Current Students
CRSI PhD students
Kristine Aquino
Phone: 9850 4116; Room:C5C384
PhD topic: Everyday Racism and Antiracism: The experience of middle class and working class Filipinos in Sydney
This research investigates how working class and middle class Filipinos in Australia experience, understand, and manage race and racism in their everyday lived experiences. Through field observation and qualitative interviews with Filipino-Australians living in metropolitan Sydney, this study explores how racism manifests itself in everyday routine situations across diverse social spaces, and the cultural strategies and discourses deployed by Filipino-Australians to overcome these racial boundaries. By investigating how boundaries are transgressed or maintained, the research seeks to develop a critical understanding of how notions of equality and difference are conceptualized and lived out across race, class, culture, gender and generation among the Filipino diaspora in Sydney.
Sudheesh Bhasi
Phone: 9850 5113; Room:C5C384
PhD topic: Faith and Social Capital: Exploring Religious Influence among Indian Immigrants in Multicultural Australia
This research examines the role of religion in providing the impetus to promote levels of social capital that could increase social opportunity and improve the quality of life in diasporic immigrant communities. Drawing upon empirical ethnographic research among first-generation Hindu migrants in Sydney, the study also explores ways in which values imparted through religious groups are appropriated by the migrants in creating positive changes in their own lives, which in turn improve their social potentiality. Furthermore, the study compares the significance of Hindu religious groups in the lives of Indian migrants, to secular ethnic-based organisations, to understand their varying roles in the active negotiation of identity within the Hindu disapora in Sydney.
Laavanya Kathiravelu
PhD topic: Destination Dubai – Indian migrant labour and tourism in a “globalizing” city state
Dubai is rapidly amassing a reputation as the quintessential example of a hyper-globalized city. New industries of international finance, tourism and trade on which Dubai’s growth is generated rely not just on the generation of capital by tourists, multinationals and affluent residents, but depend simultaneously on an underclass who create and maintain the material infrastructures necessary for their sustenance. This research focuses on two such groups - Indian migrant labour and tourists, as transient agents in the development of Dubai’s new economies and subjects of India’s polarized development. In examining how the ‘global’ city acts as a locus for the formation of post-national, multilateral identifications, this project points to possibilities of an emergent Asian modernity.
Click here for Laavanya's Dubai PhD blog.
Bernard Leckning
PhD topic: The experiences and practices of tolerance within everyday negotiations of cultural difference.
Tolerance is often treated as a moral precept that exists on a spectrum between the position of advocates, who equate it to respect, and critics, who object to its permissiveness. My research, however, takes a normative view of tolerance as a practice through which mutual recognition can be achieved across cultural differences. By recovering tolerance as an empirical concept, I hope to explain its everyday practice and meaning in both failed and successful inter-cultural interactions, which I argue can be understood as differentiated relationships of recognition. In this way, recognition provides a critical lens through which to understand the horizon along which everyday strategies and meanings of tolerance connect to the way in which we imagine a decent and multicultural society.
Mei Yi Leung
PhD topic: Engaging Culturally & Linguistically Diverse Communities In Local Government Level - A Comparative Study
Mei Li will research how different local governments apply the principles of multiculturalism in policy and practice and the effectiveness of strategies intended to engage and consult with culturally and linguistically diverse communities. She will also explore the adequacy of local government responses to key moments of 'tension' such as the Redfern riots.
Kylie Sait
Phone: 9850 4468; Room:C5C389
PhD topic: Cultural Diversity, Community and Caring: Experiences of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) parents
Kylie is carrying out the research for the Cultural Diversity, Community and Family Services Project. Her research involves a longitudinal study exploring the experiences of parents with young children (aged 0-3 years) from various CALD backgrounds living in the Ryde local government area. This qualitative research will investigate parents’ use of and access to local services; explore their subjective experiences of parenting and caring in the local community; assess the level of community supports and informal networks available to them; and analyse the extent to which issues of cultural, religious and linguistic difference include or exclude parents from formal and informal support networks. Kylie will be using the research undertaken in Ryde as a case study to conduct a broader analysis of the complex links between caring in the early years, community, formal and informal support networks and CALD background. Recommendations will be made to the City of Ryde community services division to contribute to their social plans. The research has the potential to contribute more broadly to Australian policy and service provision in raising awareness of the diversity and complexity associated with assisting new parents, particularly those from CALD backgrounds.
Banu Senay
PhD topic: "The Children of the Republic": The Production of Turkishness and Turkish Cultural Revolution in the Diaspora
Banu is investigating the ceaseless production of various forms of Turkishness, as well as knowledge about Turkishness, among the Turkish migrants in Sydney. The key arguments underpinning this study are, first, that the formation of migrant communities can not be addressed in isolation from the broader national projects and discourses dominant in the migratory context, and second, that any plausible account of the formation of migrant communities must also incorporate the position of migrants themselves so as to understand how migrants live in 'nationalised' spaces and how they respond to the national projects of the sending and recruiting state. The task of the study is then to elucidate some of the important ways in which (i) the Turkish state nationalizes Turks in Australia; (ii) the Australian state enables/disenables such nationalising attempts of the Turkish state through its policy of multiculturalism; and (iii) Turkish migrants respond to these dual national projects.
Students Affiliated with the Centre
Ruth Cox (Philosophy, SCMP)
PhD topic: Applying the ethics of recognition
Applying the ethics of recognition to the issues of immigration, work, and social hope. Testing the hypotheses that recognition is crucial for self-esteem; that recognition establishes and maintains healthy social bonds; and that adequate recognition may be a requirement of social justice. Exploring the ability of the theory of recognition to describe and explain how actual societies function. Using the concept of recognition as a diagnostic tool to criticise social structures and relationships in terms of adequate or inadequate recognition. Exploring whether societies could be improved by better structures of mutual recognition, and identifying the potential difficulties of implementing the theory.
Bruce Dennett (Indigenous Studies, SCMP)
The changing image and historiography of aboriginal Australia in feature films.
Victoria Loblay (Anthropology, SCMP)
PhD topic: The effects of activist campagins against use of prenatal diagnostic technology in sex selection in India
Visual culture and embodiment in urban South India. How global images of bodies create new kinds of gendered communities and how new possibilities of inclusion challenge older gender hierarchies. The ways in which more entrenched forms of exclusion (such as gender, class and caste) mitigate the flows of cosmopolitan identities, determining who has access to new opportunities in this fluid cultural landscape.
Andrew Montin (Philosophy, SCMP)
Habermas and Luhmann on the role of philosophy within society including work on the early Frankfurt school as well as Karl-Otto Apel.
Sheila Watkins (Sociology, SCMP)
PhD topic: Social networks of Australian families
My PhD examines the types of social networks that exist for Australian families to ascertain the resources that are generated by these. It also examines the characteristics that influence these levels. Using the concept of social capital, the paper investigates the social, practical, emotional and financial support as well as the encouragement and inspiration that come to the families that possess each configuration of network. It looks at characteristics to see if they influence these levels, characteristics such as reciprocity, independence, participation and conflicts. It also examines the patterns of interactions and the opportunity structures that each network is embedded within to see it these affect levels of social capital.