The meaning of home for Karen and Chin refugees from Burma: An interpretative phenomenological approach

Loss of home is common to all people from a refugee background yet we have little understanding of the diversity of meaning associated with this important concept. A phenomenological approach was used to explore experiences of home amongst Karen and Chin refugees residing in Brisbane. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with nine participants from Karen and Chin backgrounds. The participants comprised five females and four males (mean age 40 years, median length of time in Australia 1.33 years). Participants described their migration stories, including pre- and post-migration history. Analysis was conducted using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Three superordinate themes, explicating the meaning of home for participants, were identified: home as the experience of a psychological space of safety and retreat; home as the socio-emotional space of relatedness to family; and home as geographical-emotional landscape. Loss of home was experienced as a multidimensional loss associated with emotional and physical disturbances. These findings, based upon a phenomenological paradigm, enhance understanding of the experience of being a refugee and of the suffering engendered by loss of home. They open up the possibility for conceptualizing refugee responses in terms of human suffering and meaning making.

YouTube versus the national film and sound archive: Which is the more useful resource for historians of Australian television?

This article compares YouTube and the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) as resources for television historians interested in viewing old Australian television programs. The author searched for seventeen important television programs, identified in a previous research project, to compare what was available in the two archives and how easy it was to find. The analysis focused on differences in curatorial practices of accessioning and cataloguing. NFSA is stronger in current affairs and older programs, while YouTube is stronger in game shows and lifestyle programs. YouTube is stronger than the NFSA on “human interest” material—births, marriages, and deaths. YouTube accessioning more strongly accords with popular histories of Australian television. Both NFSA and YouTube offer complete episodes of programs, while YouTube also offers many short clips of “moments.” YouTube has more surprising pieces of rare ephemera. YouTube cataloguing is more reliable than that of the NFSA, with fewer broken links. The YouTube metadata can be searched more intuitively. The NFSA generally provides more useful reference information about production and broadcast dates.

The benefits of not managing change and not communicating : towards a complex systems view of communication in evolving organisations

The relationship between change in organisations and communication about change in organisations can be analysed as a particular case of a general debate in social theory about the extent to which reality is socially constructed. Social constructivists emphasise the role of language in the construction of social realities, enacted through controlling the message agenda; material determinists assert that economic and social structural factors are more constitutive of reality as seen in strategies emphasising structural and resource interventions. Here we define a third view of language and materiality - one that leads to the potential for a reflexive, experimental approach to change based on the view that organisations are complex evolving systems.