Moral childhoods: the role of morality in friendship-making among children from refugee backgrounds in rural, multicultural settler Australia

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines how children draw on local sources of morality and moral worth to forge connections, build friendship and enforce distinctions across difference in a rural multicultural city of settler Australia. Children’s friendship-making practices across ethnic and class differences have been widely explored in urban Australia. Far less is known about how children connect and distance in regional and rural places, notably those experiencing profound social change. This paper examines friendship work among children from humanitarian refugee backgrounds in one rural city of south-eastern Australia through the lens of morality and moral worth. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, it shows how deeply classed and racialised ideas about morality and moral worth scaffold children's social worlds, delineate which behaviours are valorised, and can exclude children whose actions do not meet the necessary moral criteria of belonging. A focus on morality provides rich insight into how children shore up familiarity and build affinities with one another while simultaneously policing and enforcing boundaries. This has important implications for understanding how children from refugee backgrounds build relationships and friendships in rural settler Australia, and the implications of such work for children’s everyday geographies of belonging.