- Title
- Performing care with people from refugee backgrounds: an intersectional exploration of spaces of care and care-full encounters in Newcastle, Australia
- Creator
- Curtis, Faith
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2017
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- Research on the experiences of people from refugee backgrounds in Western nations has been dominated by inquiries into social exclusion and problematic encounters across difference. As a body of work, it tends to document despair and provides little evidence of ‘the hope residing in cities’ (R Fincher & Iveson, 2012, p. 240). Yet, many people from refugee backgrounds are welcomed by people taking individual or collective steps to foster social inclusion. The overall aim of this research is to bring a more hopeful disposition to research on people from refugee backgrounds by employing literatures on care, spaces of care and encounter to examine caring people and organisations. This thesis explores caring relationships, care practices, spaces of care and care-based encounters with people from refugee backgrounds in Newcastle, Australia. I draw on Conradson’s (2003c) framing of care as ‘a movement towards another person in a way that has the potential to facilitate or promote their well-being’ (Conradson, 2003, p. 508) and the principles of Tronto’s (1993) practice of the ethic of care, to offer a critical and hopeful analysis of grounded experiences of giving and receiving care initiated by organisations which support people from refugee backgrounds. I draw on the literature on encounter to explore the possibilities that arise in fleshy and fun care-full encounters with people from refugee backgrounds. In order to apprehend the messy and complex ways that care is performed, I draw on case studies of four organisations working with people from refugee backgrounds in Newcastle, NSW using a range of methods including interviews, document analysis and participant observation. In contrast to existing spaces of care and encounter research, I immerse myself in formal and informal spaces of care. In doing so I offer new insights into the importance of hanging out and spending time with people as a way of comprehending what happens in spaces of care and care-full encounters. This research examines the complexities of what it means to care within an organisational framework. The role of an organisational ethos in the performance of care is explored in Chapter 6. As other research on spaces of care has found, an organisational ethos is not simply set by mission statements; it is performed by people working within organisational spaces (P Cloke, Johnsen, & May, 2005). Unlike most care literature, this thesis draws on the experiences of both care givers and care receivers and offers insights into the inseparability of care giving and receiving. Previous research has emphasised that in many institutional care-giving contexts people from refugee backgrounds are called upon to perform a refugee identity – a subject position that enables them to access services, care and support, but that at the same time has precarious and limiting effects on their agency (P. Westoby & Ingamells, 2010). To explore the inseparability of care giving and receiving and performances from refugees beyond the refugee identity, I turn to caring practices of welcoming and teaching which have been absent from previous academic accounts of the experiences of people from refugee backgrounds in Western nations. In the organisational spaces I examine, I reveal that welcoming and teaching are not practices reserved for ‘host’ populations; rather, people from refugee backgrounds also perform care through welcoming and teaching. Drawing on literature on intersectionality, I reveal that in an appropriate organisational context the binary between refugee/non-refugee or care giver/care receiver can be transcended as people build on shared identities as mothers, friends, cooks, football players and people. In Chapter 7 I build on the existing spaces of care literature to reveal the importance of space in the performance of care. Like previous spaces of care literature, I explore formal institutionalised spaces, but I also contribute to the spaces of care literature by exploring spaces of protest in support of people from refugee backgrounds, and the ways that public parks are transformed into transitory spaces of care. The performances in these spaces extend beyond formal and professionalised interactions, and reflect a recognition on the part of people already living in Newcastle that it is not up to people from refugee backgrounds alone to adjust to difference; rather, it is also up to longer-term residents to perform more inclusive caring spaces and neighbourhoods. The chapter therefore examines how spaces of care encourage performances of belonging, home and hope across multiple scales of home, neighbourhood and nation. Finally, I explore caring with people from refugee backgrounds through the lens of encounter. My approach to care-full encounters is to move away from thinking that ‘meaningful’ encounters are only those that can be scaled up (Valentine, 2008). Rather, I place value in the embodied, fleshy and sensuous moments of encounter, and in doing so, I am able to reveal moments of joy, happiness and hope that are too often dismissed in the encounter literature. These moments are important because they are full of potential and the possibility of a different way of doing Australia in an extremely intolerant time. Care is not simple and easy. Caring relationships can be fraught with tensions and difficulties. Nonetheless, this thesis argues that exploring existing practices of care holds the possibility for understanding new ways of living together with difference and creating more inclusive cities. While previous literature has mostly focused on the ways that the presence of people from refugee backgrounds in Western nations seems to have created insecurities that undermine individuals’ capacity to care, this thesis avoids adopting an approach that is primarily attuned to exclusionary practices. Rather than giving a voice to the people who want to incense and create more hate, this thesis contributes to a more hopeful disposition by focusing on examples in which people demonstrate a readiness to stand up against intolerance through proactive performances of care. As people from refugee backgrounds continue to seek protection in the West, providing a caring narrative that counters the exclusionary attitudes towards their presence is essential for performing more caring and inclusive worlds.
- Subject
- refugee; encounter; care; spaces of care; caring with; hope
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1342369
- Identifier
- uon:28958
- Rights
- Copyright 2017 Faith Curtis
- Language
- eng
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
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| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 3 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 352 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT03 | Original thesis | 3 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |