community-based arts and concepts of whiteness and cultural diversity, inevitably seeing me return to Flinders University to begin postgraduate studies. At Flinders University, I fulfilled various RA roles, including for the Yunggorendi First Nations Centre, where I had the privilege to work with the Ngarrindjeri Regional Authority on an Indigenous Governance Project. I also moonlighted for a couple of years as a manager of a visual-arts/design business (are/why?), and for the past three years have co-managed an online arts community that explores the topic of refugees and global migration (http://yourfirstmate.org).
These multifarious experiences have given me a better understanding of the complexities at play at the interface of cultural studies and ‘cultural industries.’ In particular, they have helped refine my understanding of the critical role that cultural difference and re-translation plays in ensuring meaningful and rigorous engagement with place and identity in contemporary life.edit - Postdoctoral Supervisor: A/Prof Melinda Hinksonedit
In the twenty-first century, the migration terrain has a new, networked shape. More accurately, the terrain is perpetually reshaping itself, operating as one node in a complex network of mobility. In this networked and culturally diverse... more
In the twenty-first century, the migration terrain has a new, networked shape. More accurately, the terrain is perpetually reshaping itself, operating as one node in a complex network of mobility. In this networked and culturally diverse society the experience of art has also undergone a radical transformation. Not only do people increasingly expect to interact with artwork through a variety of media platforms, the cultural reference points that people bring to these interactions are wider and more diverse than any other point in history. Cultural participation has thus disrupted the temporal and spatial conventions of mobility and its study, taking on an ambient mode and calling for new conceptual tools that better capture this predicament. Migration studies, media and communication scholarship, and art criticism have used multicultural debates to help map people’s engagement with place and space and offer insights into the contemporary experiences of culture-in-flux. This paper proposes that the metaphor of turbulence can be used to bridge these insights, and better capture the ambient ways we now experience art and culture. With reference to art collectives and collaborations in the Asia-Pacific, the paper explores how conviviality becomes a conduit for creating cosmopolitan worlds, worlds on the move, worlds capable of navigating turbulent everyday life.
Research Interests:
http://phaenex.uwindsor.ca/ojs/leddy/index.php/phaenex/issue/view/452/showToc This international ensemble of scholars discuss Thomas Nail’s The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford UP, 2015). These scholars represent various disciplines... more
http://phaenex.uwindsor.ca/ojs/leddy/index.php/phaenex/issue/view/452/showToc
This international ensemble of scholars discuss Thomas Nail’s The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford UP, 2015). These scholars represent various disciplines within the academy and divergent methodologies. One thing we share in common, though, is the opinion that the migrant needs to occupy a more significant place within our political theory and policy. Nail’s book is one of kinopolitics, that is, a politics of movement. It provides a kind of theory of social motion. According to Nail, the book offers a remedy to problems in how the migrant is typically theorized, namely that (a) the migrant is understood as a derivative figure in contrast to the stable denizen and (b) the migrant is discussed through the lens of the state. His remedial maneuver mobilizes the potential to understand the figure of the migrant by placing the migrant in the primary position, by offering a political philosophy of the migrant.
Joining us today are Robin Celikates, Daniella Trimboli, Sandro Mezzadra, Todd May, Ladelle McWhorter, Andrew Dilts, and Adriana Novoa. Welcome and thank you all for participating in this discussion about Thomas Nail’s The Figure of the Migrant. We have here a diverse set of scholars representing various disciplines within the academy and divergent methodologies. One thing we share in common, though, is the opinion that the migrant needs to occupy a more significant place within our political theory and policy. Thomas’s book is one of kinopolitics, that is, a politics of movement. It offers a kind of theory of social motion. Thomas, do you want to offer a few words to get us started?
This international ensemble of scholars discuss Thomas Nail’s The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford UP, 2015). These scholars represent various disciplines within the academy and divergent methodologies. One thing we share in common, though, is the opinion that the migrant needs to occupy a more significant place within our political theory and policy. Nail’s book is one of kinopolitics, that is, a politics of movement. It provides a kind of theory of social motion. According to Nail, the book offers a remedy to problems in how the migrant is typically theorized, namely that (a) the migrant is understood as a derivative figure in contrast to the stable denizen and (b) the migrant is discussed through the lens of the state. His remedial maneuver mobilizes the potential to understand the figure of the migrant by placing the migrant in the primary position, by offering a political philosophy of the migrant.
Joining us today are Robin Celikates, Daniella Trimboli, Sandro Mezzadra, Todd May, Ladelle McWhorter, Andrew Dilts, and Adriana Novoa. Welcome and thank you all for participating in this discussion about Thomas Nail’s The Figure of the Migrant. We have here a diverse set of scholars representing various disciplines within the academy and divergent methodologies. One thing we share in common, though, is the opinion that the migrant needs to occupy a more significant place within our political theory and policy. Thomas’s book is one of kinopolitics, that is, a politics of movement. It offers a kind of theory of social motion. Thomas, do you want to offer a few words to get us started?
Research Interests: Critical Theory, History, Cultural History, Sociology, Cultural Studies, and 19 moreInternational Relations, Political Economy, Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Social Sciences, Globalization, Political Theory, International Studies, Social Philosophy, Immigration, Cultural Theory, Immigration Studies, Political Science, Migration, Transitional Justice, Justice, Undocumented Immigration, Migration Studies, and Social and Political Philosophy
The overall aim of this evaluation is to examine the role of arts and culture in climate change conversations. Using the case study of Refuge 2016, the evaluation focuses on how communities like North Melbourne can build resilience and... more
The overall aim of this evaluation is to examine the role of arts and culture in climate change conversations. Using the case study of Refuge 2016, the evaluation focuses on how communities like North Melbourne can build resilience and prepare for acute weather shocks. The Research Unit in Public Cultures evaluated the exercise, based on three measures:
1. how arts organisations can contribute to the planning and creation of Emergency Relief Centres;
2. how arts pedagogy can communicate resilience, and;
3. how arts participation can foster community
resilience.
1. how arts organisations can contribute to the planning and creation of Emergency Relief Centres;
2. how arts pedagogy can communicate resilience, and;
3. how arts participation can foster community
resilience.
Research Interests: Community Resilience, Cultural Diversity, Community Arts, Arts-Based Participatory Action Research, Participatory and Relational Arts, and 2 moreEvaluation of Community Arts and Creative Community Environmental Projects and Emergency Relief Rehabiliation /Disaster Risk Reduction and Local Government
Research Interests:
Written in solidarity with Djab Wurrung people who are currently defending sacred land from destruction by the State government in Victoria, Australia. The paper is about cultural memory, complicated paternal attachments, and, ultimately,... more
Written in solidarity with Djab Wurrung people who are currently defending sacred land from destruction by the State government in Victoria, Australia. The paper is about cultural memory, complicated paternal attachments, and, ultimately, ethical relationships with Others.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
The contemporary diasporic experience is often fragmented and contradictory, and the notion of 'home' increasingly blurry. In response to these moving circumstances, many diaspora studies' scholars have turned to the everyday, focussing... more
The contemporary diasporic experience is often fragmented and contradictory, and the notion of 'home' increasingly blurry. In response to these moving circumstances, many diaspora studies' scholars have turned to the everyday, focussing on the local particularities of the diasporic experience. Using the Italian-Australian digital storytelling collection "Racconti: La Voce del Popolo" and The Foundling Archive's digital film "Italian-Australian: Defining Diaspora, Creating Culture," this paper argues that, while crucial, the everyday experience of diaspora always needs to be read in relation to a broader context, one which includes the larger, biopolitics at play. Indeed, to draw on Grant Farred (2009), the experience of diaspora must be read both in relation to-but always 'out of'-context. Reading diaspora in this way ensures diasporic experience remains a constant local/global translation, one that avoids collapsing into the racialised dialectic of 'us' and 'them'. I argue that this form of translation remains pertinent in countries like Australia, whose multiculturalism rhetoric continues to echo normative whiteness.
Research Interests:
This short presentation introduced the panel on intergenerational barriers to cultural participation, held as part of the symposium "[Digital] Ageing and The Arts" on 6 December 2017. This interdisciplinary symposium explored, through... more
This short presentation introduced the panel on intergenerational barriers to cultural participation, held as part of the symposium "[Digital] Ageing and The Arts" on 6 December 2017. This interdisciplinary symposium explored, through critical, technological and creatives lenses, how older people access the arts. The event involved artists, practitioners, members of the public, policymakers, and academics in questions of reception and location, to both (un)think and (re)make arts access for older people. This particular panel pivoted off research carried out by Daniella Trimboli, Tia Di Biase and Nikos Papastergiadis on the social, cultural and economic impact of the Greek Centre for Contemporary Culture in the city of Melbourne. One outcome of this research was a better understanding of different generational groups in the Greek diaspora of Melbourne, and the ways in which they engage with one another and with the broader concepts of Greekness and belonging. Other members of the panel were: Tia Di Biase (Research Unit in Public Cultures & Swinburne University), Lella Carridi (Multicultural Arts Victoria), Nat Grant (independent sound artist), and Grace and Katrina Lolicato (The Foundling Archive).
Research Interests:
Much research has been carried out on the discursive dehumanisation of refugees and asyslum seekers in Australia. This discourse has an affective dimension that, in Sara Ahmed’s terms, ‘sticks’, impressing upon refugees and asylum seekers... more
Much research has been carried out on the discursive dehumanisation of refugees and asyslum seekers in Australia. This discourse has an affective dimension that, in Sara Ahmed’s terms, ‘sticks’, impressing upon refugees and asylum seekers at a corporeal level. Written and visual depictions of self and Other in comic zines such as Where Do I Belong? by Silent Army, Villawood: Notes from a Detention Centre by Safdar Ahmed, and The Refugee Art Project’s zine collection clearly demonstrate the ways in which the body becomes implicated in narratives about asylum. But, the comic art zine medium allows for ‘something else’ to be revealed in these auto-biographical accounts. In particular, the medium allows the toxicity of refugee discourse to be redeployed elsewhere, sometimes to its extreme ends, but always to an unsettled space where the refugee body can resist and reassemble.
Research Interests:
The contemporary migration experience is mobile, fragmented and mediated, creating a new diasporic interface that interplays the three threads of media, culture and art. However, studies of transnationalism within media, culture and art... more
The contemporary migration experience is mobile, fragmented and mediated, creating a new diasporic interface that interplays the three threads of media, culture and art. However, studies of transnationalism within media, culture and art scholarship continue to collapse into binary models, ultimately streamlining the complex cultural translations that occur in this interface. This essay argues that the notion of aesthetic cosmopolit-anism allows for a more rigorous account of the diasporic interface, keeping alive the kinetic element that permeates transnational cultural production.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This paper explores how the arts-for-social change company, Big hART, responded to the Cronulla riots in Western Sydney, Australia. The riots were instigated on 4 December 2005 following an altercation between three Anglo-Australian... more
This paper explores how the arts-for-social change company, Big hART, responded to the Cronulla riots in Western Sydney, Australia. The riots were instigated on 4 December 2005 following an altercation between three Anglo-Australian lifeguards and a group of men identified as being of Lebanese background. Big hART’s creative response, ‘Junk Theory,’ involved the collaboration of youth from diverse cultural groups in the Sutherland Shire and resulted in a moving-media installation that projected digital stories onto the sails of a junk boat. With its message: ‘It’s harder to hurt someone when you know their story,’ the work raises important questions regarding diversity, social cohesion and the corporeal force of community-based art. My critique of this work is the starting point for my interest in the material—and often subtle—ways that racialised bodies come to be produced through multiculturalism discourse. I want to add to the contemporary scholarship account of a tension between theoretical/political multiculturalism and its everyday engagements, by utilising Judith Butler’s theory of performativity to examine the multicultural body in both public and creative space. The article uses performativity to consider how it is that certain bodies came to be seen as beyond the limits of not only the Cronulla beach, but humanness itself. It then considers how the same theory makes way for slippages which, if harnessed, may be used to deconstruct the racialised body in everyday art forms.
Research Interests:
The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam is a two-part project created by Canadian-based filmmaker Ann Marie Fleming. The project traces the history of Fleming’s Chinese ancestor, Long Tack Sam, and presents it in a documentary (2003) and an... more
The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam is a two-part project created by Canadian-based filmmaker Ann Marie Fleming. The project traces the history of Fleming’s Chinese ancestor, Long Tack Sam, and presents it in a documentary (2003) and an accompanying graphic novel (2007). In the concluding moments of the documentary, Fleming comments ‘memory is a type of magic’. This point provides a useful hook to summarize Fleming’s aesthetic practice, which can be translated into a productive model of cosmopolitanism. Her ‘memory-magic’ involves four ‘tricks’, or techniques: the revealing of history and modernity as smoke and mirrors; the acceptance and engagement with the unknown or yet-to-be-experienced, and the deconstruction of common notions of time and place. This paper thus argues that Fleming’s project aligns itself with what can be described as a critical, vernacular cosmopolitanism.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
A peer reviewed roundtable review and discussion of The Figure of the Migrant with important scholars in the field: Sandro Mezzadra, Todd May, Ladelle McWhorter, Andrew Dilts, Robin Celikates, Daniella Trimboli, and Adriana Novoa.... more
A peer reviewed roundtable review and discussion of The Figure of the Migrant with important scholars in the field: Sandro Mezzadra, Todd May, Ladelle McWhorter, Andrew Dilts, Robin Celikates, Daniella Trimboli, and Adriana Novoa. Interview conducted by Mark Westmoreland. Responses by author, Thomas Nail.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, European History, Cultural History, Sociology, Cultural Studies, and 224 morePolitical Sociology, Social Movements, Social Theory, Sociology of Culture, Social Psychology, Geography, Human Geography, Cultural Geography, Historical Geography, Political Geography and Geopolitics, Social Geography, Urban Geography, Environmental Geography, Regional Geography, Physical Geography, European Studies, Economic Geography, International Economics, Game Theory, Anthropology, Historical Anthropology, American Politics, Comparative Politics, International Relations, Philosophy, Media and Cultural Studies, Critical Discourse Studies, Social Work, Social Policy, Social Anthropology, Cultural Sociology, International Relations Theory, Feminist Theory, European integration, Social Sciences, European Law, Globalization, Philosophical Anthropology, Corporate Social Responsibility, Political Theory, Marxism, Marxist Economics, International Studies, Critical Geopolitics, International Business, Mexican Studies, Mobility/Mobilities, Migration mobilities, Radical Geography, Urban Politics, International Law, International Development, Refugee Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Critical Realism, Religion and Politics, Posthumanism, Latin American politics, Poststructuralism, Critical Pedagogy, Critical Animal Studies, Political Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology, International Criminal Law, Urban Anthropology, Immigration, Anthropology of Mobility, Cultural Theory, Immigration Studies, Critical Thinking, Migration Law, Critical Legal Theory, Migration, Anarchism, Academic Mobility, Critical Social Theory, Critical Race Theory, Legal Theory, International Human Rights Law, Irregular Migration, Transport Geography, Post-Marxism, Critical Security Studies, Immigration Law, Politics, Social Justice, Identity politics, Tourism Geography, International Political Economy, Mexico History, Cosmopolitanism, Global Studies, Cultural Politics, Critical Criminology, Anarchist Studies, Labor Migration, Literary Theory, Immigration And Integration In Europe, Cross-Cultural Studies, Gilles Deleuze, European Foreign Policy, Social Media, Post-Colonialism, History of Anarchism, Globalisation and Development, Rural Geography, International Politics, European Union, Postmodernism, Critical Discourse Analysis, Marxist theory, Communication Theory, International Migration, Globalization And Postcolonial Studies, Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Chinese Diaspora (Migration and Ethnicity), Critical Geography, Immigration and Emmigration, Post-Soviet Studies, Undocumented Immigration, Immigration History, Religion and Globalization, Indian Diaspora (Migration and Ethnicity), Global History, Refugee Resettlement, European Immigration and Asylum Law, Postcolonial Theory, Philosophy of Geography, Immigration an Citzenship, Forced Migration, Migration Studies, Structuralism/Post-Structuralism, Social History, Migration History, Sociology of Migration, Transnational migration, Contemporary International Migration, Migration And Health, Urban Sociology, Globalization And Higher Education, Return Migration, Race And Ethnicity (in ) migration of indigenous people, International Refugee Law, Middle East Politics, Political Geography, Migration (Anthropology), Transnational Labour Migration, Military and Politics, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Feminist Geography, Geography of Mobility and Migrations, Marxism (Political Science), Cultural Anthropology, Immigration Policy (Immigration History), Critical and Cultural Theory, European Union Politics, Foucault and education, Marxist political economy, immigration, migration, identity, Immigration and identity (Anthropology), Internal migration, Foucault (Research Methodology), Refugee Camps, Karl Marx, Social Mobility, Poststructuralist Theory, Post-Anarchism, Immigration and Citizenship, Geography Education, Refugees, Marxist and Materialist Feminism, Mexico, Global Warming, International Migration and Immigration Policy, Mobility, Foucault power/knowledge - discourse, Biopolitics (in Agamben, Foucault and Negri), Postmodern, Migrations, Critical Legal Geography, Migration Theory, Autonomist Marxism, Neo-Marxism, Foucault and mobility/transport, Cultural Globalization, Migration policies, Great Migration period, Marxismo, Ciencias Sociales, Migration and Diaspora, Labour migration, Refugees and Forced Migration Studies, Refugee Law, Bird Migration, Spatial Migration Modelling, Migration and Development, Virtual Machine Migration, heterotopia/Foucault, Politics and International relations, Borges y Foucault, La filosofía política de Deleuze y Foucault, DELEUZE-FOUCAULT, Asylum and refugees studies, migration and integration, Refugees, migration and immigration, Foucault Studies, Archaeology Of The Migration Period And The Early Middle Ages, Educación Física Foucault, Foucault Archaeology Geneology Method, Immigration and Ethnicity, Michel Foucault and the theory of Power, Italian American Immigration history, Comparative Social Policy. Welfare State Research. Sociology of Work. Migration and care, Deleuze and Guattari, Globalization and Transnationalism, Socio-Economic Impact of Rural-Urban Migration, Refugee memory, Immigration Status & Nationality, Migration and Diaspora Studies, Application of Foucault's Work to the Nature and Social Status of Illicit Drug Use and Illicit Drug Users, Social Science, Foucault, Michael Foucault, and Michel Foucault: The subject and power
Some preliminary thoughts about the sea as a place of epistemological potential, prompted by my weekend, which featured The Honeymoon Suite's exhibition Waves, Kristina Davidson's beautiful sculptural work Disconnect (pictured), and the... more
Some preliminary thoughts about the sea as a place of epistemological potential, prompted by my weekend, which featured The Honeymoon Suite's exhibition Waves, Kristina Davidson's beautiful sculptural work Disconnect (pictured), and the first episode of the new documentary series Blue Planet II.
Research Interests:
The introduction to keynote speaker Emerita Professor Sneja Gunew at the Journal of Intercultural Studies' conference Migrating Concepts, Singapore, February 2018. The introduction outlines some of Prof Gunew's incredibly rich scholarship... more
The introduction to keynote speaker Emerita Professor Sneja Gunew at the Journal of Intercultural Studies' conference Migrating Concepts, Singapore, February 2018. The introduction outlines some of Prof Gunew's incredibly rich scholarship and pioneering activist work on multiculturalism, 'ethnic' literature, and feminist writing.