The settlement and social inclusion of immigrant youth in New Zealand

The immigrant population of Aotearoa New Zealand has increased significantly over recent years. This rise in ethnic minority populations, especially from non-English speaking countries, has significant social implications for the country. Anecdotal and empirical evidence in New Zealand show that many immigrant youth are not socially included, and that this compromises their ability to settle successfully in New Zealand. This study investigates the settlement and social inclusion of immigrant youth in New Zealand. It investigates the significant/actors that act as barriers to their settlement and social inclusion. The study gathers data through face to face and telephone interviews from key informants who are service providers and experts in six cities in New Zealand. Data is analysed using an inductive approach to produce primarily qualitative data which identifies key themes and issues for different age groups, genders, migrant and refugee groups. It supplements this data with some quantitative data on frequency, duration and intensity. Findings reveal that most immigrant youth generally do not feel well settled and socially included in New Zealand, and that some may suffer psychological and social consequences due to this.

Hybrid perspectives : defining the relativity of culture and identity through migration experiences

This paper examines how culture and identity can be relatively defined through hybrid perspectives in relation to migration experiences. Addressing and portraying definitions of culture and identity is crucial in understanding how notions of such issues connect and initiate the migrant subject through new experiences, perspectives and ways of being. In enunciating the transitions from home to a new place, and elaborating on the rupture of an inherited culture and grounded identity, I refer to them through self-reflexive perspectives. The search for meaning through appraisals of cultural lineage and linguistic capital through a Diaspora, a post colonial history and lived life experiences from my home country, pre-empts the ambivalent and hybrid status in defining culture(s) and identit(ies). It is crucial to recognise how challenges for adaptation to new culture, language, societal norms, and differences in class, nationality, race and gender play specific roles in the migrant experience. My current experiences of migration to Australia are narrations of encountered difficulties, fears, inhibitions, new aspirations, perceptions and perspectives, which map an ‘identity crisis.’ From this narrative structure, I investigate through my ongoing PhD study, how my artistic expression and representations progress towards experiences, and themes that metaphorically reflect, inspire and enact the hybrid structures of culture(s) and identit(ies). Explored reflexively my representations suggest how the ‘liminal space’ or the ‘third space,’ (Bhabha, 1990) express transitions about the ‘self’ and my artistic expression, which enable further reflection and positions to emerge and extend to metaphorical expressions.

Comparing the seasonal survival of resident and migratory oystercatchers : carry-over effects of habitat quality and weather conditions

Events happening in one season can affect life-history traits at (the) subsequent season(s) by carry-over effects. Wintering conditions are known to affect breeding success, but few studies have investigated carry-over effects on survival. The Eurasian oystercatcher Haematopus ostralegus is a coastal wader with sedentary populations at temperate sites and migratory populations in northern breeding grounds of Europe. We pooled continental European ringing-recovery datasets from 1975 to 2000 to estimate winter and summer survival rates of migrant and resident populations and to investigate long-term effects of winter habitat changes. During mild climatic periods, adults of both migratory and resident populations exhibited survival rates 2% lower in summer than in winter. Severe winters reduced survival rates (down to 25% reduction) and were often followed by a decline in survival during the following summer, via short-term carry-over effects. Habitat changes in the Dutch wintering grounds caused a reduction in food stocks, leading to reduced survival rates, particularly in young birds. Therefore, wintering habitat changes resulted in long-term (>10 years) 8.7 and 9.4% decrease in adult annual survival of migrant and resident populations respectively. Studying the impact of carry-over effects is crucial for understanding the life history of migratory birds and the development of conservation measures.

Ecophysiology of avian migration in the face of current global hazards

Long-distance migratory birds are often considered extreme athletes, possessing a range of traits that approach the physiological limits of vertebrate design. In addition, their movements must be carefully timed to ensure that they obtain resources of sufficient quantity and quality to satisfy their high-energy needs. Migratory birds may therefore be particularly vulnerable to global change processes that are projected to alter the quality and quantity of resource availability. Because long-distance flight requires high and sustained aerobic capacity, even minor decreases in vitality can have large negative consequences for migrants. In the light of this, we assess how current global change processes may affect the ability of birds to meet the physiological demands of migration, and suggest areas where avian physiologists may help to identify potential hazards. Predicting the consequences of global change scenarios on migrant species requires (i) reconciliation of empirical and theoretical studies of avian flight physiology; (ii) an understanding of the effects of food quality, toxicants and disease on migrant performance; and (iii) mechanistic models that integrate abiotic and biotic factors to predict migratory behaviour. Critically, a multi-dimensional concept of vitality would greatly facilitate evaluation of the impact of various global change processes on the population dynamics of migratory birds.

Habitat use throughout migration : linking individual consistency, prior breeding success and future breeding potential

1. Habitat use can influence individual performance in a wide range of animals, either immediately or through carry-over effects in subsequent seasons. Given that many animal species also show consistent individual differences in reproductive success, it seems plausible that individuals may have consistent patterns of habitat use representing individual specializations, with concomitant fitness consequences.

2. Stable-carbon isotope ratios from a range of tissues were used to discern individual consistency in habitat use along a terrestrial–aquatic gradient in a long-distance migrant, the Bewick’s swan (Cygnus columbianus bewickii). These individual specialisations represented <15% of the isotopic breadth of the population for the majority of individuals and were seen to persist throughout autumn migration and overwintering until aquatic habitats were no longer available.

3. Individual foraging specialisations were then used to demonstrate two consecutive carry-over effects associated with macroscale habitat segregation: consequences of breeding season processes for autumn habitat use; and consequences of autumn habitat use for future reproductive success. Adults that were successful breeders in the year of capture used terrestrial habitats significantly more than adults that were not successful, revealing a substantial cost of reproduction and extended parental care. Use of aquatic habitats during autumn was, however, associated with increased body condition prior to spring migration; and increased subsequent breeding success in adults that had been unsuccessful the year before. Yet adults that were successful breeders in the year of capture remained the most likely to be successful the following year, despite their use of terrestrial habitats.

4. Our results uniquely demonstrate not only individual foraging specializations throughout the migration period, but also that processes during breeding and autumn migration, mediated by individual consistency, may play a fundamental role in the population dynamics of long-distance migrants. These findings, therefore, highlight the importance of long-term consistency to our understanding of habitat function, interindividual differences in fitness, population dynamics and the evolution of migratory strategies.

Telescope

Telescope is a feature length time lapse of reflections, changes in sunlight of my backyard, assembled over 20 years. Telescope starts in Super 8 and ends with digital video, shot mostly while the family were themselves at work, somewhere else. It is an emptied landscape. When people think of Australia they imagine open space and bush. But really most Australians inhabit or were born in suburban spaces, often with backyards with fences, big enough for fruit trees, lawns and clotheslines. I consider this a place of absence that speaks to many things that our culture avoids.The backyard as emblem of a White Australia that hit its highpoint in the 1950s, for example. Australia is a migrant culture settled by waves of newcomers escaping, running away from somewhere else, leaving to forget. Another story concerns the continued invisibility of the indigenous people. When the British first planted the Union Jack on Australian soil and said "there is nothing here" they set up a tradition of denial as our founding principle. This still plagues us. What is festering in Australian backyards are these denials and erasures that I try to bring out in the soundtrack, that plays like the radio that meanders through a lazy Sunday afternoon. Such sounds try to tell stories of absence, of occupation, and of a nostalgia for an Australia that no longer exists, but still palpably reverberates around the suburban backyard.

Phillip doggett-williams : no climate for change

Written article about the artist Phillip Doggett-Williams published through his exhibition catalogue for the 2012 exhibition 'No Climate For Change' held at Montalto Winery and Scultpure Park, Red Hill, Victoria, 2012

Hybrid identities in a globalised world

Sociology is interested in how identities are constructed and maintained, especially how gender, race, ethnicity and class impacts on self-identity and on our life chances. Who we are, how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us has increasingly led many social scientists to describe contemporary identities as hybrid. This might be defined at one level as the intermingling or mixture of people from different cultural backgrounds. Sociologists and other social theorists have argued over the last twenty years that individuals have multiple identities that cut across many group allegiances. Nevertheless, there are problems with the use of the term hybrid. For some, hybrid suggests some kind of ‘new cultural melting pot, in which crucial cultural differences are effaced and power relations obscured’ (Hynes 2000). For others it implies that something pure or authentic and of traditional value has been lost. These debates do not hide the fact that racial and cultural hybrid identities have been fuelled by globalizing and transnational processes.

Unsung oz hysteries

The screening and funding opportunities for Experimental film in Australia has always had a problematic and underground history since the 1960s, moving through 16mm, super 8 and now digital moving image forms. One source of that history was Cantrills Filmnotes which expressed the rhetoric of a founding generation who experience the promise of a new Australian National Cinema and new film culture in the 70s, but whose mainstream product eventually left it behind. Experimental film inherited a marginal position through a lack of critical debate and because funding shifts left its identity somewhere between the fine arts and commercial cinema. It was consequently viewed as marginal to both. The general visual quality of this work meant it was perceived as apolitical, although it implicitly expressed and performed the denials and negations experienced directly by the migrant and working classes.

Through several cycles of emerging generations of artists (through such organizations as Fringe Network, MIMA and Experimenta), such artists knew more of the histories of work emanating from Europe and North America than their own, a general problem for Australian history. New underground opportunities are now arising to connect with the emerging and aspirant cultures coming out of Asia that reflect the shifts of global capital and the rise of China as an economic power. Asian work, registering a history of aspiration offers a re-integration of Peter Wollen’s avant-gardes split from the early 70s in the West. In the academy the Avant-garde’s strategies and techniques are studied, but are offered up in new work as aesthetic and lifestyle choices, rather than as the political imperatives announced implicitly or explicitly in their originating forms.

Oz@1950

This short film re-edits Australian historic newsreel footage to present the point of view of the migrant arriving into Australia in the 1950s.

Performing the 1950s New Australian

As a tentative beginning to locating a particularly local Australian brand of a post-colonial materialist (formalist) cinema this paper contextualises the recycling and re-samplings of mainstream industrial cinema that I have recently undertaken. I aim to place this practice within emerging discourses of hybridity, crossing-borders and a Global Cinema. This research speaks to my earliest experiences of migration into Australia, of becoming Australian, unfolding in my 50s childhood and enunciates the pressures my parents’ migration placed on them. The focus of this work articulates the somewhat emptied and gutted voice of the New Australian, a 50s term for the assimilated migrant (CAB 1948) of which the Dutch were considered exemplar performers, good white New Australians, who neatly left their Dutch identity at the door but who never-the-less witnessed the ambiguities of the ideologies they implicitly embraced.

Re-imaging citizenship in suburban Australia

Formal citizenship focuses on the provision of rights and responsibilities by the nation state. Such an understanding of democratic citizenship, however, is limited in providing social inclusion in everyday life, if cultural practices privilege whiteness. Although this paper draws attention to such practices that mark the ethnic Other, it also demonstrates the potential that exists to shift the boundaries of white privilege and negotiate dominant narratives of citizenship. Using a theoretical and methodological approach that focuses on poststructural and feminist ideas, I argue that the ways in which place is produced through reiterative everyday practices, makes place a site of transformative social change where white privilege can be questioned and difference welcomed. I draw on 54 indepth semi-structured interviews with people who live and/or work in the City of Greater Dandenong, suburban Melbourne, Australia to makes visible these everyday reiterative practices, and illustrate how they can be conceptualised as acts of responsibility, rather than just repetitive acts of hostility and suspicion. From my intersecting and shifting subject positions as a woman, a resident, ethnic, migrant, and Indian, the visibility of such practices makes it possible to re-imagine citizenship in the local neighbourhood, the city as well as the nation.

A journey through places: politics of spatial location in the stories of South Asian diaspora in Australia

In this paper, I analyse the post-colonial and post-modern experiences in the light of questions and issues concerning the spatial identities or locations that the diasporans carry. By politics of spatial location, I mean a migrant's positions within power hierarchies created through geographic, historical, political, economic and other socially stratifying factors in the new homeland. This paper is mainly concerned with the theoretical ways in which a shift is accelerated in Australia's literary landscape by the South Asian diasporic writers who produce and cover the dynamics of politics of location in different contexts. It also focuses on South Asian diaspora's widely agreed ‘ability to recreate their cultures in diverse locations’. I conclude that these stories are not just of spaces but also of a promising future for the South Asian diaspora in Australia.