Multicultural Suburb Research Articles

Weight, relief and overcoming: a safe space for racialized women learning to swim in Sweden

ABSTRACT This article aims to contribute to the nascent field of critical phenomenology in geography by elaborating on a feminist-phenomenological understanding of the conceptual binary of weight–relief and Nietzsche’s (self)overcoming. These notions provide a theoretical language for the universality of the human condition, transcending the tendency for theoretical-political reification of marginalized subjects’ lives and agencies. The empirical component consists of in-depth interviews with predominantly non-white, immigrant women who have either learned or taught other adult women to swim in a women-only swimming school founded in the multicultural suburb of Fisksätra, Stockholm, Sweden. By historicizing and contextualizing this setting, it is argued that the lack of swimming ability in Sweden (and elsewhere) is today a partly racialized phenomenon, where this deficiency constitutes a socio-phenomenological weight in individuals’ everyday geographies. What this gender-exclusionary space enables, in its quality as a ‘safe space’, is not so much the integration or securing of minority identities as the possibility to overcome one’s own fears and bodily challenges regarding water through shared experiences of safety, convivial solidarity and the joyful pleasures of being-in-water together.

Engaging with culturally and linguistically diverse communities during a COVID-19 outbreak: a NSW Health interagency public health campaign.

To report on efforts to engage culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities to provide an effective and appropriate public health response to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), and to report how a tailored, interagency response addressing specific community needs was rapidly rolled out in a pandemic setting. Type of program or service: A novel, rapid, interagency public health campaign led by NSW Health and Sydney Local Health District (SLHD) was established in response to a local outbreak of COVID-19 in the multicultural suburb of Lakemba, in Sydney's south west, in October 2020. The public education and testing campaign was run over 2 weeks and involved in-language development of COVID-19 resources, establishment of a local pop-up testing clinic, 'COVID Safe' inspections of local businesses, engagement with local community leaders and distribution of written and verbal in-language education by cultural support workers. We describe the campaign impact in engaging CALD communities in a pandemic setting, including the impact on COVID-19 testing rates, identification of close contacts and engagement with local businesses, as well as learnings from a multi-agency debrief at the conclusion of the campaign. There was an 87% increase in COVID-19 testing in the local area during the campaign. Despite 890 close contacts being identified during the outbreak, only 17 cases of COVID-19 were identified. Regulators visited 127 local businesses to provide 'COVID Safe' education and advice. SLHD cultural support personnel worked with the community to provide verbal and written in-language resources and education. Community and religious leaders were engaged to act as 'COVID Safe' champions. A key to the success of the Lakemba campaign was the rapid, multi-agency collaboration between NSW Health, SLHD and regulators. An important lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic has been the importance of providing a flexible, tailored public health response that reacts to the target community's needs. This is even more important in our CALD communities, where mainstream health messages are insufficient. The Lakemba campaign is an example of how such a response can be undertaken rapidly while maintaining the key principles of community partnership, engagement and equity.

Dreamscapes and Monsters, from “Little Boxes” to “Multicultural Suburbs”

In a departure from historic understandings of immigrant settlement in North America, and the traditional Global City, a cluster of suburban immigrant enclaves in metropolitan Atlanta are highly representative of immigration and migration trends, worldwide. While a post-Trump and authentically “purple” Georgia continues to debate anti-immigrant measures, Asian and Latino households and businesses array themselves in linear fashion along metro Atlanta's ubiquitous highway corridors, and local politics in Atlanta suburbs like Norcross, Doraville, and Clarkston advertise efforts to welcome and integrate immigrant populations. However, each city is also primarily interested in generating higher property taxes and offering increased units of upper-class to luxury housing for a select few. The immigrant suburb still wants boxes, upon boxes, in yellow, pink, and blue.

Ihnji Jon's Bubble Clash: Identity, Environment, and Politics in a Multicultural Suburb

Jon's article is a matter of how any event, interaction, or scenario works off all that precedes and follows it, how their very conditions of possibility are posed, not simply within the personalities, histories, or situations of a given context, but in the time underway, the multiplicity of indetectable transversals of responding to the entirety of the world at a given moment, which makes itself present in an unprecedented specificity.

Bubble clash: Identity, environment and politics in a multicultural suburb

The purpose of article is to examine whether the current feminist philosophies in the intersection of identity, politics and the environment can have practical purchase in urban problem-solving. My argument is mobilised using the story of Greater Dandenong, a multicultural suburb approximately 30km south-east of Melbourne's central business district. This suburb witnessed what I call a ‘bubble clash.’ In recent years, Greater Dandenong has experienced an ecological problem: its seagull population has increased, causing community conflicts over how to manage it. These conflicts have been fought between insular, closed (i.e. bubble) groups. One effect of this ‘bubble clash’ has been that it is incredibly difficult to develop a communal agreement between groups with very different outlooks. Feminist theory has, historically, provided significant resources for understanding this kind of situation. In the article, I review feminist political philosophies – drawing on Iris Young, Patricia H. Collins and Elizabeth Grosz – that help us understand how identity and urban politics relate. My contribution is to add a pragmatic supplement to this body of work. Extending beyond the interpretation of multiculturalism in which ‘differences’ in our identities are given an a priori quality, I propose a ‘transitionist pragmatist perspective’ that (a) reframes how we understand context and contingency in the ongoing formation of subjectivities and their ideals and (b) seeks to trace the history of problematic situations specifically through the lens of problem-solving.

Parents' beliefs, perceptions and practices: Influence on child school readiness in Western Sydney, Australia.

Beliefs, practices and perceptions of early child development informing school readiness were examined for parents of preschool-aged children living in one multicultural suburb in Western Sydney, Australia. Survey data (N=87) and semi-structured interviews (N=52) with parents were collected in public spaces (e.g., parks, libraries, church halls and community centres) in mid-2019. Participants, primarily migrants of South Asian background, believed children learn through practical activities, prioritising academic and social development, with less focus on emotional development and communication skills. Parents' approached school readiness through the engagement of children in shared activities that maintained traditional cultural practices while simultaneously seeking to create community connection. Raising awareness of and engagement in both formal (e.g., early education services) and informal services (e.g., playgroups, library groups) could provide migrant and refugee parents with supportive networks in their local communities. Offering subsidies for attendance at early childhood programmes may reduce costs and encourage attendance, particularly for outdoor activities, helping to establish support networks for parents and children before starting primary school. These connections may provide families with a pathway for the identification and access of other local services and supports for their children. Programmes could also offer a platform for raising parental awareness of a holistic approach to child development and its importance for school success. Incorporating multicultural activities into early childhood programmes and settings could further assist parents in maintaining traditional cultural ties while creating essential local community connections.

Socio-Sensory Practice and its Potential for Identity, Plurality and Dissonance

ABSTRACT This paper explores how the consideration of sensory embodied practice offers a route to unraveling subtle and nuanced placemaking practices of multicultural communities, revealing the physical, cultural and social interplay of everyday interactions. While a sensorial epistemological approach has been a relatively recent development in the humanities and social sciences, the ‘body’ has been theorised extensively. Even so, this has been of a generic body that is typically white, male and middle class. The embodied practices I present here affirm that bodies are social, sensorial and multiplicitous. Drawing from fieldwork in the multicultural Melbourne suburb of Footscray, I discuss the socio-sensory, through two types of sociality encountered on site; firstly, around economic activities, and the other around small groups of individuals, appearing unplanned and leisurely. I discuss the significance of these embodied acts in defining identity and validating presence in the urban landscape, demonstrating the sensescapes they create, informed by culturally specific sensory orders carry the potential to challenge – permeating and confronting, implicitly providing a means of expression and dissonance. I argue, consideration of the socio-sensory dimension provides an alternative framework of analysis that expands vocabulary and recalibrates sensibilities, providing insight into other ways of making and occupying space.

Libraries in women’s lives: everyday rhythms and public time

ABSTRACT This paper asks how libraries have rhythmed women’s education and everyday lives. It draws on women’s narratives of library use in a multicultural suburb of Birmingham, UK. It shows that women’s use of libraries exists in rhythmic relations with other times and places, both public and private. The narratives reveal the value of the library in offering space for women to claim time for themselves in the Lefebvrian “weak time, the stops, silences, blanks”. Routines, cycles and continuity of use over various scales are important in women’s engagements with libraries. Memorable too are particular moments. Punctuating the quotidian rhythms of library use, these moments are individual stories of rupture; times of great significance in women’s lives. Changes to library provision have, therefore, rhythmic consequences, with reduced opening hours and library closure bringing arrhythmia. Through the library, women are linked to particular histories and they enter into shared rhythms, within both the present and the past. Libraries, this paper argues, offer not only an important public space but also public time. 1

Strengthening resilience through an extended postnatal home visiting program in a multicultural suburb in Sweden: fathers striving for stability

BackgroundTo improve prerequisites for better health development among children growing up in multicultural suburbs in Stockholm County, where poorer health is displayed in several aspects including child health, early support was initiated for first-time parents in one of the suburbs. An extended postnatal home visiting program during the child’s first 15 months was offered to families with first-time mothers during 2013–2014 and consisted of six home visits by a child health care nurse and a parental advisor from social services. Almost all invited families (94%) participated in the program and the program evaluation. Fathers’ participation in two or more home visits within the program was 53%.The aim of this study was to explore the experiences of fathers participating in the program, with respect to their role as a first-time parent from a resilience perspective.MethodsIn-depth interviews were conducted with nine fathers. Constructivist grounded theory (GT) was applied in the analysis.ResultsThe fathers’ experiences formed the core category of the study, ‘striving for stability in living conditions’, as well as three categories: ‘everyday life conditions’, ‘adjustment to fatherhood in Sweden’ and ‘channels of support’. The fathers perceived that the home visiting program strengthened their parental confidence and increased their knowledge of societal services and local resources for their family.ConclusionsIn terms of resilience, the extended postnatal home visiting program benefitted the interviewed migrant fathers on an individual level by meeting part of their need for support regarding knowledge and parental confidence; on a structural level the program helped fathers gain information about available societal services and resources in their local area.Trial registrationThe study was retrospectively registered (11 August 2016) in the ISRCTN registry (ISRCTN11832097 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/ISRCTN11832097).

Stranger adaptations: public/private interfaces, adaptations, and ethnic diversity in Bankstown, Sydney

ABSTRACTWhile geographical and planning literature has traditionally adopted a macro-scale focus when studying ethnic diversity, this has been recently supplemented by more fine-grained analyses of “everyday multiculturalism.” Although these micro-scale studies recognise that relationships between socialities and spatialities are important, the role of built form in framing these relationships is not much explored. With a view to extending this literature, this paper examines how experiences of ethnic diversity in public space are influenced by built form in the multicultural suburb of Bankstown, Sydney. Drawing on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with residents and users of Bankstown’s town centre, along with ArcGIS maps of the area’s urban morphology, the particular focus is on the role of public/private interface adaptations in affecting experiences and perceptions of cultural diversity. It is argued that these adaptations function as both facilitator and foil for the strategies people employ to negotiate the problematic Simmel associated with “the stranger.”

An extended home visiting program in a multicultural suburb, fathers striving for stability

An extended home visiting program in a multicultural suburb, fathers striving for stability

Vernacular Cosmopolitanisms in Suburban Peripheries: A Case Study in Multicultural Sydney

This article examines different forms of cosmopolitanism that shape everyday spaces in a multicultural suburb at the periphery of urban and political dynamics of Sydney. I investigate two forms of cosmopolitanism: top-down cosmopolitanism as part of place-making strategies enacted by local government and associated parties, and ordinary intercultural encounters enacted in public spaces. The latter kind of vernacular cosmopolitanism does not necessarily fit with prevailing ideas of marketable diversity in the cosmopolitan city. The paper analyses these dynamics using a case study of Campsie, a peripheral multi-ethnic neighbourhood between Sydney’s Inner West and South West regions. The examples of vernacular exchange portrayed here point to the important role that space – as a social, political and material assemblage – plays in mediating the everyday performance of ‘ground-up’ cosmopolitanism. The paper argues that the dense web of spatially mediated interactions – ordinary cosmopolitanism – reveals values of civility and sociality that has the potential to foster inclusive urban spaces in multicultural cities.

What motives are important for participation in leisure-time activities at Swedish youth centres?

Objective: This study aimed to explore the motives of young people in multicultural suburbs for participating in youth-centre activities. Design and setting: The study employed practice-based research with a focus on collaboration and methodological diversity. Data on motives for participation were collected in spring 2013 at two non-governmental organisation (NGO)-run youth centres located in the suburbs of two cities in Sweden using surveys and focus-group interviews. Method: The study used mixed methods, with qualitative data being used to help explain initial quantitative findings. Statistical analysis was conducted using measures of competence and social motives. Qualitative analysis used both deductive and inductive content analysis. Results: Study findings suggest that motives concerning competence development and socialising are insufficient to account for why young people in multicultural, socially disadvantaged suburbs participate in youth-centre activities. The study highlights the importance of additional motives influencing participation in leisure-time activities. The additional motives of ‘fun/undemanding’ and ‘support’ were found to be important to most young people in this study. Conclusion: Study findings suggest that motives for participation in youth-centre activities have to do with characteristics of the participants, of the neighbourhood in which the centre is located and the specific type of unstructured leisure-time activity. Future motive measurement scales should include items concerning socioeconomic status, activities provided and young people’s degree of influence over the activities in which they participate.

Making scents of the landscape

Moving away from logocentric studies of the linguistic landscape, this paper explores the relations between linguascapes and smellscapes. Often regarded as the least important of our senses, smell is an important means by which we relate to place. Based on an olfactory ethnography of a multicultural suburb in Sydney, we show how the intersection of people, objects, activities and senses make up the spatial repertoire of a place. We thus take a broad view of the semiotic landscape, including more than the visual and the intentional, and suggest that we are interpellated by smells as part of a broader relation to space and place. Understanding the semiotics of the urban smellscape in associational terms, we therefore argue not merely that smell has generally been overlooked in semiotic landscapes, nor that this can be rectified by an expanded inventory of sensory signs, but rather that the interpellative and associational roles of smells invite us towards an alternative semiotics of time and place.

Eat, Swim, Pray

Eat, Swim, Pray

Untangling the different components of Norwegianness*

ABSTRACT. National identity is under scrutiny in Europe. A new non-ethnic conception of the nation to replace the traditional ethnic one is needed. National identity is therefore undergoing a public reconstruction. This article is based on narratives of “Norwegianness” that emerged in a qualitative interview study of white majority Norwegians who live in multicultural suburbs in Oslo. I respond to an overlooked need to analytically untangle different components of “Norwegianness” as phenomenological knowledge, to decouple its different constituents from each other. In order to analyse qualitative data where notions of “Norwegianness” and “non-Norwegianness” are at play, their different aspects must be clarified. I identify multiple discursive oppositions that researchers ought to keep apart, and distinguish between civic aspects (citizenship), cultural aspects, and ethnic/racial aspects. I suggest that everyday notions of the national are fruitfully studied as discursive space constituted by a series of overlapping, but sometimes mutually contradicting, oppositions.

In Between the Accented and the Mainstream: Cutting across Boundaries in Kniven i Hjärtat

The article discusses the Swedish fictional television drama Kniven i Hjärtat (KIH) as an accented drama depicting diasporic experience in contemporary Sweden. It is inspired by an ethnographic audience research conducted by the author among migrant teenagers. KIH, produced by Swedish public broadcasting company SVT (2004) is a mixture of realist drama and youth musical depicting life in Swedish multicultural suburb. It is argued that while KIH shares elements of Hamid Naficy?s (2001) concept of ? the accented? thematically and linguistically, the production of the series parts from Naficy?s understanding of the accented as alternative. Produced by the public service broadcasting company (SVT) KIH is situated in the mainstream media influenced by international television broadcasting, most evidently by the BBC. Moreover KIH seems to be berthed in the European public service broadcasting culture as it embraces the shifts in EBU?s multicultural policies.

Limits of Hybridity Versus Limits of Tradition?: A Semiotics of Cultural Reproduction, Creativity, and Ambivalence among Multicultural Youth in Rudenga, East Side Oslo

Abstract Although hybridization may be understood as processes through which cultural forms become separated from already existing practices and recombine into new expressions, identities, and practices, a more explicit and empirically informed exploration of the limits of this phenomenon on a microlevel—and the tension to its opposite, in the shape of tradition—is largely absent in the anthropological literature. On the basis of several periods of fieldwork in a youth club in a multicultural suburb, East Side Oslo, over a time span of 12 years, I explore the psychosocial processes whereby a single actor strengthens and questions central aspects of the tradition with which he originally associates while also orienting himself toward some features of a different cultural tradition. Using the phenomenological semiotics of Charles Peirce, I approach these processes as instances in which actors articulate and make meaningful relations to themselves, others, and the outside world. [hybridization, reproduction, semiotics, multicultural youth, emotion]

Cultural capital and cultural diversity: some problems in Ghassan Hage's account of cosmopolitan multiculturalism

Ghassan Hage's account of Australian ‘cosmopolitan multiculturalism’ provided an exemplary class critique of multiculturalism policy under the labor Hawke-Keating governments (1983–1996), one which highlighted the fault lines along which a popular backlash against multiculturalism later developed. However, upon closer inspection the theoretical and ethnographic work behind the ‘cosmo-multiculturalist’ thesis appears seriously flawed. This article revisits Hage's mid-1990s ethnography on Vietnamese restaurants in Cabramatta, a suburb in Sydney's south-west that has a significant number of Indo-Chinese residents and businesses and is promoted by local government as ‘Australia's most multicultural suburb’. It argues Hage's ethnography not only distorts the causality of local tourism, but is unable to appreciate the mixed governmental rationales that underpin local planning and the active participation of migrant associations in this process. Furthermore, it is argued Hage's notion of ‘cosmopolitan capital’ is insufficiently Bourdieusian as it assumes the domination effects of cultural capital are due to the commodity relations it enables, rather than being a consequence of its unequal distribution and (therefore) its capacity to realise class-specific social advantages. A brief review of one recent attempt to operationalise Hage's critique in Australian broadcasting policy further supports the conclusion that the ‘cosmo-multiculturalist’ thesis as it currently stands has limited value as an explanatory tool and point of policy intervention.

The art of government: Khoa Do's The Finished People and the policy reform of Community Cultural Development

This article considers the production of the independent feature The Finished People (Khoa Do, 2003) in terms of a key factor reviewers and critics chose to play down: namely, that the director sought to capture public interest in Cabramatta (a suburb in Sydney's south west promoted as Australia's ‘most multicultural suburb’) in order to lift a Community Cultural Development (CCD) project out of the suburbs and deliver it to audiences of art-house cinema. While the film's representational strategies clearly reflect a tradition of independent Asian Australian cinema that critically negotiates the identity politics of state-sponsored multiculturalism, the film's mode of production had less to do with the avant-garde agendas reviewers compared it with, and more to do with an enduring governmental regime of pastoral pedagogy dedicated to the correction of ‘at risk’ subjects. Furthermore, the project strongly anticipated recent policy reforms to CCD initiated by the Australia Council for the Arts in 2004. Under the flexible rubric ‘Creative Communities’ these reforms seek to steer CCD workers away from cultural development as a narrow target of government intervention, and towards a more open and flexible range of policy goals and objectives. A close reading of the film's context of production reveals how such a policy shift might be expected to increase opportunities for local content to move between fields of cultural production, even as it multiplies dilemmas of formal accountability and aesthetic evaluation.