Affective energies : Sensory bodies on the beach in Darwin, Australia

Emerging debates on anti-racism within white majority cultures centre emotion and affect to explore the visceral nature of racialised encounters that unfold in public spaces of the city. This paper builds on such understandings by conceptualising whiteness as a force that exerts affective pressures on bodies of colour who are hypervisible in public spaces. I show that these pressures have the potential to wound, numb and immobilise bodies affecting what they can do or what they can become. This paper argues, however, that affective energies from human and non-human sources are productive forces that are also sensed in public spaces such as the suburban beach. These energies entangle sensuous bodies with the richness of a more-than-human world and have the potential to offer new insights into exploring how racially differentiated bodies live with difference. The paper draws on ethnographic research conducted in Darwin, a tropical north Australian city at the centre of politicised public debates on asylum seeker policy, migrant integration and Indigenous wellbeing. My attention to affective pressures and affective energies contributes to understanding how bodies with complex histories and geographies of racialisation can inhabit a world of becoming. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Race lines and spaces of political action among migrant youth

Recently proposed Anti-Racism Strategy established within a framework of the Australian Government's multicultural policy, People of Australia, identifies ‘youth engagement’ as one of the key areas that needs to be promoted and supported. Young people have been invited to join youth councils and youth forums and work with national, state and local policy-makers. Some have taken up this challenge and became public faces and active members of anti-racism campaigns. Others, however, either remained silent about the discrimination they face, or organised their own grassroots youth-based and youth-led initiatives. This paper discusses individual and collective responses to racism among young people in Australia, focusing on Melbourne, and examines possibilities in which racism, as a common experience among migrant youth, can be utilised to form alternative spaces for political action, challenging not only interpersonal, but also systemic forms of racism. By drawing attention towards institutional and systemic forms of racism, and the historical perpetuation of racist practices, these youth initiatives rely on legal measures, and argue that racism should be discussed in the context of the broader Australian society, not only in relation to minority groups.

Criança negra e educação: um estudo etnográfico na escola

Pós-graduação em Psicologia - FCLAS

Quando gestos não políticos são políticos: a tradução brasileira de Giovanni's Room, de James Baldwin, e a questão da homossexualidade

This work is part of a research project on the role of translations of African-American literature in Brazil and their relation to issues of identity, discourse and aesthetics. It analyzes the translation, by Affonso Blacheyre, of Giovanni's room (1956), by James Baldwin, which was published in 1967 in Brazil. Baldwin is revered for his role in the Civil Rights Movement, having produced works that portray the contradictions of a democratic, but, at the same time, racist society. Giovanni's room was first rejected by his publisher for addressing homosexuality. The text displayed on the book flaps of the translation praises Baldwin's "work with language", in contrast to his anti-racism in other works. The praise of aesthetics of Giovanni's room is noteworthy, in contrast with the absence of any remarks on its critique of the marginalization of homosexuality. The focus on the aesthetics of the work corresponded to characters speaking a more formal register in the translation. Discourses on identity strengthening were less apparent in the 60s in Brazil in comparison to nowadays. The emphasis on aesthetics represented a seemingly "non-political" gesture that made it less shocking in the context of military dictatorship prevalent in the country at the time.

Social Work in an Ethnically Diverse Europe: The Shifting Challenges of Difference

This article addresses the inherently politicised context of social work practice located within the contested logics and values of national social policy and professional values and identities. Noting the key role of social work in delivering the state’s promise of social citizenship, it is argued that the increasing neo-nationalist sentiments and politics in European states generate significant pressures upon the universalist, inclusive, values of social work in a multiethnic Europe. The academic and policy debate around social cohesion is explored to illustrate how an assimilationist drift in multicultural state policies undermines the capacity of social work services to deliver appropriate, ethnically sensitive, services. It is further argued that the pervasive spread of populist counter-narratives to multiculturalism erode support for anti-racist and transcultural social work practice. In this context it is argued that social work must acknowledge its compromised situation and explicitly develop a political agenda committed to guaranteeing substantive equality in service delivery.

The sound of whiteness: early music vocal performance practice in Britain

American Musicological Society annual meeting, San Francisco, 10 Nov. 2011

Screening Diversity: Women & Work in Twenty-First-Century Popular Culture

Screening Diversity: Women and Work in Twenty-first Century Popular Culture explores contemporary representations of diverse professional women on screen. Audiences are offered successful women with limited concerns for feminism, anti-racism, or economic justice. I introduce the term viewsers to describe a group of movie and television viewers in the context of the online review platform Internet Movie Database (IMDb) and the social media platforms Twitter and Facebook. Screening Diversity follows their engagement in a representative sample of professional women on film and television produced between 2007 and 2015. The sample includes the television shows, Scandal, Homeland, VEEP, Parks and Recreation, and The Good Wife, as well as the movies, Zero Dark Thirty, The Proposal, The Heat, The Other Woman, I Don’t Know How She Does It, and Temptation. Viewsers appreciated female characters like Olivia (Scandal), and Maya (Zero Dark Thiry) who treated their work as a quasi-religious moral imperative. Producers and viewsers shared the belief that unlimited time commitment and personal identification were vital components of professionalism. However, powerful women, like The Proposal’s Margaret and VEEP’s Selina, were often called bitches. Some viewsers embraced bitch-positive politics in recognition of the struggles of women in power. Women’s disproportionate responsibility for reproductive labor, often compromises their ability to live up to moral standards of work. Unlike producers, viewsers celebrated and valued that labor. However, texts that included serious consideration of women as workers were frequently labelled chick flicks or soap operas. The label suggested that women’s labor issues were not important enough that they could be a topic of quality television or prestigious film, which bolstered the idea that workplace equality for women is not a problem in which the general public is implicated. Emerging discussions of racial injustice on television offered hope that these formations are beginning to shift.

As formas de expressâo do preconceito na infância

Dissertação de Mestrado apresentada ao Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada para obtenção de grau de Mestre na especialidade de Psicologia Educacional.

Migrant youth and social policy in multicultural Australia: exploring cross-cultural networking

This chapter explores the extent to which the direction of Australia’s official multicultural and civic integration policies, reflects the social attitudes and networking practices of migrant youth. The chapter pays particular attention to the Federal Government’s “Anti-Racism Strategy” announced in 2012 as part of its Multicultural Policy. On a theoretical level, direct efforts to mitigate racism have the potential to augment strategies that reaffirm pluralism and address disadvantage often associated with the migrant experience. On an empirical level, it is important to explore the extent to which such top-level discourses have actual founding in the social lives of migrant youth. Therefore this chapter presents the empirical findings of an empirical longitudinal on “Social Networks, Belonging and Active Citizenship among Migrant Youth” (Australian Research Council Linkage project 2009–2013). Migrant youth in this study pointed to a number of instances of racism, which act as significant barriers to cross-cultural networking. Analysis of the data shows, among other things, that there is a persistent tendency among migrant youth to point to their social distance from the metaphorical “Aussie Aussie” people of Anglo origins who are perceived as symbolising Australia’s mainstream. Such manifestations of racial discrimination preclude the emergence of a genuinely inclusive society that supports and nurtures cultural diversity as a significant part of the Australian national identity, as well as the stated objectives of its social policy repertoire.

Tolerance, Freedom, Justice and Peace?: Britain, Australia and anti-Muslim Racism in the UK and Australia before 11 September 2001

Since 11 September 2001, Muslim minorities have experienced intensive "othering" in “Western” countries, above all in those US-led anglophone nations which invaded Afghanistan and Iraq to prosecute their "war on terror". This paper examines the cases of Britain and Australia, where whole communities of Muslims have been criminalised as "evil" and a "fifth column" enemy within by media, politicians, the security services and the criminal justice system. Although constituted by disparate ethnic groups, the targeted communities in each of these nations have experienced similar treatment in the State's anti-terrorist measures, as well as ideological responses and everyday racism, making comparable the two cases.

All lads together? Racism, masculinity and multicultural/anti-racist strategies in a primary school

This article examines the articulation of racism and masculinity as manifest amongst infant children in a multi-ethnic, inner-city primary school. Drawing upon a year-long ethnographic study of the school, it will highlight some of the inherent problems of multicultural/anti-racist strategies which are not sufficiently grounded in an understanding of racism and how iti complexly interrelates with other systems of inequality, in this case gender. The article will show how many of the racist incidents and processes evident amongst the infant children can only be understood within the context of their expressions of masculinity. With this as a starting point, the article will go on to outline and assess one particular strategy of the school to try and engage older African/Caribbean boys through sports and particularly football. It will be shown how, as a result of this 'multicultural/anti-racist' strategy, a distinct masculine ethos has been created within the school which, ironically, provides a strong context for racist incidents to flourish. The article will conclude by arguing for a more complex and context-specific understanding of racism and will reiterate the concerns of a number of black feminist writers of the early 1980s that strategies to combat racism can only be successful alongside strategies addressing all forms of subordination.

Between the panels: How anti-Black racism has recycled myths of the Black body in comic books

Anti-Black racism continues to be a widespread problem, and as such deserves investigation and elimination. As Jackson (2006) says; “There is a hyperawareness…of the negative inscriptions associated with the Black masculine body as criminal, angry and incapacitated.” (2) To continue the study of the changing face of racism, the researcher must be well equipped with a contemporary methodology which is adaptable and exploratory. Due to the malleability of racism, research into its elimination must make inroads to areas that have heretofore been neglected and overlooked by traditional academic study. This project achieves a unique perspective by undertaking a theoretical exploration of racist stereotypes and motifs in the world of mass produced superhero comic books, a genre of comics which has neither yet been thoroughly investigated for the use of racist stereotypes nor been the focus of anti-racist scholarship.

Strategies against racism: a comparison of a social movement and case studies of anti-racist policy and practice in the local state

The thesis compares two contrasting strategies employed with the aim of combating particular forms of racism within contemporary Britain. Both are assessed as political strategies in their own right and placed within the broader context of reformist and revolutionary political traditions. The sociology of social movements is examined critically, as are Marxist and post-Marxist writings on the role of human agency within social structures and on the nature of social movements. The history of the Anti Nazi League (ANL) in the late 1970s and its opposition to the National Front is considered as an example of anti-racist social movement based on the Trotskyist model of the United Front. The degree to which the Anti Nazi League corresponded to such a model is analysed as are the potential broader applications for such a strategy. The strategy with which the ANL is compared is the development of anti-racist and equal opportunities policies within local government in the 1980s, primarily by Labour-controlled local authorities. The theory of the local state and the political phenomenon of municipal socialism are discussed, specifically the role of various groups operating in and around local authorities in the formation and implementation of anti-racist policy and practice. Following this general discussion, two case studies in each of the areas of local authority housing, education and employment are explored to consider in depth the problems of specific anti-racist policies. In summation the efficacy of the two strategies are considered as parts of wider political currents in tandem with their declared specific objectives.

The failure of Australian legislation on indirect discrimination to detect the systemic racism which prevents Aboriginal people from fully participating in the workforce

Government figures put the current indigenous unemployment rate at around 23%, 3 times the unemployment rate for other Australians. This thesis aims to assess whether Australian indirect discrimination legislation can provide a remedy for one of the causes of indigenous unemployment - the systemic discrimination which can result from the mere operation of established procedures of recruitment and hiring. The impact of those practices on indigenous people is examined in the context of an analysis of anti-discrimination legislation and cases from all Australian jurisdictions from the time of the passing of the Racial Discrimination Act by the Commonwealth in 1975 to the present. The thesis finds a number of reasons why the legislation fails to provide equality of opportunity for indigenous people seeking to enter the workforce. In nearly all jurisdictions it is obscurely drafted, used mainly by educated middle class white women, and provides remedies which tend to be compensatory damages rather than change to recruitment policy. White dominance of the legal process has produced legislative and judicial definitions of "race" and "Aboriginality" which focus on biology rather than cultural difference. In the commissions and tribunals complaints of racial discrimination are often rejected on the grounds of being "vexatious" or "frivolous", not reaching the required standard of proof, or not showing a causal connection between race and the conduct complained of. In all jurisdictions the cornerstone of liability is whether a particular employment term, condition or practice is reasonable. The thesis evaluates the approaches taken by appellate courts, including the High Court, and concludes that there is a trend towards an interpretation of reasonableness which favours employer arguments such as economic rationalism, the maintenance of good industrial relations, managerial prerogative to hire and fire, and the protection of majority rights. The thesis recommends that separate, clearly drafted legislation should be passed to address indigenous disadvantage and that indigenous people should be involved in all stages of the process.