States of emergency

 Dark legacies combined with ‘moral panic’ and ‘extraordinary measures’ have slowly shaped attitudes in Australia and Italy towards asylum-seekers into something increasingly dangerous.

Addressing migration-related social and health inequalities in Australia: call for research funding priorities to recognise the needs of migrant populations

Objective Migrants constitute 26% of the total Australian population and, although disproportionately affected by chronic diseases, they are under-represented in health research. The aim of the present study was to describe trends in Australian Research Council (ARC)- and National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC)-funded initiatives from 2002 to 2011 with a key focus on migration-related research funding.Methods Data on all NHMRC- and ARC-funded initiatives between 2002 and 2011 were collected from the research funding statistics and national competitive grants program data systems, respectively. The research funding expenditures within these two schemes were categorised into two major groups: (1) people focused (migrant-related and mainstream-related); and (2) basic science focused. Descriptive statistics were used to summarise the data and report the trends in NHMRC and ARC funding over the 10-year period.Results Over 10 years, the ARC funded 15 354 initiatives worth A$5.5 billion, with 897 (5.8%) people-focused projects funded, worth A$254.4 million. Migrant-related research constituted 7.8% of all people-focused research. The NHMRC funded 12 399 initiatives worth A$5.6 billion, with 447 (3.6%) people-focused projects funded, worth A$207.2 million. Migrant-related research accounted for 6.2% of all people-focused initiatives.Conclusions Although migrant groups are disproportionately affected by social and health inequalities, the findings of the present study show that migrant-related research is inadequately funded compared with mainstream-related research. Unless equitable research funding is achieved, it will be impossible to build a strong evidence base for planning effective measures to reduce these inequalities among migrants.What is known about the topic? Immigration is on the rise in most developing countries, including Australia, and most migrants come from low- and middle-income countries. In Australia, migrants constitute 26% of the total Australian population and include refugee and asylum seeker population groups. Migrants are disproportionately affected by disease, yet they have been found to be under-represented in health research and public health interventions.What does this paper add? This paper highlights the disproportions in research funding for research among migrants. Despite migrants being disproportionately affected by disease burden, research into their health conditions and risk factors is grossly underfunded compared with the mainstream population.What are the implications for practitioners? Migrants represent a significant proportion of the Australian population and hence are capable of incurring high costs to the Australian health system. There are two major implications for practitioners. First, the migrant population is constantly growing, therefore integrating the needs of migrants into the development of health policy is important in ensuring equity across health service delivery and utilisation in Australia. Second, the health needs of migrants will only be uncovered when a clear picture of their true health status and other determinants of health, such as psychological, economic, social and cultural, are identified through empirical research studies. Unless equitable research funding is achieved, it will be impossible to build a strong evidence base for planning effective measures to reduce health and social inequalities among migrant communities.

Exploring cultures of belonging in Darwin, Australia

This paper argues that the use of visual methods such as participatory video is crucial to co-producing sensory and embodied knowledges of belonging in Australian cities. These knowledges of belonging that focus on affectivity and passion have the potential to expand the worlds that racialised bodies of colour inhabit, but contemporary urban research shows an overwhelming focus on ‘talk’. This paper therefore takes the risk by engaging in a research process that is experimental, flexible and adaptive to explore diverse sensory cultures of belonging through a focus on Darwin, a small north Australian city. This is a city with a polyethnic history where Indigenous-migrant-settler race relations are recognised as more complex in comparison to large south Australian cities. The paper draws on participatory videos of two eventsin suburban Darwin - a Vigil on the side of the road opposite Airport
Lodge, an asylum seeker detention centre, and an afternoon walk along Casuarina beach where Aboriginals who live ‘rough’ camp. Using short video clips, long-term residents, migrant newcomers and asylum seekers (on bridging visas) compose an expressive narrative of the road and beach in Darwin, as places where refrains of welcome expand worlds that racialised bodies of colour inhabit. Using digital technologies the flow and juxtaposition of video clips of these events provides the possibility to craft sensory and embodied knowledges of belonging in a north
Australian city with a history of assimilationist and racially discriminatory policies.

Critical perspectives on refugee policy in Australia : proceedings of the Refugee Rights Symposium hosted by the Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Faculty of Arts, Deakin University, December 5, 2002

Keynote addresses: What next for Australia's refugee policy? / Peter Mares -- One year after Tampa: refugees, deportees and TPVs / Chris Sidoti -- Academic papers: The tension of re-other-ing bodies / Snezana Dabic -- Acting for asylum: the nexus of pro-refugee activism in Melbourne / Helen Hintjens & Alison Jarman -- Biopolitics and the 'problem' of the refugee / Matthew Holt -- Temporary protection of refugees: Australian policy and international comparison / Fethi Mansouri & Michael Leach --The not-so-special benefit and non-mutual obligation: refugees on a TPV and income support arrangements / Greg Marston -- Family separation: Somali women in Melbourne / Celia McMichael & Malyun Ahmed -- Embodying exile: protest, performance, trauma and effect in the formation of East Timorese refugee identities / Amanda Wise -- Personal and Community Sector Perspectives -- A personal experience of the TPV policy / Mueen Al-Breihi -- A city of refuge?: protecting the social and cultural rights of refugees in Brisbane / Renae Mann -- Temporary protection visas, recovery from trauma and personal identity / Helen Martin -- All I ask for is protection: young people seeking asylum in Australia / Samira Mohamed.

Refuge in the land of liberty : France and its refugees, from the revolution to the end of asylum, 1787-1939

France has a long tradition of asylum for refugees. Since the Revolution, this has made it the land of liberty (pays de la liberte) and the land of asylum (la terre d'asile)." "In practice, responses have been shaped less by principle than by political and social conditions. Various refugee movements - from the late eighteenth-century Lowlands, to Spanish and Italian liberals in the 1820s, Polish nationalists in the 1830s. German social revolutionaries of 1848-9, anti-Bolsheviks from the Russian Revolution, Christians from the former Ottoman Empire, and Jews from Nazi Germany - have met with mixed responses, which shifted uneasily between sympathy, principle, pragmatism, and open hostility." "This book examines the tensions between refugee rights and political responses to refugees, and between humanitarian concern for their plight and hostility to their imposition on the state. Increasingly punitive measures against refugees saw, in 1939, the end of asylum in the internment of republican exiles from the Spanish Civil War.

Remaking asylum in post-war France, 1944−52

This article examines the steps by which asylum and the rights of refugees were remade in France after the Liberation. The legacy of the pre-1940 period, in which exclusive practices such as legislative prohibitions on refugees, expulsion and internment were the norm, resulted in the need, after the war, to restate and reaffirm republican prin- ciples. The article will examine the ideological assumptions that lay behind the postwar asylum debate, and address why it was necessary to place asylum so firmly within republican political culture