Reinscribing and Inhabiting the City: Young Women Students from Asia Make Melbourne Home

Abstract

AbstractThis paper argues that embodied acts of mapping movement and feeling, taking photographs, and talking about public spaces have the potential to transform the central city into homely and stimulating spaces for young women, tertiary students from Asia who have recently migrated to Melbourne. Such performative acts that reinscribe the city temporarily unsettle feelings of exclusion, anxiety, and disappointment that are so much a part of living with cultural difference for these newcomers. This paper draws on women students' maps, images, and stories to provide an insight into urban sociality that is often hidden from our view, but significant because it demonstrates how performative acts animate bodies learning to reinhabit a new home.