Australian Media and the Politics of Belonging 9781783087785, 1783087781

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Australian Media and the Politics of Belonging

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ANTHEM STUDIES IN AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, ECONOMICS AND SOCIETY This series showcases the most significant contributions to scholarship on a wide range of social science issues, dealing with the changing politics, economics and society of Australia, while not losing sight of the interplay of other regional and global forces and their influence and impact on this region. Anthem Studies in Australian Politics, Economics and Society is intended as an interdisciplinary series, at the interface of politics, law, sociology, media, policy, political economy, economics, business, criminology and anthropology. It is seeking to publish high quality research which considers issues of power, justice and democracy; and provides a critical contribution to knowledge about Australian politics, economics and society. The series especially welcomes books from emerging scholars which contribute new perspectives on social science. Series Editor-​in-​Chief Sally Young –​University of Melbourne, Australia Series Editors Timothy Marjoribanks –​Swinburne University of Technology, Australia Joo-​Cheong Tham –​Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne, Australia Editorial Board Iain Campbell –​Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), Australia Sara Charlesworth –​Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), Australia Kevin Foster –​Monash University, Australia Anika Gauja –​The University of Sydney, Australia John Germov –​The University of Newcastle, Australia Michael Gilding –​Swinburne University of Technology, Australia Simon Jackman –​Stanford University, USA Carol Johnson –​The University of Adelaide, Australia Deb King –​Flinders University, Australia Jude McCulloch –​Monash University, Australia Jenny Morgan –​University of Melbourne, Australia Vanessa Ratten –​La Trobe University, Australia Ben Spies-​Butcher –​Macquarie University, Australia Ariadne Vromen –​The University of Sydney, Australia John Wanna –​Australian National University, Australia George Williams –​The University of New South Wales, Australia

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Australian Media and the Politics of Belonging Edited by David Nolan, Karen Farquharson and Timothy Marjoribanks

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Anthem Press An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company www.anthempress.com This edition first published in UK and USA 2018 by ANTHEM PRESS 75–​76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK and 244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA © 2018 David Nolan, Karen Farquharson and Timothy Marjoribanks editorial matter and selection; individual chapters © individual contributors The moral right of the authors has been asserted. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-​13: 978-​1-​78308-​778-​5 (Hbk) ISBN-​10: 1-​78308-​778-​1 (Hbk) This title is also available as an e-​book.

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CONTENTS List of Illustrations

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Acknowledgements

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Part I.

THEORIZING BELONGING IN CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIA

Chapter 1. Australian Media and the Politics of Belonging David Nolan, Karen Farquharson and Timothy Marjoribanks

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Chapter 2. Politics of Belonging in a Mediated Society: A Contribution to the Conceptual Exegesis Val Colic-​Peisker

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Chapter 3. Media, Belonging and Being Heard: Community Media and the Politics of Listening Tanja Dreher

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Part II.

SUDANESE AUSTRALIANS, MEDIA PRACTICES AND THE POLITICS OF BELONGING

Chapter 4. Talking about the Other: Sudanese Australians and the Language of Difference on Talkback Radio Scott Hanson-​Easey

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Chapter 5. In a Context of Crime: Sudanese and South Sudanese Australians in the Media Karen Farquharson and David Nolan

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Chapter 6. Journalism Practice, the Police and Sudanese Australians Denis Muller, Karen Farquharson and David Nolan

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Chapter 7. Constructing the Heroic Other and ‘They Always Asked about Africa, They Never Asked about Me’: Three Screen Representations of Sudanese Australians Paola Bilbrough Part III.

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SHIFTING THE POLITICS OF BELONGING: MEDIA INTERVENTIONS AND POSSIBILITIES FOR TRANSFORMATION

Chapter 8. Towards an Australian Framework for Best Practice in Reporting News Involving Muslims and Islam Jacqui Ewart and Mark Pearson Chapter 9. Creating Media, Creating Belonging: Young People from Refugee Backgrounds and the Home Lands Project Raelene Wilding and Sandra Gifford

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Chapter 10. Creating Belonging: The Possibilities and Limitations of an Organizational News Media Intervention Timothy Marjoribanks, Denis Muller and Michael Gawenda

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Notes on Contributors

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Index

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ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 2.1 The ‘triads’: an intersecting conceptual framework

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Tables 5.1 Newspaper items on Sudanese Australians, 2007–​12

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5.2 Television news items on Sudanese Australians, 2007–​12

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5.3 Main category of news item (per cent)

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5.4 Other elements included where the main context was crime (per cent)

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book brings together contributions from leading scholars in their disciplines, working on critical issues advancing our understanding of belonging. As an editorial team, we thank them for their willingness to contribute their important work to this volume and for their earlier participation in a workshop that provided the basis for this book. As a note, individual authors have provided their own acknowledgements where appropriate in their respective chapters. We thank the editorial and production team at Anthem Press for their work through all stages of the editing and production process. It has been a pleasure to work with them, and we thank them for their professionalism and encouragement in bringing this book to publication. We thank Vassilissa Carangio for her work on the final manuscript. We also very much thank the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne for a publication grant that contributed to the final publication of this book. We are also grateful to Matthew McCarthy, Founding Director of Clear Design, for his permission to use the cover image, which features posters produced for the ‘Identity: Yours, Mine, Ours’ exhibition at the Immigration Museum, Melbourne. The project would not have been possible without the support of these individuals and organizations. This book had its origins in a research project on the communication needs of Sudanese Australians, with a research team of chief investigators that comprised Michael Gawenda, David Nolan, Karen Farquharson, Denis Muller and Timothy Marjoribanks. A  number of the chapters in this book present findings from the project. The members of the research team wish to express their heartfelt thanks to all those who contributed to this project, in particular Violeta Politoff, who organized much of the early work; Reece Lamshed, who managed the training programme; and Alice Burgin and Aisling Bailey, who, along with Violetta Politoff, provided excellent research assistance. Particular thanks also to all the members of the Sudanese and South-​ Sudanese Australian communities who participated in or in any way contributed to the project. Without their willingness to participate in the

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project (details of which are provided in chapters in this book), the research project and book would not have been possible. Louise Wilson and Lucy Chancellor-​ Weale at the Centre for Advancing Journalism (CAJ) at the University of Melbourne provided invaluable and greatly appreciated administrative support throughout the project, and we also thank Margaret Simons for ensuring the continued support of the CAJ. The contributions of the project’s industry partners the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and Adult Multicultural Education Services (AMES) are also richly deserving of acknowledgement and thanks. AMES provided accommodation for the training and for workshops at which the participants were able to gain access to computers for the purpose of building and maintaining the website that became the main work of the group. We are particularly grateful to Cath Scarfe and Adam Baxter for their support and advice, and to Maureen O’Keeffe and Maria Tsopanis for their work in contributing to and facilitating the training sessions. The ABC, in particular Carolyn MacDonald and Frances Green, provided access to their journalists and persuaded them to act as mentors, gave generously of their own time as teachers and harnessed resources across the ­organization to provide the participants with training in technical as well as editorial fields. Through the project, numerous current and former journalists, as well as other colleagues, made significant contributions to the training programme through a range of activities including delivering training and being involved in mentoring. We thank them for their generosity and for their important contribution to the project. We also thank members of the broader community who attended project roundtables for their interest in, and engagement with, the project. The project was made possible by a Linkage Project grant from the Australian Research Council, ARC LP 110100063. We are grateful for the support provided by the ARC. We also thank the Sidney Myer Foundation and the Social Justice Initiative at the University of Melbourne for financial support through their grant schemes for this project. The project would not have been possible without their financial support. The support of the University of Melbourne, Swinburne University of Technology and La Trobe University, the institutional homes of the members of the research team at the time the book was developed, is also gratefully acknowledged.

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Part I THEORIZING BELONGING IN CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIA

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Chapter 1 AUSTRALIAN MEDIA AND THE POLITICS OF BELONGING David Nolan, Karen Farquharson and Timothy Marjoribanks

Introduction: Feels Like Home? In late 2015, Qantas released the second of its ‘Feels Like Home’ television advertising campaigns. This series of advertisements, aired extensively on Australian commercial television during its coverage of the 2016 Olympic Games, focused on a series of stories of members of a real-​life family, the Shelpers, travelling to spend Christmas with their parents on the NSW coast. In the ads, each family member travels from a different location –​one daughter from what is recognizably the Australian outback, another from Brisbane, a third from country Victoria and the youngest son orchestrates a surprise visit from New  York, from where he is shown travelling home on business class.1 Each story, featuring a family member travelling to their parents’ home with Qantas, is accompanied by the Randy Newman song ‘Feels Like Home’ covered by young Australian singer Martha Marlow. The culmination of each advertisement shows the emotional scene of the whole family reunited for Christmas dinner, accompanied by the climax of the song’s chorus in its final line: Feels like home, feels like home to me Feels like I’m all the way back –​where I belong.

This text replays what is a familiar and nostalgic scene for many Australians who travel home to share time with their families, and this sense of nostalgic familiarity is linked in each of the advertisements of Australian locations that are drawn together through its national family narrative. During the Olympics, this familiarity was interlinked with a sense of national pride evoked by the warm feelings the ads evoke, their linkage with an airline that is a national icon in its own right and the evocation of sporting patriotism.

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In this way, the ads directly appealed to and constructed a sense of national belonging –​an image, or set of images, of homeliness constructed through synecdoche and personification, via which an individual family –​the Shelpers –​ are signified as a national family. To understand this as a semiotic process, we must not only pay attention to what these advertisements depict, or what is presented, but also the relationship between what is present and what is absent in them. In its focus on a singular, middle-​class ‘white’ family enjoying a secular ritual rooted in Christian tradition, these ads necessarily exclude other potential images of Australia: its non-​white and Indigenous populations, scenes of urban and working-​class life and the presence of non-​‘Anglo’ cultural traditions and rituals associated with Australian multiculturalism. In drawing attention to this, our point is not to criticize these ads as ‘bad’ in themselves. On the contrary, they are highly accomplished products that no doubt achieved the identificatory aims they were designed to fulfil. Instead, we focus on this example as a starting point for this book because it highlights key themes regarding both the nature of belonging and the role of media in constructing it that ensuing chapters build on. The most fundamental point to draw here is that ‘belonging’ refers to a feeling, or a set of feelings, of being ‘at home’. Such feelings bring with them a sense of security and confidence in one’s capacity to operate socially, as an accepted member of a given community. Greg Noble has defined such ‘homely belonging’ by drawing on Anthony Giddens’s concept of ‘ontological security’, which refers to ‘the confidence or trust we have in the world around us, both in the things and the people with which we share our lives, and hence which provide stability and a continuity to our identity’, contributing to a ‘settled feeling’ (Noble 2005, 113). ‘Settled’ here means ‘unperturbed’, yet this word choice nevertheless also refers us to other aspects of ‘settlement’ that may also be implicated in belonging. Interestingly, much of the affective power of the Qantas campaign derives from images of Australian landscapes –​scenes of outback life, of country living and of natural beauty. That these landscapes can be presented as ‘home’ implicitly references a historical process of white settlement and the forcible appropriation of land, here also referencing another sense of ‘belonging’ as ownership, whereby the nation is constructed fundamentally as a white possession (Moreton-​Robinson 2015). Settled feelings, in this respect, can be situated in the Australian context as a historical legacy of a process of settlement that involved an accumulation of land by dispossession via the now notorious and discredited, albeit still consequential, doctrine of terra nullius. This brings us to a third meaning of ‘settled’, referring to a state of affairs that exists as a consequence of a (negotiated or enforced) achievement of a political settlement. Indeed, it is interesting to reflect here on the degree to which

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the incorporation of the Australian landscape into a narrative of belonging associated with a ‘white’ family implicitly relies on a history of colonial violence and dispossession, where the question of whom land belonged to, and which populations could legitimately claim belonging in relation to it, was treated as a zero-​sum game. The ontological security of feeling ‘at home’, then, can be seen to be produced by, and implicated in, processes whereby feelings of belonging have historically accrued to particular populations. If belonging can be taken to refer to an affective sense of security and comfort, such feelings are also associated with material dimensions: personal well-​being and economic security; a capacity to both operate and be welcomed within various social networks and sites of interpersonal exchange; a confident knowledge of and familiarity with one’s surroundings, contributing to a sense of environmental comfort; and a familiarity with, and comfort in, the idioms, objects and customs that are characteristic of particular social spaces. Historically, the material underpinnings of ‘ontological security’ have not only been unequally distributed among populations along the grounds of ethnicity and ‘race’ but also divisions of class and gender, among others. Indeed, much interdisciplinary work that has been historically concerned to address forms of social inequality has highlighted how these are based on exclusive constructs of sociality that work to benefit certain subjects while excluding others: how workplaces, for example, are not only structured in ways that further male dominance but also by forms of sociality that privilege masculinity and exclude women. Feelings of belonging, in this respect, are both products and part of the structures of privilege associated with the operation of social hierarchies. This raises questions that the chapters of this book address in detail: To what extent, and how, are media texts and practices implicated in reiterating and challenging such structures? What are the models of ‘belonging’ that such texts and practices represent and construct, and to what extent do these serve to support forms of sociality that are inclusive and/​or exclusive for different populations? To what extent do media practices and texts serve to reiterate inherited traditions upon which senses of belonging rest, or work to contest and replace them? These questions take us from a consideration of belonging, as a condition or feeling of ‘ontological security’, to the ‘politics of belonging’ –​the processes through which such feelings are produced and struggled for and over. As we have noted in our reading of the Qantas ‘Feel Like Home’ campaign, the construction of particular feelings of belonging relies not only on its inclusions but also on its structuring exclusions, or what is absented or repressed in the models of sociality that provide a basis for identification. Such inclusions and exclusions are, we suggest, not coincidental but rather products of political

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settlement, whereby particular images and norms of belonging have become installed and are reiterated as dominant within a particular setting. Yet, because politics are never entirely settled once and for all, ‘belonging’ does not constitute a given or uncontested condition but rather an object or field of ongoing struggle. It is important, here, to provide a brief reflection on the relations between belonging and citizenship. While belonging is irreducible to citizenship, both formal definitions of and the politics surrounding citizenship have material implications for both the experience of belonging and the relations of power that shape the terrain upon which struggles for belonging take place. Equally, however, media practices and representations may inform, as well as be informed by, definitions of citizenship, and media provide a vital terrain through which debates about citizenship are (well or ill) informed. In addition, as several contributions to this volume highlight, media engagement and use provide a vital part of the social terrain within which belonging is experienced, and individuals’ engagement with media institutions, practices and projects can provide resources that work to empower or disempower them in their experience of and struggles for belonging. Media institutions and practitioners are also, significantly, actors in their own right, whose actions and representations do not simply reflect state agendas or everyday life but are also shaped by their own identities, concerns and agendas. This book aims to consider, and analyse, the multiple ways in which media are implicated in belonging, how it is constructed and the struggles which surround it. While this is a potentially broad terrain, it is focused through three thematic sections. Part I (which this chapter opens) provides a series of theoretical and historical engagements with both the concept of belonging, and how different media sectors and practices are implicated in Australia’s politics of belonging. Part II provides a set of case studies of how the mediated politics of belonging affects and implicates a particular group, Sudanese Australians, as these politics play out across and through mediated public spaces and, simultaneously, how Sudanese Australians are engaged in mediated struggles to belong and over what defines belonging. Part III, by contrast, examines a number of academic projects that seek, in different ways, to intervene in the politics of belonging, providing both practical avenues for achieving shifts in mediated politics and reflecting on the challenges such projects confront. Before we turn to introduce the constituent chapters of this book in greater detail, however, we turn first to further elaborate on the concept of belonging, and to provide an initial consideration of the socio-​historical context in which this book’s engagement with Australia’s politics of belonging is situated.

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Australia’s ‘Politics of Belonging’ As Nira Yuval-​Davis has defined it, the ‘politics of belonging’ refers to ‘specific political projects aimed at constructing belonging in particular ways to particular collectivities that are, at the same time, themselves being constructed by these projects in very particular ways’ (2005, 197). Here, as we previously focused on the divergent connotations of Noble’s reference to belonging as a ‘settled feeling’, we highlight the different meanings of the concept of a political ‘project’. On the one hand, as Yuval-​Davis uses it, this term refers to a course of action that is future oriented, and to the achievements of those courses of action. On the other, shifting from noun to verb, to ‘project’ refers to the process of envisioning a future state of affairs, of the ‘projected’ relations that particular political projects seek to put in place. Taking both aspects into account, we may ask questions about the sort of relations envisioned or projected in different mobilizations of a politics of belonging, and the degree to which particular projects are successful in realizing these visions, fully or partially, and installing them in the public imaginary. As Yuval-​Davis (2005) suggests, the politics of belonging combines a reference to practices (or ‘projects’) that seek to realize and/​or maintain particular relations of belonging, and the ongoing production of social relations that are both the outcomes of such practices and that form the conditions for further practices. Such practices of belonging are primarily concerned with the definition and management of social boundaries surrounding who or what ‘belongs’, and are thereby welcomed, in a particular social space or community. While by comparison to more easily identifiable constructs such as ‘nationality’ or ‘citizenship’ the idea of ‘belonging’ may appear rather abstract, theorists of intersectionality have noted that boundaries and categorizations of belonging are seldom constructed on a single axis. Rather, these boundaries and categorizations are produced along the convergent and divergent lines of nationality, ethnicity, ‘race’, gender, class, religion, age and sexuality, alongside other categories of identity that provide the grounds for variable practices and experiences of inclusion and exclusion (Rigoni 2012, Yuval Davis 2011, Anthias 2008). As a ground on which experiences and conditions of ‘ontological security’ are socially distributed, ‘belonging’ refers not only to an object of struggle but also to the stakes around which contests over belonging are conducted. Ghassan Hage (1998, 21)  has memorably referred to these processes as subjects’ ‘struggles to make their lives viable’. Thus, for example, where subjects struggle for recognition within a national space, or to redefine the boundaries around which an economy of national belonging operates, this is not because nationhood has an inherent value but because it provides a

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significant ground upon and through which ‘belonging’ is socially organized and distributed. ‘National belonging’ remains, nevertheless, a significant site of articulation in the politics of belonging, intersecting with (though not reducible to) formal definitions of, debates surrounding and everyday experiences of citizenship. Kevin Dunn (2005) has drawn on the work of Judith Butler to suggest that definitions and experiences of national belonging are dependent on processes of performative reiteration and repetition, through acts and statements that are produced, constrained and judged according to the normative orders installed by previous iterations of national identity and its limits, while non-​ normative identities and performances are critiqued or punished. In the case of Australia, Dunn argues, an effect of its history is that sedimented norms of national identity and belonging, which have been historically constructed by reference to white and later Anglo-​Celtic identity, remain persistent. As Val Colic-​Peisker recounts in the next chapter in this book, the Federation of British colonies into the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 installed the norm of white Australia as a political settlement that dominated society for the next half-​century, largely as a consequence of the restriction of immigration to white migrants from the British Isles. Nevertheless, the economic requirement of an expanded intake of immigrant labour in the post-​war period saw the gradual contestation and partial displacement of the norm of white Australia in favour of policies and discourses of ‘multiculturalism’ that, at their peak in the early 1990s, sought to install a new vision of Australia as a ‘multicultural nation’. Although multicultural policies and constructions of Australia may be argued to have partially contested and troubled the sedimented norms of white Australia, Dunn notes that ‘multiculturalism is by no means sedimented as a national norm in Australia’ (2005, 35). While multiculturalism involved a qualified representation of Australian national identity as both constituted and enhanced by cultural pluralism, alongside policies that involved some recognition and facilitation of minority rights, in recent years this focus has been displaced in favour of a framework centred on imperatives of ‘social cohesion’ and ‘harmony’ (Ho 2014, Harris 2010). ‘Social cohesion’ has developed as a policy approach that seeks to promote shared values and social equality across various groups (Markus and Dharmalingam 2012). However, its deployment has also been articulated to a problematization of multiculturalism’s emphasis on cultural pluralism (Ho 2014, 39). In this respect, Australia’s policy shifts align with an international critique of and backlash against multiculturalism, largely based on the long-​standing critique emanating from the Right that, in emphasizing and supporting cultural difference, multiculturalism represents a divisive influence and an obstacle to the achievement of a common culture

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and shared values. Thus, while concepts of social cohesion and harmonious coexistence may appear innocuous and even desirable, in practice this shift ‘has meant that policy regarding citizenship, ethnic affairs and migration no longer emphasizes the rights of cultural minorities, the plurality of Australian culture, and the importance of state resources for the reduction of social inequities experienced by migrants’ (Harris 2010, 575). Operating alongside and informing this shift away from multiculturalism is a view of cultural difference as itself a cause of disharmony, an aspect that has informed a demand that migrants embrace and ‘integrate’ within a pre-​existing (dominant) core culture that pre-​exists their arrival. This shift, which Scott Poynting and Victoria Mason (2008) refer to as the ‘new integrationism’, is significant not only because it is tied to transformations within state programmes but also in its rhetorical and discursive dimensions and the degree to which these have impacted both public culture and everyday life. While Australia has not officially abandoned multiculturalism, the new integrationism has precipitated the displacement of policies that sought to recognize and facilitate migrants’ rights as members of a multicultural nation in favour of a model in which rights are granted by the nation in exchange for respect for ‘Australian values of equality, democracy and freedom’ (Commonwealth of Australia 2003, 6). While such values appear unexceptionable, it is significant that the imperative to conform to such values is framed as the requirement to adopt a particular ‘Australian’ identity, wherein ‘Australian values’ are positioned as products of white history and a British cultural heritage (van Krieken 2012, Fozdar and Spittles 2009, Johnson 2007). As Yuval-​Davis has commented, ‘emancipatory ethical and political values can be transformed, under certain conditions, into inherent personal attributes of members of particular national and regional collectivities’ (2006, 212), thus serving as a ‘dividing practice’ (Foucault 1982, 777–​78) between national subjects assumed to already hold such values and those whose otherness makes them potentially suspect. In the lead-​up to this book’s publication, changes proposed to Australia’s policies and laws relating to citizenship by Australia’s prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, and immigration minister Peter Dutton highlighted this process of division. These changes will make the achievement of citizenship notably stricter, requiring that applicants for citizenship must have been permanent residents for four years and demonstrate integration within Australia through participation in work, community activities and schooling. The requirement for extended permanent residency, alongside a ‘three strikes’ rule that denies applicants the opportunity to apply for residency after failing the citizenship tests three times, will particularly reduce the opportunities for refugee populations to achieve citizenship (Reilly 2017). In addition, changes to the existing citizenship test have been proposed, adding new questions about

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‘Australian values, and the privileges and responsibilities of Australian citizenship’ (Australian Government 2017, 6). In public statements surrounding this test, Turnbull and Dutton have suggested these questions on values might test applicants on their awareness that domestic and family violence, genital mutilation and violence generally are unacceptable within Australia. As critics have pointed out, since such activities constitute criminal acts, these might be better positioned as matters of law rather than values. However, by framing them as ‘values’-​based issues, such statements work to position them as an ‘ethnic’ problem grounded in a problematic cultural difference, despite the fact gender-​based and family violence remain a highly significant problem in Australia, and not one that is restricted to any group defined by ethnicity. In effect, it positions such issues as a problem with ‘them’, encouraging generalized and ill-​informed views of cultural ‘otherness’ rather than approaching gender and family violence as a shared problem that is unrelated to nationality or ethnicity.

Australian Media and the Politics of Belonging To what extent should these developments be positioned as part of a coherent ‘project’ of belonging whose conditions are, in part, constituted by Australia’s media environment? How far do the terms of dominant projects of belonging define the relations that mediate experiences of belonging, and to what extent do, or might, other projects operate to define and redefine those relations? Many of the contributions presented in this book provide resources that provide a ground for engaging with these questions, focusing not so much on ‘whether’ but rather how media are implicated, for both good and bad, in Australia’s politics of belonging. On the one hand, this includes detailed, critical analyses of how media practices and representations may operate as mechanisms of either exclusion or inclusion that is delimited, maintaining a distinction between those whose belonging is subordinate, qualified and provisional, and those who are positioned as empowered to define the terms of what it means to belong. On the other hand, several contributions also focus on the critical question of how media practices and coverage might be more reflective and inclusive in their relations with subjects who are individually and collectively othered, and how such subjects may be empowered, noting that they are not merely passive and should not be marginalized. Several contributions focus on how media coverage and media practices are shaped by, and operate as, mechanisms for projects that seek to draw boundary lines for different subjects. Mediated constructions of ‘home’ may be comforting for some, but produce very different feelings and experiences for ‘Others’ who are either excluded from, or positioned as threats to, Australia’s

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‘settlements’ of belonging. On the one hand, we may consider the situation of migrants who are simply unfamiliar with the norms, traditions and cultural practices of a new location, and may thus feel alienated rather than at home with them. On the other, where a politics of belonging positions particular subjects as either not belonging or as a threat to collective security, this may contribute to experiences of exclusion and discrimination. As we have seen, from terra nullius to ‘white Australia’, exclusion and discrimination have a long-​established history in Australia’s politics of belonging. More recently, in the context of the shift from multiculturalism to the ‘new integrationism’, Australian politics and public debate have become increasingly dominated by the construction and mobilization of a series of threatening ‘Others’ –​most notably Asians, asylum seekers and Muslims  –​as endangering ‘ordinary’ Australians’ economic, physical and national security (Poynting et  al. 2004, Gale 2004, Perera and Pugliese 1997). In Chapter  2, this history provides the backdrop for Val Colic-​Peisker’s novel conceptualization of belonging through an analysis of four intersecting triads. The first looks at the intersection of community-​belonging-​identity, arguing that one’s belonging is very much shaped by one’s community, and that one’s ability to choose an identity varies based on the social power of the communities to which one belongs. The second triad examines media-​ communication-​representation. Through this analysis Colic-​Peisker argues that we live increasingly mediated lives, leading to opportunities for ‘fake news’ and challenges for the legitimate dissemination of information. This has increased the power of the media to perform boundary-​setting roles around identity, contributing to the othering of minority groups and the maintenance of the power of dominant groups. The third triad, Australia-​politics-​ discourse, focuses on interests and power, in particular the power to set the agenda and be heard. Dominant voices are able to shape agendas around belonging to the detriment of minority groups. Finally, the fourth triad of reality-​construction-​perception argues that when people perceive situations as real, they behave as though they are real and that is how they become real. In an era of ‘fake news’ this leads to minority groups being increasingly othered, influencing belonging. The combination of the four triads leads to a situation where community, media and politics intersect to shape discourses and realities of belonging. Colic-​Peisker notes that while the othering of minority groups has a long history in Australia, the increasing mediation of our daily lives has enhanced such processes. In Chapter  3, ‘Media, Belonging and Being Heard:  Community Media and the Politics of Listening’, Tanja Dreher builds on her already significant contribution to debates around voice, listening and belonging in media. Through an analysis of media in Sydney’s western suburbs, and in the context

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of a racialized politics of belonging and related forms of exclusion, Dreher explores the politics of listening in addition to the more common emphasis on the politics of voice. The listening approach seeks to extend the analysis of community media and belonging beyond the celebration of individual empowerment and community voice, to also ask questions of receptivity, recognition and response. To explore this further, Dreher focuses on listening strategies developed by the innovative new media community arts organization Information Cultural Exchange (ICE), among others, to generate forms of individual and community-​level belonging. Indeed, through her analysis of a number of media innovations, Dreher is able to show that, where mainstream media has often stigmatized, marginalized or excluded, community media interventions in western Sydney can enable ‘acts of belonging’ (Vanni 2014). This includes generating forms of listening such as community affirmation, intergenerational listening, cross-​community listening, competition and critique, and creating a process in which counter-​publics, voices and stories rarely heard in mainstream media were valourized and celebrated, claiming vital forms of cultural citizenship (Salazar 2010). In the context of debates around belonging and media, Dreher’s analysis reveals a landscape of highly uneven and contingent possibilities for belonging, and hierarchies of differential or precarious belonging. In particular, her analysis extends the debate by recognizing that transforming the uneven politics of belonging requires changing practices and hierarchies of listening in response to the creative assertion of voice. Opening Part  II of this book, Scott Hanson-​Easey’s ‘Talking about the Other:  Sudanese Australians and the Language of Difference on Talkback Radio’ provides a detailed analysis of the performative mechanics of belonging through focusing on the deployment of language in the everyday space of talkback radio. While the flow of discursive constructions on radio talk shows is both incessant and fleeting it is, Hanson-​Easey argues, of the utmost significance because ‘the chief tool of exercising prejudice, racism and xenophobia, is language’. In a close and detailed analysis, he reveals the often subtle, but highly significant, ways that linguistic constructs deployed on Adelaide talkback radio worked to present explicit and implied arguments that collectively served to consistently ‘other’ people of Sudanese background, through the deployment of various modes of essentialism. The examples he analyses, notably, derive not only from ‘ordinary’ callers whose veracity is claimed on the basis of an experiential, felt ‘common sense’ but also from politicians who present themselves as developing arguments based on a reasoned expertise. The analysis, however, highlights how these rest upon appeals to, and the promotion of, an essentialization and homogenization of Sudanese people that, in many cases, represents a recrudescence of racialized (il)logics. In doing

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so, Hanson-​Easey positions his analyses historically, within the context of Australia’s historically ambivalent relationship to refugees, and the persistence of a tendency to position refugee groups through the construction of an essentialized ‘otherness’, as presenting a threat to ‘the Australian way of life’, and as embodying a potential unravelling of Australia’s social and cultural fabric. Although such persistence is often disheartening, however, Hanson-​ Easey’s analyses are premised on the claim that the politics of belonging rests upon linguistic practices that are constructs, the contingency and mutability of which offers scope for them to be challenged. Karen Farquharson and David Nolan’s chapter ‘In a Context of Crime: Sudanese and South Sudanese Australians in the Media’ also provides a perspective on the constitutive role played by media in the politics of belonging, but offers a more long-​term, quantitative analysis of news coverage relating to Sudanese and South Sudanese Australians. Like other contributors, Farquharson and Nolan are concerned to position the significance of media practice in the social and historical context of contemporary Australia, and to do this they draw on the concept of ‘racial formation’ to provide a wider picture of the sociopolitical situation which conditioned political and public responses to the presence of Sudanese people following Australia’s humanitarian migration intakes of the early 2000s. They argue that Australia’s historical and contemporary cultural politics surrounding ‘race’ and immigration served to condition these responses, and that media practices and predilections play a strong role in contributing to these politics. Recounting and reflecting on findings that demonstrate that in the decade following the arrival of Sudanese migrants in the early 2000s news representations of Sudanese people overwhelmingly focused on crime and violence, Farquharson and Nolan discuss the persistent association drawn within media coverage between crime and ethnicity. They focus particularly on the way ascribed ethnic characteristics involve a racialization that positions ‘culture’ as an inherited and fixed attribute of identity, and cultural ‘otherness’ as a cause of crime of crime and violence. They conclude that such coverage works as a mode of symbolic containment, where rather than addressing the disadvantage of racialized minority groups such as Sudanese Australians and supporting belonging, such coverage contributes to public and policy settings that ultimately support discrimination and prejudice. Building further on these themes, in Chapter  6 Denis Muller, Karen Farquharson and David Nolan discuss how police racial profiling of African migrants and media discourses of these migrants as criminal others mutually reinforced one another. The chapter recounts the process of over-​policing and the response of a group of African migrants in the Melbourne suburb of Flemington, who eventually took the police to court over its racial profiling and won, and in the process provided clear evidence of discriminatory

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police practices. It argues that the news media and the police both produced and reproduced stereotypes of African migrants as criminal others, which contributed to the racial profiling and subsequent over-​policing. While the court case provided vindication for the African litigants, the ways that media and police framed these migrants contributed to a lack of opportunity for them to belong in Australia. Indeed, African migrants have continued to struggle to assert their place in Australian society in the face of projects of belonging that have worked to delimit belonging to certain groups while positioning others as problematic outsiders, in an active process of alienation. Paola Bilbrough’s chapter analyses three screen representations of Sudanese Australians, focusing on three different examples of representation from different sources: the first, a promotional video from Western Sydney University, focused on a former student’s biography; the second a reality television programme produced by SBS focusing on immigration; the third a collaborative film which Bilbrough herself directed, This Is Me. Agot Dell. Bilbrough argues that the first two of these representations show the African protagonists as ‘heroic others’, whose heroism is defined by their struggle against a refugee past that continually defines them. In both representations, this identity operates as a power relation, whereby the recognition bestowed on the protagonists works to reaffirm the power of the (normatively white) audience to bestow such recognition, while displacing the problem of racism as one of racist individuals. At the same time, countering racism operates as a ‘burden of representation’ placed on Sudanese Australians themselves. Thus, Bilbrough’s analysis also exposes how, while superficially progressive and liberal, such representations operate as mechanisms to reproduce and extend a politics of belonging in which a hierarchy of positionalities is preordained and, through its performance, problematically reiterated. By contrast, Bilbrough reflects on how the co-​authored, collaborative documentary, This Is Me:  Agot Dell, might offer a space for different terms of representation, facilitating a dialogic process that provides an opportunity for a performance in which what it means to belong is not predefined or prejudged. Instead, Bilbrough suggests, it operates as a mechanism whereby the agency of participants to define (in the words of Dell) ‘who they are’ and ‘what they want’ comes to the fore. In making this case through a grounded analysis, Bilbrough’s contribution provides a reflection on the implication of media practices and representational modes within the politics of belonging that, in addition, also offers resources for the practical problem of rethinking and shifting those politics. In this respect, her contribution opens the way for the chapters in Part III, which detail and reflect on projects that explicitly aim to intervene in the politics of belonging. In Chapter 8, Jacqui Ewart and Mark Pearson provide an analysis of their path-​breaking work in the ‘Reporting Islam’ project. This project seeks to

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facilitate positive interventions in relation to how journalists report on Muslims and Islam in Australia. Recognizing that mainstream media reporting relating to terrorism and Islam in Australia has been identified as a source of deep frustration and anger in the Muslim community, Ewart and Pearson draw on data from interviews with senior journalists, media trainers, police media relations staff and journalism educators and experts to identify that a critical source of problematic reporting of stories about Muslims and Islam is a lack of knowledge on the part of journalists and other media workers. Based on this critical insight, the authors have developed a best practice reporting framework, consisting of a number of information-​based and interactive components, which provides journalists with specific tools to facilitate better informed reporting of Muslims and Islam in the Australian context and internationally. In the context of pressing social and research concerns relating to belonging and the role of the media, this chapter makes an innovative contribution, first, by identifying key media-​related challenges to attempts to promote belonging in the Australian context and, second, by providing a specific set of tools that have the potential to enable media to better contribute to promoting belonging. Significantly, the chapter makes it clear that dominant groups in society, including media, need to reflect on and change their work and organizational practices if there are to be moves towards more inclusive forms of belonging. Raelene Wilding and Sandra Gifford’s chapter extends this consideration by shifting away from the practices of media professionals, to focus on how a media initiative aimed at young people from refugee backgrounds contributed to their experiences of belonging, drawing on interviews with participants in the Home Lands project. This project provided support for the production of video narratives by young people from refugee backgrounds in Melbourne, and tracked how participants’ accounts of what it means to belong, and their sense of belonging, shifted over the time they were involved in the project. However, Wilding and Gifford’s account provides far more than an account of the ‘effects’ of the Home Lands project, which they acknowledge are only suggested by the evidence they present rather than being absolutely conclusive. Instead, they use the opportunity Home Lands provided to explore the complexity of how belongings are felt and constructed by migrant groups, and how this suggests a complexity that is often belied by assumed dichotomies. Thus, the opposition between ‘civic’ and ‘ethno’ belonging provides a starting point that draws a basic distinction between models of belonging that revolve around formal and informal categorizations of national belonging, and those that relate to subjects’ personal and affective identification with homelands and their personal, social and affective ties to countries of origin. Ultimately, however, Wilding and Gifford argue that the evidence presented

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suggests that belonging is far more processual than this binary suggests. An empowering sense of belonging, they find, is strongly connected to the process of people constructing and telling stories and histories which may be neither simply ‘here’ nor ‘there’, and to feel that they are being heard. In making this case, they also contribute to a project of reconstructing how we think about belonging, and how this might be understood and supported. Finally, in Chapter 10, Timothy Marjoribanks, Denis Muller and Michael Gawenda provide a critical analysis of the AuSud media intervention. Developed in response to concerns with mainstream media reporting of Sudanese Australian people in Melbourne, the AuSud media intervention aimed to provide members of the Sudanese Australian community with tools, resources and an organizational space through which they could develop a voice of their own that could engage with and contest dominant media narratives. Building on this experience, and on the perspectives of those involved in this process including members of Sudanese Australian communities, academics, and media and community organization professionals, the chapter reveals that while alternative news production models can be developed, there are significant organizational challenges in implementing and sustaining such models over time. In particular, challenges emerged around the development, implementation and ownership of the intervention; motivations for participation; and long-​term organizational sustainability in a context in which media representation and voice, while important, was just one part of the lived experience of participants. The AuSud media project makes an important contribution to contemporary debates around belonging, and builds further on other contributions to this volume, by revealing processes through which belonging is constituted through processes of political contestation, and how these define the terrain on which projects of belonging are situated and with which they must contend. Like preceding contributions, it also provides important insights into the importance of relationships in building forms of belonging, in this case between members of marginalized communities and members of dominant institutions including the media and universities, while highlighting the need to consider interventions as processes that develop over time, with the question of how to create a capacity for sustainability being vital. What this book ultimately contributes is not only a continued focus on belonging but also ways of approaching belonging theoretically, empirically and practically that, by engaging with its complexities, stimulates thinking to inform both media analysis and media practices. This involves a shift beyond binary modes of thinking, to analyse the interplay between feelings and experiences of belonging and the politics of belonging, between exclusion and inclusion, representation and dialogue, here and there. One way of doing this,

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which is common to many of the contributions in this collection, is to think of ‘home’ not as a given object but as a continually made construct and aspiration, as something that is simultaneously necessary and desired. Belonging, in this sense, always exists in the space between being a present outcome of projects of belonging, and projections towards a possible future. Media, in its broadest sense, will continue to be strongly implicated in how conceptions of home are constructed and in how different populations experience feelings of being at home. Media will remain, for this reason, central to continuing problem of – and struggle over – how to make a viable collective life.

Note 1 Qantas, ‘Welcome Home’. http://​www.qantas.com/​travel/​airlines/​welcome-​home/​ global/​en. Accessed 17 March 2017.

References Anthias, Floya. 2008. ‘Thinking through the Lens of Translocational Positionality:  An Intersectionality Frame for Understanding Identity and Belonging’. Translocations 4, no. 1: 5–​20. Australian Government. 2017. Strengthening the Test for Australian Citizenship. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. Commonwealth of Australia. 2003. Multicultural Australia: United in Diversity –​Updating the 1999 New Agenda for Multicultural Australia. Canberra:  Commonwealth of Australia. https://​www.dss.gov.au/​sites/​default/​files/​documents/​01_​2014/​united_​diversity.pdf. Accessed 30 March 2017. Dunn, Kevin. 2005. ‘Repetitive and Troubling Discourses of Nationalism in the Local Politics of Mosque Development in Sydney, Australia’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23: 29–​50. Foucault, Michel. 1982. ‘The Subject and Power’. Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4: 777–​95. Fozdar, Farida, and Brian Spittles. 2009. ‘The Australian Citizenship Test:  Process and Rhetoric’. Australian Journal of Politics and History 55, no. 4: 496–​512. Gale, Peter. 2004. ‘The Refugee Crisis and Fear: Populist Politics and Media Discourse’. Journal of Sociology 40, no. 4: 321–​40. Hage, Ghassan. 2008. White Nation:  Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Annandale: Pluto Press. Harris, Anita. 2010. ‘Young People, Everyday Civic Life and the Limits of Social Cohesion’. Journal of Intercultural Studies 31, no. 5: 573–​89. Ho, Christina. 2014. ‘From Social Justice to Social Cohesion:  A History of Australian Multicultural Policy’. In For Those Who’ve Come across the Seas:  Australian Multicultural Theory, Policy and Practice, edited by Andrew Jakubowicz and Christina Ho, 31–​41. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing. Johnson, Carol. 2007. ‘Howard’s Values and Australian Identity’. Australian Journal of Political Science 2, no. 2: 195–​210. Markus, Andrew, and Arunachalam Dharmalingam. 2012. Mapping Social Cohesion. Clayton: Monash University.

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Moreton-​Robinson, Aileen. 2015. The White Possessive: Property, Power and Indigenous Sovereignty. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press. Noble, Greg, 2005. ‘The Discomfort of Strangers:  Racism, Incivility and Ontological Security in a Relaxed and Comfortable Nation’. Journal of Intercultural Studies 26, no. 1: 107–​20. Perera, Suvendrini, and Joseph Pugliese. 1997. ‘Racial Suicide:  The Re-​Licensing of Racism in Australia’. Race and Class 39, no. 2: 1–​19. Poynting, Scott, and Victoria Mason. 2008. ‘The New Integrationism, the State and Islamophobia: Retreat from Multiculturalism in Australia’. International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice 36, no. 4: 230–​46. Poynting, Scott, Greg Noble, Paul Tabar and Jock Collins. 2004. Bin Laden in the Suburbs: Criminalising the Arab Other. Sydney: Sydney Institute of Criminology. Reilly, Alex. 2017. ‘Explainer:  The Proposed Changes to Australian Citizenship’. The Conversation, 20 April. https://​theconversation.com/​explainer-​the-​proposed-​changes-​ to-​australian-​citizenship-​76405. Accessed 1 May 2017. Rigoni, Isabella. 2012. ‘Intersectionality and Mediated Cultural Production in a Globalised Post-​Colonial World’. Ethnic and Racial Studies 35, no. 5: 834–​49. Salazar, J. (2010), ‘Digital Stories and emerging citizens’ media practices by migrant youth in Western Sydney’, 3CMedia: Journal of Community, Citizen’s and Third Sector Media and Communication, 1, no. 6: 54–​70. van Krieken, Robert. 2012. ‘Between Assimilation and Multiculturalism:  Models of Integration in Australia’. Patterns of Prejudice 46, no. 5: 500–​517. Yuval-​Davis, Nira. 2006. ‘Belonging and the Politics of Belonging’. Patterns of Prejudice 40, no. 3: 197–​214. —​—​—​. 2011. The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations. London: Sage.

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Chapter 2 POLITICS OF BELONGING IN A MEDIATED SOCIETY: A CONTRIBUTION TO THE CONCEPTUAL EXEGESIS Val Colic-​Peisker

Introduction This chapter provides a conceptual introduction to the central theme of this volume –​the way media, politics and belonging intersect in the ethnoculturally diverse Australia of the early twenty-​first century. I  undertake an intersectional analysis of four conceptual triads:  ‘belonging-​ identity-​ community’; ‘media-​communication-​representation’; ‘Australia-​politics-​discourse’ and ‘reality-​construction-​perception’. In this section, the chapter first introduces key features of the Australian context in relation to the book’s central interest. Modern Australia is a ‘settler nation’ that developed through successive, progressively more diverse waves of immigration, dislodging and dispossessing the Indigenous population in the process. From the very start in the late eighteenth century, the colonizers were ethnically diverse, contravening the ideal of white Britishness (Moreton-​Robinson 2006). The 1901 federation of British colonies into the Commonwealth of Australia created the first new nation of the twentieth century. The considerable ethnocultural diversity of the nineteenth century was politically denounced and the ideal of a ‘white Australia’ pursued for the next 70  years (DIBP 2016). The enactment of the first major law of the Commonwealth parliament, the Immigration Restriction Act of December 1901, was primarily a reaction to the arrival of a significant number of Chinese during the Gold Rush. In the 1850s, the colonies of Victoria and South Australia introduced restrictions on Chinese immigration, prompted by the white miners’ resentment towards industrious Chinese on the goldfields (DIBP 2016). These restrictions were

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later repealed as the free movement of people was highly valued in the mid-​ nineteenth century (Bashford 2014), the period historian Eric Hobsbawm called the ‘age of capital’, ruled by what Germans called Manchesterismus  –​ the ‘free trade orthodoxy of Victorian Britain’ (Hobsbawm 1996/​1975: 303). However, the restrictions were reintroduced in all Australian colonies in the period 1870s–​1890s. The Commonwealth Immigration Restriction Act 1901 continued and reinforced this race policy where ‘prohibited immigrants’ were all ‘non-​Europeans’. According to Bashford (2014, 31–​32), these restrictions were part of ‘great white walls’ protecting the Anglosphere (Australia, United States, New Zealand) from ‘contamination’ by ‘coloured races’. The law held steady until the late 1950s, and its achievements were impressive. In 1919, the Australian prime minister, Billy Hughes, praised it as ‘the greatest thing we have achieved’. The hostilities with Japan during the Second World War reinforced the philosophy of the ‘White Australia’, and the wartime prime minister, John Curtin, declared that Australia ‘shall remain forever the home of the descendants of those people who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race’.1 Yet, the war exposed the vulnerability of the sparsely populated continent, in 1946 hosting only 7.5  million people. The post-​war ‘populate or perish’ imperative, launched as a political slogan, started to dismantle the Australian nation as an ‘outpost of the British race’. Even though, in the words of Curtin, the ‘Commonwealth Government [was] very earnestly desirous of obtaining large numbers of British subjects as migrants’, they were not arriving in the faraway land in large enough numbers. A diverse immigration was therefore a necessity: a post-​war contingent of 170,000 European displaced persons (DPs) consisted of non-​English-​speaking-​ background continental Europeans, with the preference given to northern Europeans who could more easily blend into the prevalent Britishness. The first post-​war census (1947) revealed that ‘99.3 per cent of the population were of full-​blood European race and 0.7 per cent of non-​European and half-​caste’ […]. The principal full-​blood non-​Europeans in Australia were Chinese, 9,144’ (ABS 1951, 552). By the mid-​century, the Chinese population in Australia had dropped absolutely and relatively.2 The post-​war immigration of European DPs was accepted with an expectation that the ‘New Australians’ would quickly assimilate, and the fear of an Asian invasion  –​ the ‘yellow peril’ –​was quelled for the moment. In the two growth decades that followed the war, a high intake of NESB immigrants was dominated by ‘swarthy’ southern Europeans; by now the idea of whiteness had expanded to include them. In 1979, the introduction of the ‘points tests’ for prospective immigrants signalled a paradigm shift in the immigration policy which reflected the

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restructuring of the economy away from the predominantly blue-​collar industries towards a white-​collar ‘service economy’. As the Australian manufacturing shrank, a preference for skilled immigrants took hold. In the 1980s, for the first time in the twentieth century, Asian migrants were entering Australia in the thousands, and most of them were well educated (Jupp 2002). A historic, ever-​present fear of a populous and increasingly prosperous Asia strongly resurfaced at the very end of the twentieth century (Markus et al. 2009). In her maiden speech in the Commonwealth Parliament on 10 September 1996, Pauline Hanson, the leader of the newly founded ‘One Nation Party’, proposed that Australia was ‘in danger of being swamped by Asians’. She also suggested that multiculturalism ‘should be abolished’. Her speech came a month after the 1996 Australian census in which under 5 per cent of the Australia population declared their ancestry as ‘Asian’.3 Twenty years later almost to a day, on 14 September 2016, Pauline Hanson addressed the nation in yet another maiden speech, this time as a newly elected Australian senator. She recycled the swamping metaphor, suggesting that ‘Australia is in danger of being swamped by Muslims’, and asked the government to stop the immigration of Muslims altogether. A  flood of public commentary followed her speech. Some supported her for what she said and for ‘having the courage to speak her mind’, and others accused her of dangerous and divisive racism and xenophobia.4 Interestingly, none of the commentators, including high-​profile politicians, juxtaposed her contention with the numerical facts that in the 2011 census, people of Muslim religion made up only 2.2 per cent of Australians, and that by the 2016 census (the results of which are not yet available at the time of writing), the Muslim minority might have reached 3–​4 per cent, still far below anything conceivable as a flood threatening to ‘swamp’ Australia. The 9/​11 terrorist attack on the United States in 2001 left an indelible mark on the new century. Muslims became the key Other not just of the United States but of the whole ‘Western world’, virtually overnight. This shift was foregrounded by Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations thesis’ (1993). In twenty-​first-​century Australia, the public discourse dealing with the politics of belonging often has Muslims in its sights (Dunn et al. 2007). Even when political leaders practice inclusiveness and avoid alienating the ‘Muslim community’, Australian Muslims may still be ‘othered’. this happened in the wake of the ‘Sydney Siege’, considered by many to be the first (Muslim) terrorist attack on Australian soil (Colic-​Peisker et al. 2016). In twenty-​first-​century Australia, asylum seekers have had a political role of the Other as well. The ‘Tampa affair’ in late August 2001, shortly before the 9/​11 attack, started the public debate on ‘boat people’, which never really stopped. An increasingly uncompromising ideology and policy of ‘border protection’ became a conspicuous Australian example of xenophobic ‘othering’.5

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A  significant part of the policy’s success in securing popular support was a perception of high numbers of ‘boat people’ arrivals and a perception that most asylum seekers are Muslims.6 For example, a colour illustration representing a boat carrying a bar chart appeared on the front page of the national newspaper (The Australian, 16 May 2012). It accompanied an article titled ‘Asylum-​ Seeker Numbers Blow Out by Almost 200’ (a year). The modest increase in the number of ‘boat people’ arriving on the Australian shores was in contrast with the strong word (‘blowout’) and the maximum prominence the article was given (colour illustration, cover page). The effect of representing the problem as serious and urgent was no doubt achieved: an example of perception trumping reality. In the current context of the global ‘war on [Islamic] terror’, the Muslim Other seems to be essential in reinforcing the symbolic and territorial boundaries of the national community:  in defining who we are by showing who we are not, and in protecting our borders/​sovereignty from the threatening Other. The symbolic, identity boundaries of the nation are reinforced by the public discourse about protecting territorial borders. Nation-​building is an ongoing project, and ‘othering’ is its flipside. Many historic occasions, usually wars and political crises, have shown that ‘Others’, those perceived as a threat or as ‘enemies’, real or imagined, have an effect of making a nation more internally cohesive, strengthening the belonging of those who perceive themselves as the nation’s core  –​the unproblematic ‘mainstream’. The Others do not have to be external enemies. They can be minorities excluded from formal or substantive citizenship. Political theorists and sociologists of the community have argued that a warm glow of community presupposes the exclusion and non-​belonging of Others (Mulligan 2015; Barth 1969). Imagining a nation –​a composite of multiple groups with different and often opposed interests –​as a united and cohesive whole is not a spontaneous but rather a highly engineered process bolstered and sustained by the fear of ‘Others’. The following sections focus on the conceptual triads as a way to conceptualize the framework for the analysis of politics of belonging in a mediated (Australian) society (Figure 2.1).

Belonging-​Identity-​Community Not so long ago, a Melbourne Immigration Museum exhibition titled ‘Identity: Yours, Mine, Ours’ was advertised by a poster featuring a question: ‘I belong, do you?’ A thought-​provoking website blurb for the exhibition stated, ‘The exhibition focuses on how our cultural heritage, languages, beliefs, and family connections influence our self-​perceptions and our perceptions of

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Belongingidentitycommunity Australiapolitics-(public) discourse

Mediacommunicationrepresentation

Realityconstructionperception

Figure 2.1  The ‘triads’: an intersecting conceptual framework.

other people  –​perceptions that can lead to discovery, confusion, prejudice and understanding.’ The reference to ‘our self-​perceptions and our perceptions of other people’ is a reference to ‘identity’ being a combination of how we see ourselves and how we are seen by other people. Our identities are complex, relative, relational and impermanent. They change not only through the life cycle but also through a daily cycle as we interact with others and move from one social role to another. Clearly, there is a connection between our feeling of belonging to certain groups and our feeling of identity; who we feel we are and how other people see us is largely defined by our group memberships and social roles associated with these memberships. The groups we identify with and belong to, we usually define as ‘communities’ A need to belong to a ‘community’ (in reality, a number of them) is taken for granted as a universal human need. Our communities provide not just real-​life practical and emotional support but they also support our feeling of identity, a sense of who we are or who we aspire to become. As a consequence, in spite of much talk of globalization, the ‘age of migration’ and a diminishing importance of nation states, national identity and belonging remain strong. The more often we find ourselves in foreign lands, physically and virtually, the more our national identity is invoked. National membership is not only about a sense of belonging and identity but also about important rights and protections. It is therefore no surprise that belonging –​ formal, substantive and emotional  –​to this specific ‘community’ causes

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considerable anxieties and debates and has a significant impact on our lives, even for those who may not feel too invested in their national belonging. This issue is especially important in a ‘nation of immigrants’ such as Australia. Therefore, the question ‘I belong, do you?, although contrived (one is unlikely to hear such a sentence in a real-​life situation), is an important one. On the exhibition poster, the question was accompanied by a picture of a young man of Sikh ancestry. While I have no doubt that the authors of the exhibition and its advertising poster meant to reinforce our perception of Australia as an inclusive multicultural nation, for me the poster had some ‘cringe value’. Why does this young man need to declare or assert his belonging? Belonging to what, anyway –​presumably the Australian nation? Or perhaps an ‘ethnic community’? Further, does a poster titled ‘I belong, do you?’ have to feature a ‘culturally and linguistically diverse’ (CALD) person?7 The official (‘CALD’) formula denoting a non-​ white or non-​ Anglo Australian resident is itself an aspect of a long shadow cast by the White Australia policy. The imaginary ‘White Australia’ never seems to have been transcended in the mind of most Australians, even those who are themselves ‘non-​white’ (see Hage 1998 for an in-​depth analysis of this issue). Should therefore a white, blonde, blue-​eyed, ‘mainstream’ Australian feature in the poster? Probably not –​that would be seen as wrong-​headed and exclusionary to the ‘CALDs’, while the exhibition seems to have been primarily about their inclusion in an ‘Australian identity’. Yet, the poster may be interpreted as assuming that the way people look, hinting at their ‘ethnic ancestry’, makes their (Australian) belonging somehow natural, or conversely, exceptional, which may not be the best way to promote inclusive multiculturalism. In fact, making assumptions about people purely on the basis of their appearance is the essence of racism. Perhaps there should be no person in that poster? After all, it was meant to be a marketing tool rather than a way to raise difficult questions. The exhibition website solved this issue by alternating six consecutive images of people, the first five of ‘CALD’ backgrounds and the sixth a group of ‘white’ women and children. The exhibition received very good online reviews. For me, it raised questions about the right to belong and therefore the right to a (unquestioned) national identity. In Australia and elsewhere, such a right is relatively clear in a formal sense, as citizenship, but much more complicated at a social, political and psychological level. The central issue here seems to be who has the power to set the boundaries of ethnic, subcultural, professional, religious and other groups we belong to. How and by whom are the formal (citizenship) and informal (belonging) boundaries of the national community decided upon? People have differential power to choose their belonging and identity: some are free-​choosing subjects,

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and some can be objectified and subjected to the symbolic violence of having their identity and otherness imposed on them. The subject-​object position, just like our identities, varies through time and space. The amount of social power any individual can wield in any particular situation determines whether s/​he is a subject or object of identity; minority or majority; visible or invisible; included or excluded. Those who belong to visible and potentially excluded minorities wield little power in identity determination processes and can have their identities imposed on them. They can be, in many subtle and overt ways, excluded –​ told or made to feel that they do not belong. Unlike many ‘old nations’ of Europe, the young Australian nation does not have any ‘hereditary Others’. According to Hobsbawm (2007), ‘hereditary Others’ are historically defined enemies, often neighbouring nations. The threat they are perceived to pose may take different forms  –​political, military and symbolic. Their existence may be a threat to our existence, territorially, demographically or symbolically, identity-​wise.8 Instead of the ‘hereditary Others’, Australia is sometimes seen as having ‘serial Others’: a new, relatively unknown immigrant group that arrives on Australian shores in larger numbers causes a period of xenophobic ‘moral panic’, until it is ‘domesticated’ and proven relatively harmless as well as superseded by more recent and therefore more suspect arrivals. The series of Australian ‘Others’ starts with the Irish, Chinese and Germans in the nineteenth century and continues with ‘swarthy’ Mediterraneans (Italians, Greeks, Maltese, Yugoslavs), then Vietnamese refugees, generalised Asians, and highly visible Africans who were, just like the Vietnamese before them, in a double jeopardy of being non-​Europeans and also mostly refugees (Markus et  al. 2009).9 Several chapters in this volume deal with the media representation of the Sudanese. Yet, a decade after their peak intake, their otherness fades before the (undifferentiated, homogenised) ‘Muslims’ (Colic-​ Peisker et al. 2016). This kind of exclusion seems inherent in the community-​ building dynamic, including the ongoing project of nation-​building. Public/​ political discourse and the media have a key role in shifting the symbolic boundaries of the Australian nation, as elaborated in the next section.

Media-​Communication-​Representation The power of the media to define identities, groups and boundaries between them is significant, as a majority of twenty-​first-​century humanity consumes a steady, rich diet of news, opinions, human interest stories and ‘expert’ commentary. Louis Althusser (1984) defined the media, alongside the education system, as the ‘ideological apparatus of the state’. As the media become more diverse, multifaceted and privatised, the idea of the state can be

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substituted by the idea of powerful interests more generally –​those individuals and groups that promote their agendas through reaching, persuading and leading the audiences. We are not just overloaded by information. The latter, formulated by the media, shapes our views and perceptions of social reality. This is done through an increasingly diverse mediascape: from the twentieth-​century-​dominant radio and television to the twenty-​first-​century Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media platforms where the boundary between the creator and consumer of media and content have become blurred. Apart from their technical features and outreach, media are different in their declared style and intentions. There are mass, high-​circulation commercial media that follow the profit imperative in attracting their audiences by ‘breaking news’ and ‘exclusive stories’. In this domain a conflict of commercial imperatives with media ethics and ‘public interest’ is ever present. There are also mass public media that purport to represent the ‘public interest’ via impartial news reporting and commentary, and a more sophisticated entertainment/​infotainment. The picture is not complete without smaller, independent community media representing and targeting niche audiences: local residents, ethnic groups, subcultures, even age groups. At the dawn of mass media in nineteenth-​century Europe and North America, the newspapers could only reach a thin layer of the privileged, but today’s audiences are counted in the hundreds of millions. The television in every home, or even in every room, is being rapidly replaced by multifunction, interactive computers that have taken many forms and are now, as smartphones, small enough to be carried in our pockets. Their ubiquitousness is impressive and truly global  –​both leading politicians and refugees navigating oceans, deserts and fences keep their smartphones with them at all times (Kingsley 2016). The power of media is a game of numbers. The ‘mainstream’ media are powerful because they are able to access large audiences, including decision makers. They shape the public discourse –​the language of public debate –​and define the concepts that shape our perceptions. The ‘alternative media’ that express minority views and advance minority agendas are an important addition to the democratic mediascape, but their reach is limited. It is important to note that certain media, including many social media platforms, started as alternative but soon became mainstream. Facebook is a case in point. Most young people get their news and information from Facebook; therefore, it is mediated by their ‘friends’ and groups of their choosing. Over recent years, it has become unremarkable for key public figures to peddle their messages through social media and for their supporters to proliferate them to wider audiences of their ‘friends’ and ‘followers’. The problem is that some of

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these messages are deliberately manipulative and some ‘news’ entirely false. Alongside its democratic potential, social media have the populist potential of spreading demagoguery and fake news, as shown during the tense finale of the 2016 US elections, which brought a new concept of ‘post-​truth’ into the mainstream (cf. Kucharski 2016; Colic-​Peisker and Flitney 2018).10 The mediated messages that reach us daily are much broader and further reaching than our immediate reality. What comes out of our smartphones, computers, television sets and other media may be regarded as Platonic shadows,11 the second-​or even third-​order reality. Usually edited and packaged with an intention to achieve a certain effect, media messages that reach us are echoes of real voices and shadows of ‘real things’. If we, just for the moment, define as ‘real’ those things that we can see with our very eyes and hear with our very ears, then we can also say that this reality is fast receding before the encroachment of the mediated experience. In a democratic society, the diversity of media should ensure debate and people’s exposure to different views. How much real dialogue is there in the mainstream media? There are media forums that make it their mission to bring together people with different political views in order to engage in debate, and this is a positive, truly democratic practice. However, most people are on a monotonous, unbalanced media diet, consuming media content that reflects their values and therefore also confirms their biases and prejudices. People’s perceptions of social issues and possible solutions may vary dramatically depending on the political colour of their media diet –​possibly to the point where we could argue that sections of society live in parallel social universes. In this context, the people on the other side of a political barricade may be perceived as more or less dangerous aliens who are better avoided. If we are forced into their close proximity, we must be ready for battle. The ideological trench battles are usually fought at a high level, among politicians, via arguments diligently transmitted by the media. Such ‘mainstream debates’ are a poor form of democracy lacking democratic, grass-​roots content, especially as the two main parties in the ‘Westminster system’ become increasingly closer in their values and agendas, and their battles are often about the fine print rather than the big-​picture blueprint. It has been argued that the new Internet-​based social media have considerable democratic potential, representing an unprecedented opportunity for grass-​roots democracy. For example, it is now widely accepted that the 2011 Arab Spring started on Facebook (Vargas 2012), and equally, that Barack Obama won the 2008 US presidential election through mobilising young voters via Internet-​based social media (Carr 2008). Do these and similar instances enhance democracy, or are they simply instances of a skilful use of the wide reach of social media for political and commercial purposes? As

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social media spread and shape into mainstream media, the leader-​follower and author-​consumer formations may be perpetuated. In spite of the often mentioned ‘communication revolution’, it is hard to say whether we are any closer to a truly inclusive deliberative, participatory democracy (Ginsborg 2008). It is dubious whether new information technologies and social media spell a new equality of public voice. The large-​scale, penetrative use of social media is likely to reflect the distribution of power in society more than being a harbinger of change (Freedman, Curran and Fenton 2012). Those who possess political power, either directly (through a political office) or indirectly (through wealth or celebrity), can also dominate social media.

Australia-​Politics-​(Public) Discourse As discussed in the previous section, in mass urban societies the public discourse is nearly always mediated. This fact gives the media extraordinary power: alongside closely followed political leaders, they are the authors of the hegemonic discourse (Dunn et al. 2007). The content of the most influential media is saturated by transmitting and analysing politicians’ statements, and their debates are the core of the political infotainment approach used by commercial media but also increasingly by public media threatened by funding cuts. The media have their own agendas, and their power is not always used responsibly. Politicians and the media are well aware that perceptions are what matters and that, in the domain of political ideologies and attitudes, perceptions and realities tend to merge. Often, politicians and the media –​the opinion makers –​themselves argue and operate on the basis of perceptions that clash with reality. They have the power because they ‘have a voice’. Moreover, they represent others and they are the public voice. They have the key influence in defining ‘us’ versus ‘them’, thus determining the boundaries of the nation and other communities: who belongs and who does not. This is done through subtle identity work as public discourse influences people’s identifications and imposes stereotyped identities on minorities –​Asians, Muslims, the Lebanese, the Sudanese or whoever is the ‘flavour of the month’ minority. Therefore the diversity of public discourse is limited to the actual diversity of political leaders and the media. In Australia, white Anglo Australian men are still considerably over-​represented in federal and state politics (Dent 2016). The concentration of media ownership is often invoked as a problem too (The Conversation, 2015). In this context, some voices are louder than others, and some groups are more entitled to speak publicly, advancing their agendas and in the process defining and shaping (social) reality according to

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their interests. These dominant groups are defined along the axes of race, ethnicity, gender, class, profession (e.g. economists have much more media space and time than other ‘experts’) and geography (national ‘centres’ versus the ‘periphery’). Some people may have no public voice at all –​this lack of voice is in fact an approximation of social disadvantage and exclusion. The voice of Others is by definition muted; they are largely excluded from direct participation in the public discourse, even though they are often a topic of the public discourse. Some media, usually defined as populist, are able to attract large audiences and exert considerable influence, often by supporting xenophobic politics and creating, as well as reinforcing, the dominant ideas about threatening Others. Outspoken right-​wing politicians are the poster boys and girls of these media. In Australia, the public discourse is guarded, some say limited, by anti-​ discrimination legislation. In recent years, this has been an area of an ongoing battle between those who advocate ‘free speech’ and those who support the legislation protecting minorities.12 In this context, the historic and contemporary examples of the political use of Others –​the ‘us versus them’ politics –​for electoral gain and ‘nation-​ building’ abound. The Australian 2001 election is often referred to as the ‘Tampa election’, where conservative prime minister John Howard won his third election by ‘othering’ asylum seekers. Similarly, the 2013 election won by his successor, Tony Abbott, was much helped by the ‘stop the boats’ slogan. Yet, the official ideology of multiculturalism stands in the way of such identity politics and has, because of that, always been suspect as a poor basis for nation-​building. Howard is often described as a prime minister who avoided mentioning the ‘m-​word’. During his prime ministership, the multicultural ideology was in retreat and Anglo-​nationalism on the rise as the time-​honoured tool of nation-​building: evoking the nation’s ethnic roots, to the exclusion of those who do not fit into the picture. Endorsing all-​inclusive multiculturalism eliminates the notional possibility of the Other, usually defined through ethnocultural differences, and therefore invalidates this political tool. Over the decades, the discourse of multiculturalism has waxed and waned. In February 2011, under the Labour government, the ‘m-​discourse’ was emphatically re-​endorsed by both parties (Colic-​ Peisker and Farquharson 2011). More recently, the current prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, upon taking leadership from Abbott, declared Australia the ‘most successful multicultural society in the world’.13 However, the ideology of multiculturalism, with its discourse of civic over ethnic nationalism, is a reason –​perhaps the reason –​for continuous hand-​wringing over ‘Australian identity’:  being such a diverse multicultural nation, who are we really? Can we be a (cohesive) community if no one is excluded?

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Reality-​Construction-​Perception As elaborated above, people act upon their perceptions, biases and interpretations, which are influenced by the perceptions, biases and interpretations of those who have power to project their voices into the public arena. The Hansonian swamping perceptions described above are a great example of the significance of perceptions over ‘reality’. Most people vote and act on the basis of their perceptions, which may be at odds with facts they seem to have no interest in checking, even when these facts are simple and easily available in the era of the Internet. On my third day as an Australian immigrant, in early January 1995, in the course of my first private conversation with an Anglo Australian native, I was informed that ‘Asians’ made up about one-​third of the Australian population. At the time, the actual proportion was under 5 per cent. The person who genuinely believed that one-​third of Australian residents were ‘Asians’ may have found Hanson’s contentions convincing –​the reality was not standing in the way of the conviction. As I  attempted to analyse above, a media-​shaped, second-​hand reality may have a more powerful sway over democratic subjects than anything we could call ‘objective reality’  –​even if such a slippery notion could be satisfactorily defined, which is a matter of considerable philosophical debate and beyond the scope of this chapter. In their classical treatise, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1985/​1966, 33) argued, The world of everyday life if not only taken for granted as reality by the ordinary members of society in the subjectively meaningful conduct of their lives. It is a world that originates in their thoughts and actions, and is maintained as real by these. (Emphases added)

Our social reality, reflecting our perceptions, is constructed through increasingly ‘mediated’ communication and public discourse. Our perceptions lead to social (inter)action, in the process turning our perceptions into self-​ fulfilling prophecies. As we are relentlessly exposed to the information overload of media (mega-​giga-​tera) bytes, social reality is an increasingly complex, dynamic, ‘liquid’ (cf. Bauman 2007) and shifting construction. We pride ourselves on living in a rational democratic society. Yet, critical political theory and more recently communication studies show that people do not necessarily have a ‘rational understanding’ of ‘objective reality’. As consumers and as citizens we often make choices led by whims and emotions, swayed by the overt and covert marketing of products and ideas, and are discouraged from a rational approach by the mere volume of information to be processed and evaluated. Elaborating on the complex notions of rationality

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and objectivity is beyond this chapter. In a nutshell, the rational choice theory, connecting well with neoclassical economics, is central in defining people as rational consumers and citizens who make their choices on the basis of rational consideration of their individual self-​interest (Allingham 2002). Such a view has been contested from different standpoints and by many authors including Pierre Bourdieu (1984), whose central concept of habitus inherently criticizes the idea of the rational individual. In modern society, some categories of people, for example, ‘experts’, have more claim to ‘objectivity’ and (scientific) ‘rationality’ than others, but the claim to an ‘objective knowledge’ and ‘rational position’ in the public arena is normally a claim to power, either professional or political. Social reality is (re)constructed in a constant flux of social interactions that make not only ‘mass communication’ but also the ‘culture’ itself. It is impossible to objectively establish the ‘truth’ of complex social phenomena –​such ‘truths’ keep shifting through time and space. For example, culturally central, hegemonic ideas such as justice, fairness, affluence, scarcity, equality, freedom, deviance and so on have changed dramatically over decades and centuries, and they vary considerably between societies. There is little objectivity about them, without the existence of universally accepted benchmarks. Yet, such benchmarks are hard to establish even in ‘national societies’, among their varied groups and interests, let alone internationally and globally. In this fluid context, we tend to declare our own time-​place dominant ideas as ‘rational’ and ‘objective’.

Conclusion This chapter proposed four conceptual triads as a way to contribute to understanding of the media and the politics of belonging. The first triad proposed the intersection of community belonging and identity. I argued that not everyone is equally able to choose their identity and that, depending on their position in the field of social power, people have different locations on the subject-​object continuums of identity determination. The national belonging of various ethnic groups on the inclusion-​exclusion continuum can change and has changed in the course of the modern Australian history of ‘serial othering’. The second triad, ‘media-​communication-​representation’, pointed to the fact that our social lives in the anonymous, urban-​cum-​global world cannot be experienced first-​hand and are increasingly mediated’ and ‘represented’. Our direct non-​mediated experience is therefore more limited than for the pre-​ urban, pre-​electronic and predigital generations whose lives largely unfolded within face-​to-​face communities. The problem with mediated reality is that it contains someone else’s interpretation and sometimes deliberate manipulation.

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For example, the stereotyped representations of minority Others may be negatively ‘ethnicized’, representing the minority as lacking some important cultural feature, or positively ‘exoticized’ (often eroticized) as possessing some special desirable trait, but in both cases the representations tend to be simplistic and ‘populist’. ‘Fake news’ circulating in social media ‘echo chambers’ (Kucharski 2016, 525) and the recent creation of the concept of ‘post-​truth’ point to the extreme end of ‘mediation’ of our communicative needs and social experience. The third triad –​Australia-​politics-​discourse’ –​rests on the often unspoken but central social notions of interest and power. We are daily confronted by, and submitted to, a conscious action of various social agents to wield power in the public sphere. Those who have power to set the public agenda and dominate media representations shape our understanding of the world and the way we communicate with others. The Australian public sphere is meant to be dialogical and democratic; however, structurally, some voices are louder and intrinsically more trusted than others. These powerful voices shape our perceptions of social reality, while outsiders/​Others are objectified by dominant perceptions. The fourth conceptual triad  –​‘reality-​construction-​perception’  –​is the most abstract one. Its meaning is most succinctly expressed in what became known as the ‘Thomas’ theorem’: ‘If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences’ (Thomas and Thomas 1928, 572). This simple but profound idea could be slightly reformulated: if people perceive situations as real (e.g. there are too many Asians or too many Muslims in Australia, and this is a threat to ‘us’), they act as if they are real (e.g. they vote for parties that promise to stop the Asian/​Muslim immigration). This is how perception becomes reality. In order to construct our own version of reality, we interpret the media interpretation as we consume media content. In this sense, our social reality construct is largely the third-​order reality, a perception twice removed from the source, and twice interpreted. Deliberate manipulation of the ‘post-​ truth era’ pushes this logic even further. As an ever-​growing proportion of our social experience, especially for the generation of ‘digital natives’, is lived through social media, the latter may carry a potential for the (not just ethnic) minorities to appropriate their voice, represent themselves and assert their belonging. It is also important to ask whether social media are mirroring relatively homogeneous audiences of the mainstream media or, conversely, offering new opportunities for cross-​ sectional  –​intergenerational, cross-​ cultural  –​communication. And what about their manipulative, populist, post-​truth potential? Diversity of voices and a dialogue among them is not only a condition of democracy but also a condition of rationality in a broad sense. Such rationality

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is always dialogical, positing that ‘I may be wrong and you may be right and together we may get closer to the truth’ (Popper 1974, 225). The abundance and apparent diversity of media do not in themselves guarantee such a democratic, dialogical rationality. While living in the same country, or even the same neighbourhood, we may live parallel lives in vastly different social universes –​ and this does not only apply to members of different groups along ethnicity and class continuums. While we may hope that new Internet-​based media, global in their reach and increasingly available to a majority of people across the globe, will fulfil their democratic and cosmopolitan potential, we should be wary of their power of political manipulation and hegemony, lest they usher us into a virtual-​reality-​embedded post-​truth society.

Notes 1 Hansard transcripts, the House of Representatives, 21 March 1945. http://​john. curtin.edu.au/​1940s/​populate/​. 2 In 1861, 38,258 people, or 3.3% of the Australian population, had been born in China. At the time of Australian Federation, there were approximately 29,000 people of Chinese origin in Australia. Between the 1933 and 1947 censuses, ‘full-​blood non-​ Europeans decreased from 22,780 to 21,495, but the number of half-​castes increased from 27,066 to 33,734 during the same period’. These numbers excluded ‘full-​blood Aboriginals’, who were not counted in the census (ABS 1951, 552–​53). In the 2011 Australian census, 4.3% of Australia’s population, or approximately 865,000 people, identified as having Chinese ancestry. 3 In 2011, the three largest Asian ancestry groups in Australia combined  –​Indian, Vietnamese and Chinese –​comprised 7.8 per cent of the total population (2%, 1.5% and 4.3% respectively). 4 See for example ABC News, 14 and 15 September 2016. http://​www.abc.net.au/​ news/​2016-​09-​15/​behind-​the-​scenes-​of-​pauline-​hanson%27s-​senate-​speech/​7845648 and http://​www.abc.net.au/​news/​2016-​09-​15/​hanson-​speech-​%27makes-​racism-​ mainstream%27/​7846430. 5 The military maritime ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’ intended to ‘stop the boats’, started in late 2013. At the same time, the Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) was renamed as the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP). For several months, the home page of the DIBP featured a stark image of a boat on unsettled sea, with a message in large red letters: ‘No Way! You will not make Australia home’. 6 Another numerical fact that may clash with majority’s perception is that only 32% of Iraq-​born and 36.8% of Iran-​born in Australia are Muslim (2011 census). See Community Information Summary. https://​www.dss.gov.au/​our-​responsibilities/​settlement-​ and-​multicultural-​affairs/​programs-​policy/​a-​multicultural-​australia/​programs-​and-​ publications/​community-​information-​summaries. 7 ‘CALD’ (‘culturally and linguistically diverse’) replaced NESB (‘non-​English-​speaking background’) as the official acronym in 1996 by the decision of the Council of Ministers

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for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (see NMAC 1999, Appendix E:  relevant Terminology, 108–​9) and Markus et al. 2009, 136–​37. 8 In his 1930 Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud used the concept of ‘narcissism of minor differences’. Applied to nationalism, this means that groups that are ethnically similar, often not immediately distinguishable even to the ‘insiders’, can see each other as especially threatening and can be at pains to emphasize their differences and thus keep their separate identities. The case of Croats and Serbs in post-​communist Croatia is illustrative. A Croatian joke defines Croats as ‘those people who are not Serbs’. 9 The Aboriginal people should not be forgotten in this context, as they were the first ‘Other’ the white British settlers encountered upon landing on Australian shores. Yet, the Aboriginal people were not sufficiently threatening, and the colonists acted as if Australia were uninhabited. It was declared terra nullius (nobody’s land). 10 In the online Oxford Dictionary defined as ‘Adjective: Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief: “in this era of post-​truth politics, it’s easy to cherry-​pick data and come to whatever conclusion you desire”; “some commentators have observed that we are living in a post-​truth age.” ’ See https://​en.oxforddictionaries.com/​definition/​post-​truth. 11 In a classical work of political philosophy, The Republic, Plato (424–​348 BC), a disciple of Socrates and a teacher of Aristotle, offered the ‘allegory of the cave’. He conceptualized the dichotomy of perception versus reality by describing ordinary people (non-​philosophers) as prisoners in a cave who cannot see the world outside but instead regard the shadows on the wall of the cave as reality. What is real and intelligible, according to Plato, is the world of ideas (perfect forms or archetypes) rather than the apparent reality we access (see, hear and so on) through our senses. 12 A battle over ‘Section 18C’ of the 1975 Australian Racial Discrimination Act is a case in point. See http://​www.abc.net.au/​news/​2016-​09-​01/​what-​is-​section-​18c-​and-​why-​ do-​some-​politicians-​want-​it-​changed/​7806240. 13 For example, the Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, in a speech in Canberra, 15 October 2015. See http://​www.businessinsider.com.au/​we-​are-​the-​most-​successful-​ multicultural- ​ s ociety-​ i n-​ t he-​ world-​ n ow-​ c ome-​ t ogether- ​ t o- ​ f ight- ​ r adicalism- ​ s ays- ​ turnbull-​2015-​10.

References ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics). 1951. Year Book Australia (No. 38), 1951 (Cat. 1301.0), ­chapter 13, ‘Population’. http://​www.ausstats.abs.gov.au/​ausstats/​free.nsf/​0/​999DC1 D0F455DA6CCA257AF300154D05/​ $ File/​ 1 3010_​ 1 951%20section%2013.pdf. Accessed 8 December 2016. Allingham, M. 2002. Choice Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press Althusser, L. 1984. Essays on Ideology. London: Verso Barth, F. 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries:  The Social Organization of Culture Difference. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Bashford, A. 2002. ‘At the Border:  Contagion, Immigration, Nation’. Australian Historical Studies 120: 344–​58. —​—​—​. 2014. ‘Immigration Restriction: Rethinking Period and Place from Settler Colonies to Postcolonial Nations’. Journal of Global History 9: 26–​48. Bauman, Z. 2007. Liquid Times, Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Berger, P. L., and T. Luckmann. 1985/​1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York, London, Melbourne: Penguin. Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by R. Nice. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Carr, D. (2008) ‘How Obama Tapped into Social Networks’ Power’. New  York Times, 9 November. http://​www.nytimes.com/​2008/​11/​10/​business/​media/​10carr.html. Accessed 10 February 2017 Colic-​Peisker, V., and A. Flitney. 2017. The Age of Post-​Rationality? The Limits of Economic Reasoning in the 21st Century. Singapore: Palgrave McMillan, ­chapter 7. Colic-​Peisker, V., and K. Farquharson. 2011. ‘Introduction:  A New Era in Australian Multiculturalism? The Need for Critical Interrogation’. Journal of Intercultural Studies 32, no. 6: 579–​86. Colic-​Peisker, V., M. Mikola and K. Dekker. 2016. ‘A Multicultural Nation and Its (Muslim) Other? Political leadership and Media Reporting in the Wake of The “Sydney Siege”’. Journal of Intercultural Studies 37, no. 4: 373–​89. The Conversation. 2015. ‘Heed Fraser’s Warning on Australian Media Concentration –​It’s Getting Worse’. 24 March. http://​theconversation.com/​heed-​frasers-​warning-​on-​ australian-​media-​concentration-​its-​getting-​worse-​38979. Accessed 8 December 2016. Dent, J. 2016. ‘Ethnically Diverse Australians Face Uphill Battle to Enter “Very, Very White” World of Politics’. ABC News, 9 September. http://​www.abc.net.au/​news/​2016-​09-​ 09/​white-​push-​to-​improve-​diversity-​in-​politics/​7822344. Accessed 10 February 2017 DIBP (Department of Immigration and Border Protection). 2016. ‘Fact Sheet –​Abolition of the “White Australia” Policy’. https://​www.border.gov.au/​about/​corporate/​information/​fact-​sheets/​08abolition. Accessed 10 February 2017 Dunn, K. M., N. Klocker and T. Salabay. 2007. ‘Contemporary Racism and Islamophobia in Australia: Racializing Religion’. Ethnicities 7, no. 4: 564–​89. Freedman, J., N. Curran and D. Fenton. 2012. Misunderstanding the Internet. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Ginsborg, P. 2008. Democracy: Crisis and Renewal. London: Profile Books. Hage, G. 1998. White Nation. Annandale, NSW: Pluto Press. Hobsbawm, E. 1996/​1975. The Age of Capital. New York: Vintage Books. —​—​—​ . 2007. Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism. London: Abacus/​Little Brown. Huntington, S. P. 1993. ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’. Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3: 22–​49. Jupp, J. 2002. From White Australia to Woomera:  The Story of Australian Immigration. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Kingsley, P. 2016. The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe’s Refugee Crisis. London: Guardian Books and Faber & Faber. Kucharski, A. 2016. ‘Post-​Truth:  Study Epidemiology of Fake News’. Nature 540:  525 (Correspondence, December 2016). Markus, A., J. Jupp and P. McDonald. 2009. Australia’s Immigration Revolution. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Moreton-​Robinson, A. 2006. ‘Towards a New Research Agenda? Foucault, Whiteness and Indigenous Sovereignty’. Journal of Sociology 42: 383–​95. Mulligan, M. 2015. ‘On Ambivalence and Hope in the Restless Search for Community: How to Work with the Idea of Community in the Global Age’. Sociology 49, no. 2: 340–​55: NMAC (National Multicultural Advisory Council). 1999. Australian Multiculturalism for a New Century:  Towards Inclusiveness. Report to the Australian Government, April. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia (Ausinfo).

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Phillips, D. 2006. ‘Parallel Lives? Challenging Discourses of British Muslim Self-​ Segregation’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24, no. 1: 25. Popper, K. 1945/​1974. The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 2, The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx and the Aftermath. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Thomas, W. I., and D. S. Thomas. 1928. The Child in America: Behavior Problems and Programs. New York: Knopf. Vargas, J. A. 2012. ‘Spring Awakening: How an Egyptian Revolution Began on Facebook’. New  York Times, 17 February. http://​www.nytimes.com/​2012/​02/​19/​books/​ review/​how-​an-​egyptian-​revolution-​began-​on-​facebook.html?_​r=0. Accessed 10 February 2017.

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Chapter 3 MEDIA, BELONGING AND BEING HEARD: COMMUNITY MEDIA AND THE POLITICS OF LISTENING Tanja Dreher

Introduction Media in all their forms play a complex and central role in the contested politics of belonging. Nowhere is this more evident than in Sydney’s western suburbs, which for decades have been framed as Sydney’s ‘other’ and featured at the centre of national debates on immigration and refugees, so-​called ethnic crime and gangs, the ‘war on terror’ and global Islamophobia. The role of mainstream media in racializing and ‘othering’ the diverse communities of western Sydney is well established (Powell 1993; Collins et al. 2000; Poynting et al. 2004). The emerging scholarship on community or citizens media, in contrast, demonstrates their significant role in the politics of belonging in western Sydney (Salazar 2010; Ho 2013; Dreher 2012; Vanni 2014; Lloyd 2013). In this chapter, I analyse these dynamics with a focus on the politics of listening in addition to the more common emphasis on the politics of voice. The listening approach seeks to extend the analysis of community media and belonging beyond the celebration of individual empowerment and community voice, to also ask questions of receptivity, recognition and response. The chapter is organized into three sections. The first section introduces western Sydney and the highly contested and mediated politics of belonging. Sydney’s western suburbs and the communities associated with key locales have long been subject to mainstream media stereotypes of culture-​ less Westies, ethnic crime and, more recently, home-​grown terrorism. These persistent narratives serve to marginalize and exclude. The following section analyses how diverse communities in western Sydney develop and mobilize

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narratives of belonging via community and alternative media projects. In particular, I focus on listening strategies developed by the innovative new media community arts organization Information + Cultural Exchange (ICE) to generate forms of individual and community-​level belonging. The third section analyses the evidence for listening at the macro or social level  –​including participants’ own perceptions of being heard, shifting perceptions of western Sydney and possibilities for belonging in the creative industries. Here, the evidence for listening in response to the voices enabled by projects for speaking up and talking back is more mixed. The brief concluding discussion highlights the significance of media for a highly uneven politics of belonging around western Sydney.

Western Sydney and the Mediated Politics of Belonging Since the 1960s, western Sydney has featured as Sydney’s ‘other’ in mainstream media representations and public discourse (Powell 1993; Collins et  al. 2000; Ho 2012). The area has long been represented as a vast suburban sprawl of cheap housing and working-​class or disadvantaged communities, far from Sydney’s famous harbour, central business district and iconic Bondi Beach. As the most common destination for recently arrived migrants in Australia, stereotypes of western Sydney have recently focused more on so-​called ethnic crime and immigrant ghettoes (Ho 2012). Racialized news reporting during the 1980s and 1990s focused in particular on so-​called Asian gangs and crime centred in Cabramatta, described in news headlines as ‘Australia’s heroin capital’ (Dreher 2007). More recently, and particularly in the years during the war on terror, media attention has shifted to the suburbs of Bankstown and Lakemba, reported first in terms of ‘Lebanese gangs’ and now associated with the ‘Muslim other’ and terrorism (Poynting et al. 2004). Western Sydney is a large region of nearly two million people covering 14 local government areas. Overall, the region has higher levels of cultural diversity, as well as higher rates of poverty, unemployment and other indicators of disadvantage relative to the rest of Sydney (Ho 2012, 39). However, typical of global cities throughout the world, socio-​economic disadvantage and cultural diversity are unevenly experienced across western Sydney. Significant refugee communities live in Sydney’s western suburbs, including Vietnamese Australians in Fairfield-​Cabramatta and Arab and Muslim Australians in Bankstown-​ Lakemba. The Villawood Immigration Detention Centre is located at the border between the two local council areas. Western Sydney has thus carried a heavy burden of representation at a time when multiculturalism,

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Islam, immigration and the war on terror have been central to highly charged political debates and media representations. In the 1960s and ’70s, Westies were derided as young, working families who were encouraged westwards into the newly built public and private housing of Sydney’s urban fringe. Westie was a term of derision, ‘and became shorthand for a population considered lowbrow, coarse and lacking education and cultural refinement’ (Gwyther 2008, 81). While the term Westie has been reclaimed (Simic 2007; Gwyther 2008), the stereotype persists in media representations of working-​class and welfare-​dependent communities, including in reality television programming such as Housos or Struggle Street, which focused on social housing tenants (Arthurson et al. 2014). Mount Druitt, for example, functions as a ‘motif for failure –​past, present and future’, part of the ‘ “interchangeable” triumvirate of Sydney’s Mount Druitt, Melbourne’s West Heidelberg, and Brisbane’s Inala’ (Gannon 2009, 608). Many diverse media and cultural flows intersect in western Sydney. Global, local, metropolitan, diasporic, transnational and community media represent not only Lakemba and Cabramatta but also many media produced and consumed by those who live and work in Sydney’s west. These suburbs are also intersections of diverse and competing representations and definitions:  Cabramatta and Bankstown have been represented as both examples of multiculturalism gone wrong and as multicultural success stories. The western suburbs of Sydney are thus the objects of a symbolic struggle to define these suburbs and the communities that live and work in them. As the subject of intense media scrutiny, Lakemba, Bankstown and formerly Cabramatta have iconic status well beyond Sydney. The construction of Sydney’s western suburbs as lacking, ugly and deviant is amplified in the case of Cabramatta and Bankstown, regularly framed as foreign and dangerous. Western Sydney, and suburbs such as Lakemba and Cabramatta in particular, can thus be understood as crucial locations in the representation of multicultural Australia. The politics of belonging Given the long history of intense media attention to the diverse communities of western Sydney, the region occupies a central place in local and national debates on belonging. Much scholarly analysis finds that news reporting in particular has served to racialize, exclude or marginalize communities associated with western Sydney. News reporting of ethnic crime, asylum seekers and the war on terror has been linked in media discourse through the involvement of people categorized as ‘Middle Eastern’, ‘Muslim’ or ‘Arab’ (Poynting

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et al. 2004; ADB 2003). Several researchers have argued that the naming and framing of these events in news reporting has contributed to ‘the emergence of the “Arab Other” as the pre-​eminent “folk devil” of our time’ (Poynting et al. 2004, 3) and to the production of refugees, Arab and Muslim Australians as ‘The New “Others” ’ (Jacka and Green 2003). A ‘spiral of racialization’ has linked local, national and global events through frames of ‘race’, culture and religion (Dreher 2007, 112–​15). This is typical of ‘a highly racialized framing of current events, around crime and terrorism, on a local, national and international level’ that has emerged over recent decades (Poynting et al. 2004, 14). In much news reporting of the ‘ethnic gangs’, asylum seekers, ‘border protection’ and the war on terror, complex events have been explained in terms of essentialized Arab or Muslim ‘cultures’. Racialized news reporting not only contributed to the discursive linking of these events but also privileged a moral frame of explanation rather than a focus on social causes. This Other functions not only as an object of hostility, therefore, but also as a form of ideological explanation of a range of social problems, understood as moral problems originating in the cultural pathology of the folk devil and providing a simple narrative of us and them, good and evil, victim and wrongdoer. (Ibid., 50)

Thus racialized news reporting is central to the politics of belonging –​both because such reporting can contribute to a climate of increased prejudice which allows discrimination, harassment and racist violence (ADB 2003; HREOC 2004; Dreher 2007), and also because racialized reporting produces cultures and communities as a threatening, evil ‘other’. The production of ‘The New Others’ encourages politics and strategies of exclusion in response to cultural diversity and obscures the possibilities for complex interrelationships, negotiations and belonging. With a similar interest in the social implications of news reporting of cultural diversity, cultural geographers have analysed news discourse with reference to the concepts of belonging, place and citizenship. Kevin Dunn (2003, 163) argues that ‘representations are both expressive and constitutive of citizenship’ and that the representation of people and the places they inhabit can inhibit their exercise of urban citizenship (ibid., 154). The media portrayal of immigrants and ethnic minorities shapes the perceptions and opinions of key urban managers and influences understandings of country, locality and belonging for all residents (Dunn and Mahtani 2001, 163). ‘[As] minorities [are] rarely presented as having something important to say […] this marginality proscribes the right of immigrants to speak about the future of their country and locality and undermines national and local belonging’ (ibid., 164).

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Examining media coverage of Cabramatta and of mosque developments in Sydney, Dunn concludes that news representation contributes to the ‘uneven cultural distribution of citizenship’ (ibid., 162) by degrading or delegitimizing the participation of those presented as ‘un-​Australian’ or ‘other’ in public space and political debate. News reporting has profound implications for those positioned as ‘out of place’ (Dunn and Mahtani 2001, 171), as ‘ethnic minorities in both Canada and Australia do not see themselves reflected in the media, and this perpetuates feelings of rejection, trivializes their contributions and devalues their citizenship’ (ibid, 164). Audience research in this area indicates that patterns of negative news portrayal produce feelings for non-​Anglo Australians that they do not belong (Dreher 2000) or that they ‘weren’t really Australian at all’ (Jakubowicz and Seneviratne 1996, 45; Ang et al. 2002). Graeme Turner argues that media representation has contributed to ‘an alarming shift in how we now define and regulate membership to the imagined community of the Australian nation-​state’ (2003, 413). This shift has moved beyond ‘assimilation, accommodation, or inclusion’, to focus on exclusion (ibid., 414), producing not only differentiated citizenship but also an oppositional relationship between Muslim Australians and the imagined community (ibid., 416). While mainstream media, and news reporting in particular, has produced racialized exclusions and hierarchies of belonging, audiences negotiate these meanings in complex ways. In response to the mediated discourse of ‘Islamic terrorism’ and the ‘Muslim other’, Anne Aly finds that Australian Muslims are creating new narratives of belonging (2007). Muslim women are the focus of particular media scrutiny (Ho 2007; Hussein 2016), and through courageous agency construct their own sense of national belonging (Imtoual 2006), in part by seeking to ‘right the wrong’ of misrepresentation (Hebbani and Wills 2012). The following section analyses how diverse communities in Western Sydney develop and mobilize narratives of belonging via community and alternative media projects.

Speaking Up and Talking Back Alongside the established evidence for the impact of mainstream media in othering or marginalizing communities of western Sydney, the emerging scholarship on community or citizen media demonstrates their significant role in the politics of belonging. Community or citizen media in Sydney’s western suburbs contributes to inclusion, cultural citizenship (Salazar 2010; Dreher 2012; Ho 2013), the claiming of social space (Lloyd 2013)  and to ‘acts of belonging’ (Vanni 2014). There is a long history of community and local council media projects in western Sydney, where organizations and individuals have sought to challenge

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stereotypes for as long as the news media have represented the area as Sydney’s ‘Wild West’. Many locally controlled media and cultural production projects in Sydney’s west are explicit responses to media coverage and popular perceptions of the area. Many more community-​based projects implicitly reflect a need to project positive images or alternative stories. Local governments, community organizations, chambers of commerce and individuals in Sydney’s western suburbs have developed a range of media intervention strategies, and local government bodies such as the Bankstown City Council have adopted policies on breaking down stereotypes to address the impact of news reporting of the area (BCC 2002, 36–​38). The Fairfield-​Cabramatta area presents an example of the diverse range of strategies developed over 25 years. The Cabramatta Community Centre has run street video classes for young people, and conducted writing and poster-​making programmes such as The New Image book of photographs and refugee stories (Cabello 1994). Community workers and leaders have acted as spokespeople in mainstream news reports (Basilli 2000), and the Racial Equality Action Lobby produced the Real Useful Media Kit to train community spokespeople (REAL 1990). The Fairfield City Council has published books such as Hidden Heritage (Caban 1988)  and developed cultural tourism initiatives. The Lunar New Year and Moon festivals are held annually in Cabramatta to celebrate and showcase the cultural diversity of the area. Both have been represented in council-​produced videos and are regularly reported in local and metropolitan media. The Fairfield Community Resource Centre collaborated with University of Western Sydney journalism educators to develop a resource manual for journalists reporting on Cabramatta and western Sydney more broadly (Castillo and Hirst 2001). The local council also has ongoing strategies of media management and cultural tourism. More recently, organizations and individuals have harnessed online media for the purpose of telling different stories. Incubated at Bankstown Youth Development Services, the Mapping Frictions project is ‘an accessible way to visit’ as ‘Sydney is a very segregated city’ (Bedford, quoted in Mudditt 2016): For many, [Bankstown] is a rich and vibrant neighbourhood full of interesting stories. However in the mainstream media, Bankstown is all too often generalised as poor, unsafe and a breeding ground for Islamic radicalisation.

To counter these stereotypes, Mapping Frictions showcases alternative stories and celebrates local voices with creative multimedia. Having started in Bankstown, the project now covers the whole of western Sydney. Its aim is to ‘slow down the news cycle’ and provide Australians –​and the world –​with a more complex understanding of multiculturalism (Mudditt 2016).

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There is no doubt that these many projects for ‘speaking up and talking back’ (Dreher 2003)  are vital interventions in the mediated politics of belonging. Audience research in Melbourne finds that ‘community radio stations and their diverse audiences have created and developed a space and place for diverse groups to connect in ways that foster the sense of belonging so central to the well-​being of individuals and communities’ (Foxwell 2012, 161), while Asian community radio assists Asian youth ‘in socializing with people of various ethnicities and encourages them to feel a sense of belonging in Australia’ (Wong 2012, 1). Justine Lloyd (2013, 306) argues that young Arab Australians involved in making films about car culture in western Sydney used ‘media narratives and images to negotiate a place in the city’, rewriting urban space in a practice of urban citizenship. Focusing on digital storytelling projects in western Sydney, Juan Salazar (2010, 54)  finds that the projects showcase ‘cosmopolitanism from below’ as participants ‘become active citizens in the exercise of their civil and communication rights […] allowing for processes of social empowerment and inclusion to emerge’. ICE: Information + Cultural Exchange For more than 15 years I have researched alongside community media intervention projects in western Sydney (Dreher 2003; 2006), including by co-​ facilitating media advocacy workshops for young Muslim women, refugee women, Arab Australian young people and multicultural community organizations (Dreher 2010). Most recently, I  have focused on digital storytelling projects in a research partnership with ICE, a new media community arts organization. Now located in the western Sydney suburb of Parramatta, ICE has been a pioneer in delivering services to a region traditionally neglected by arts bodies and media outlets, working mainly with young people from migrant and refugee backgrounds (Ho 2012, 38). Established in 1984 as a mobile information-​sharing service (Lloyd 2013), ICE was recognized as one of eleven key producers by the Australia Council for the Arts for their innovative use of digital technologies and engagement of marginalized communities via community cultural development practices. The strapline on the current ICE website sums up the approach: ‘connecting community creativity’. In 2011, ICE described its work at the intersection of arts, community and technology. ICE is widely recognized as a leader of western Sydney’s vibrant and growing community arts and creative industries sector (Salazar 2010; Ho 2012; Vanni 2014). Along with a range of other organizations, ICE has facilitated the development of creative expression that turns the stereotypes of western Sydney and its diverse communities on their heads. ICE consistently

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promotes the vibrancy of western Sydney’s culturally diverse population (Ho 2012, 43). This work has been enabled by major public investment through the NSW government’s Western Sydney Arts Strategy, launched in 1999. The Sydney Olympics based in the western suburb of Homebush in 2000 provided another milestone, with mainstream media noting the shifting demographic centre of Sydney. ICE recognized the potential and the significance of digital media forms early on, and deliberately targets ‘marginalized and vulnerable populations’ including Arab Australians, refugees and Muslim Australians (Ho 2012, 48)  for capacity building, skills development and telling alternative stories about multicultural Australia utilizing digital technologies. The products of ICE projects ‘often feature assertions of cultural pride, and speaking back to negative stereotypes’, challenging ‘on the one hand, traditional images of the West as bland, suburban sea of fibro, and on the other hand, as an assemblage of ethnic ghettoes riddled with crime and deprivation’ (ibid.). ICE projects have ‘reframed residents of Western Sydney’: No longer disadvantaged and unsophisticated, they are now cultural producers with their own unique stories to tell. And many of these stories are about diversity, identity, cultural conflict, racism, hybridity and other themes relating to life in multicultural Australia. (Ho 2012, 47)

The emphasis on telling different stories and shifting perceptions of western Sydney communities can be understood as an effective mobilization for the politics of ‘voice’. Indeed, community media intervention projects are often described in terms of finding a voice, speaking up or telling different stories. Salazar argues that participants in ICE were ‘able to take control of the processes of content creation and communication and find a voice to tell their stories to wider audiences’ (2010, 8) and to ‘claim a political and subjective space for their public voices as they correct the distortions and bias of mainstream media that would otherwise remain unchallenged’ (ibid., 12).

Public Events and Listening Spaces In this section I describe a number of strategies developed within ICE projects to generate ‘listening’ in response to the voices enabled by digital storytelling projects and filmmaking. Digital storytelling involves a workshop format in which participants produce a short, first-​person video narrative created by combining recorded voice, still and moving images, and music or other sounds (Centre for Digital Storytelling). ICE participants have produced hundreds of digital stories in dozens of workshops, and digital storytelling is

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arguably the fastest-​growing genre in community cultural development work (Ho 2012, 45). I  identify a spectrum of listening events and a typology of listening practices designed to negotiate belonging via media projects with diverse young people. The focus on listening is informed by emerging scholarship which argues for greater attention to the ‘other side of voice’ in order to more fully grasp the complexities of communication (O’Donnell et  al. 2009) and to bring questions of receptivity, recognition and response to the fore (Dreher 2009). Listening here is understood not primarily as an auditory practice nor as a therapeutic intervention (Lloyd 2009), but rather as a political practice that is just as vital as the more conventional focus on ‘voice’ for understanding democracy and citizenship (Bickford 1996). Crucially, a focus on listening shifts some of the onus and responsibility for more just outcomes from marginalized speakers or communities, to relatively more powerful listeners and institutions (Dreher 2009). Public events such as film festivals and the screening of digital storytelling tales can generate belonging focused variously on community affirmation, or competition and critique, intergenerational listening, cross-​ community listening or the assertion of political demands. As part of an ongoing research partnership with ICE, I participated in a number of public events associated with the ‘Youth Digital Cultures’ (YDC) programme, which aimed to develop skills via urban music and digital storytelling workshops (see Dreher 2012). The public events included screenings, launches and discussion forums. At each of these events, audiences were invited to participate by listening in a variety of ways. Promotional materials encouraged audiences to ‘witness and celebrate’ the stories produced, and at some events the audience was invited to vote or to interact with project participants and the media produced. Here I  focus on five specific modes of ‘listening’ enabled at these events. For the purposes of analysis, each is illustrated using one particular event. In practice, several modes of listening may be intertwined at any particular public event. The five modes of listening comprise a spectrum, beginning with an emphasis on safety and community, and ending with elements of critique, contestation and public debate. The listening that was encouraged at the launch of ‘Koori Youth Yarn Up’ was geared primarily towards community affirmation. The Koori Youth Yarn Up project supported Indigenous children in far western Sydney to produce digital stories exploring First Nations identity in an urban context. The launch event brought together participants, their families, community workers, a television celebrity and a representative of local government in a small community centre. The speeches and the materials that framed the screening focused on the importance of ‘listening to yourself ’. The invited television personality congratulated the storytellers on having the courage to find their voice. The

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organizers aimed for a safe and informal environment in which Koori kids could assert and affirm Indigenous culture and community, using hip-​hop, digital storytelling and painting in contrast to common stereotypes that ‘real Aborigines’ live in remote, ‘traditional’ communities. Where Koori Youth Yarn Up focused on community affirmation by celebrating children’s voices, the public event associated with ‘Vietnamese Storyexchange’ encouraged listening between members within a community –​in this case, between elders and youth. In the early stages of the project, facilitators and participants identified the challenges of intergenerational communication as a central concern. It also emerged that older Vietnamese Australians involved in the project were less interested in the possibilities of digital storytelling techniques than were younger participants. The public event for Vietnamese Storyexchange took place in a large community hall filled with ‘story cubes’ produced by the older cohort, and included screening of digital stories produced by young Vietnamese Australians. The storycubes in particular were designed to generate dialogue. Adapting the techniques of digital storytelling to an analogue format, the storycubes were tactile objects covered in photographs that illustrated an individual story. Handling the cubes functioned as an opening to conversation between the older people who had produced the storycubes and younger family or community members (see also Salazar 2010). Feedback on the event was highly positive in regards to enabling intergenerational listening and conversations where many in the Vietnamese Australian community had expressed concerns about a generation gap. From intergenerational listening within a community to cross-​community listening, the public event for ‘Yallah/​Pacific Specific’ emphasized a mode of listening across communities. This event provided the public launch for digital stories and hip-​hop produced by participants in two separate YDC projects –​ ‘Yallah’ with young Arab Australians, and ‘Pacific Specific’ with young Pacific Islander Australians. The public event brought together participants, friends, family and facilitators for a lively evening of music and screenings in several languages. Masters’ of ceremonies and performances highlighted common experiences and interests across Pacifica and Arab Australian communities, as young people participating in both projects shared experiences of racial profiling, overpolicing and marginalization as well as a common love of hip-​hop. The event was also an opportunity to broach underlying tensions and to listen across differences. In contrast to the YDC projects, ICE’s ‘POP Series’ project was more firmly focused on the development of media production skills and career pathways in the creative industries for diverse young people in western Sydney. In addition to the affirmative modes of listening emphasized at the YDC public events,

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the POP Series public-​screening event was a staging of both industry listening and audience response and support. The emphasis here was on competition and critique, as short films produced by participants were screened for a panel of invited film industry experts and a large crowd in tiered seating who were encouraged to respond to both the judging and the works. Participants were required to pitch their entries and to listen to feedback and advice from the industry insiders. Rather than the safe space of community affirmation, participants in the POP Series were told there would be ‘no kid gloves’, and judges and participants alike were exposed to feedback from a noisy audience. Listening in the mode of competition and critique combined the creativity and excitement of going public with the risk and exposure of being heard by experts and an unfamiliar audience. As the home of the Arab Film Festival Australia since its inception in 2001, ICE also hosts public events that aim to generate modes of listening typical of a counter-​public. Most years, the Arab Film Festival Australia has featured a public discussion forum with a more or less explicit political agenda  –​ whether in the form of a question and answer period with Palestinian filmmaker Saleh Bakri (2014), or the 2011 forum on representations of the Egyptian Revolution (also known as the ‘Arab Spring’), 2009’s ‘Dreaming of 1001 Rights’ or ‘Under Siege’ in 2007 marking the invasion of Lebanon by Israel. The listening audience is typically invited to critique dominant representations of the Arab world and Arab Australians, and to consider the politics of developing counternarratives and alternative representations. Often, the question and answer period will elicit calls to action and debates on political strategy and solidarities. In this mode, listening is public and politically charged.

Speaking Up, Listening and Belonging The preceding section gives a brief indication of the ways in which listening has been incorporated into ICE projects for storytelling and voice. Invitations to listen and listening spaces are increasingly central to projects for speaking up and talking back in western Sydney. Further attention to listening also reveals a highly contested and uneven politics of belonging. In this section, I  analyse three indicators of potential listening in response to projects for speaking up and talking back. First, I discuss participants’ perceptions of being heard or not. Second, I  overview the evidence for shifting perceptions of western Sydney and its communities. Finally, I discuss the possibilities and potential for belonging in the creative economy. Overall, there is strong evidence for individual and community-​level listening, and rather more mixed evidence for listening at the macro level of social impact or the creative industries.

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Being heard? There is no doubt that the many media projects for speaking up and talking back in Western Sydney, facilitated by a wide range of organizations including ICE, local government and cultural institutions, have a significant impact in terms of individual and community listening. The care and attention paid to creating listening spaces reveals ‘a process of valuing peoples’ life experiences as stories worth hearing’, which can be an important tool for narrative therapy and also enable storytellers to be ‘active citizens by validating and ­acknowledging their diverse experiences and stories’ (Salazar 2010, 65). For some participants in digital storytelling projects, simply listening to one’s own story can be a vital achievement (Podkalicka 2009). Screening or launch events can foster a sense of individual empowerment (Dreher 2012), ‘a critical space for active listening’ (Salazar 2010, 65) and also community building: The spirit of community belonging and mutual support is palpable in a genuine experience of connectedness that sustains difference. (Podkalicka and Campbell 2010, 8)

In the examples sketched above, intergenerational and cross-​ community listening enabled new conversations and understandings across difference. Reflecting on intergenerational projects at ICE, Salazar found that digital storytelling allowed ‘poetic tools for self-​representation and “talk-​back” to their older generations’, while parents and elders became active listeners of what their children were saying to them, how they were imagining and visualizing their stories of migration and settlement in Sydney. From this perspective, the participants were able to use the digital stories as a form of healing historical disruptions in cultural knowledge and social memory and as an innovative and simple way of bridge cultural identities and ideas about Australia and Cambodia between the two generations. (2010, 65)

In an evaluation of ICE’s impact, Ilaria Vanni argues that creative projects can generate ‘forms of belonging that take different shapes, from the production of a common heritage archive, to intangible and less quantifiable benefits, such as increased self-​esteem and confidence to tell one’s story, to the discovery of shared experiences that can lead to taking action with others’ (2014, 17). As much as voice and storytelling, being heard is vital to these forms of belonging. If being heard can contribute to belonging, might the perception of not being heard contribute to a sense of limited belonging? While it is clear that individual, community and intergenerational listening are important contributors,

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facilitators of and participants in speaking up and talking back projects are often disappointed at a lack of listening, or they desire further listening –​particularly at the level of institutions such as mainstream media and government (Dreher 2012). Reflecting on the success of intergenerational storytelling projects, the cultural planner for the Fairfield City Council suggested that the ‘next step’ would be for Council and mainstream media to listen (Lee-​Shoy and Dreher 2009). In interviews with digital storytelling facilitators at ICE, there was a concern that policymakers in particular needed to pay greater attention (Dreher 2012, 161). While ICE is highly successful in attracting VIPs and policymakers to public screening events, participants and facilitators also notice that VIPs may leave before the screenings even begin or engage very little with community members and the stories that are screened (ibid., 162). While a wide range of funding bodies support projects for speaking up and talking back, the evidence for listening in response to the voices thus enabled is limited (ibid.). The key question of impact beyond individual and community listening is taken up in the following discussion of shifting perceptions. Shifting perceptions? Shifting perceptions of western Sydney and the communities that live in Sydney’s west offer a further indicator of listening –​at the level of social or cultural impacts of community media and arts. There is ample evidence that the sustained determination to challenge stereotypes and to assert alternative stories has shifted perceptions of western Sydney among policymakers, the arts community and in mainstream media. Christina Ho (2012, 49) writes, In Western Sydney today, CCD projects are producing a wide range of cultural expressions that shift traditional stereotypes of the area as deprived and culture-​ less, as well as creating new ways of expressing cultural identity that valorize diversity.

In the words of key players in the arts, policy and media fields surveyed by Ho, ICE and other organizations have helped ‘create identity’ and ‘contributed significantly to a change of identity and perception of the area’ in western Sydney (quoted in Ho 2012, 43). This includes shifting perceptions of racialized communities and Australian multiculturalism: ICE works with some of the most social stigmatized groups in Australia today […] it turns their public image on its head, representing these groups, and Western Sydney as a whole, as creative, dynamic and the true face of Australian multiculturalism. (Ho 2012, 50)

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Given the highly contested and racialized politics of belonging that have characterized recent decades, it is particularly remarkable that this discourse has gained traction (Ho 2012, 49). These shifting perceptions are amplified by the increase in collaborations between arts, media and cultural organizations in western Sydney and those based in central Sydney. Bankstown Youth Development Services and Urban Theatre Projects, both based in Bankstown, now regularly partner with the Sydney Writer’s Festival and the Sydney Festival respectively, attracting inner-​ city audiences and mainstream media coverage to the diverse stories and voices of western Sydney. Since 2010, ICE has partnered with the Museum of Contemporary Art, SBS TV, Aurora Community TV, the British Council, Sydney Festival, Sydney Writers Festival, Sydney Architecture Festival and many more significant institutions. Projects and performances in western Sydney more frequently receive attention in local and mainstream media (Ho 2012), and the coverage is largely positive. A recent, typical example appeared under the headline ‘Why Sydney Festival’s Wooing of the West Points to the Future of the Arts’ in the Australian edition of The Guardian online. The article promoted three events in western Sydney, explaining, there is a strong argument for the decentralization of theatre […] The west is where the people are […] Parramatta is the geographical centre of Sydney and Campbelltown, 51km from Sydney’s CBD, is experiencing rapid growth. (Delaney 2017)

The reviewer further mentions the ‘great restaurants’ in Parramatta, including ‘a place in Church Street that does wonderful Middle Eastern food at a fraction of the cost of eating out in the city’. Here western Sydney is no longer a cultural desert or crime-​riddled ethnic ghetto but rather the new go-​to destination for ‘authentic’ contemporary arts and culture. This example is not unusual, as key western Sydney ‘creatives’ such as Ali Khadim, Maria Tran and Fadia Abboud have been profiled to major media outlets, and developments in the vibrant arts scene are reported with headlines such as ‘Culture Goes West: Could Parramatta Really Become “Australia’s Next Great City”?’ (Dow 2016). There is a ‘but’. While there is no doubt that media representations of western Sydney have been diversified, and that the discourse of young, creative and everyday multiculturalism has made an impact –​certain stereotypes and stigmas persist (Sandbach 2013). Ho leaves open the question of how widely and deeply perceptions have been shifted, and notes that cultural hierarchies remain entrenched (2012). In mainstream media we find the persistence of

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Westie stereotypes alongside the added diversity of representations. When SBS TV aired the first season of the reality television series Go Back to Where You Came From, much commentary centred on ‘Raquel’ from Blacktown as the epitome of uncultured, uneducated, blatant ‘bogan’ racism. Even the feature Culture Goes West (Dow 2016) mentions backlash against plans to move both the Tropfest short film competition and the Powerhouse Museum from their established central Sydney locations to Parramatta. The 2015 SBS television programme Struggle Street was widely criticized as ‘poverty porn’ (Threadgold 2015; Simic 2016)  and prompted protest and a garbage truck blockade of SBS headquarters from the mayor of Mount Druitt, where the show was filmed. Scholars criticized the programme for ‘denigrating the “undeserving poor”, scapegoating and even pathologizing them as figures of loathing, while completely ignoring the harsh structural economic realities that create such poverty in the first place’ (Threadgold 2015, 34). Similar criticisms were directed at the reality television parody Housos, aired in 2011 and depicting the lifestyles of fictional characters on an imaginary social housing estate (Arthurson et  al. 2014). When SBS prepared to shoot a second series of Struggle Street in 2016, the Melton, Hume, Maribyrnong and Brimbank councils in Victoria all blocked filming applications, ‘fearing the second series of the program would further stigmatize particular suburbs and cause long-​term harm to communities’ (Ham 2016). While Parramatta has been reframed as a ‘creative city’ and representations of Bankstown and Fairfield feature greater diversity, Mount Druitt provides an example of a western Sydney suburb and community for which perceptions of working-​ class lives and poverty have barely shifted. The racialized frame in reporting crime and particularly ‘terrorism’ also remains deeply entrenched, now with added emphasis on ‘home-​ grown terrorism’ and ‘jihadis in the suburbs’. ‘Positive story’ feature articles on multicultural Bankstown and reviews of western Sydney cultural productions compete with a prominent and larger set of continuing reports of Lakemba as a ‘hotspot’ of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’. Overall, then, there is considerable evidence for shifting perceptions of western Sydney, and also considerable evidence for entrenched class stereotypes and racialized framings that are very difficult to shift. Creative industries The economy offers another domain in which to ask questions of receptivity, recognition and response in the context of strategies to encourage skills and voice aimed at employment in the ‘creative industries’ for the untapped potential of western Sydney cultural producers. As in my discussion of being

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heard and shifting perceptions, a focus on attention or listening in the creative economy suggests a highly uneven politics of receptivity and belonging. For starters, I have suggested that Parramatta has successfully marketed itself as ‘a creative city, a new arts hub that demonstrates that culture and art are not the exclusive domain of inner Sydney’ (Ho 2012, 39), yet the stigma attached to suburbs such as Lakemba and Mount Druitt remains. Elaine Lally argues that community arts remain marginalized in western Sydney so that established hierarchies of highbrow arts remain intact (in Ho 2012, 50). In policy circles and at many organizations including ICE, there is a hope that creative media projects will contribute to developing pathways for young people in western Sydney to enter the creative industries –​including film, music, media and more (Salazar 2010; Vanni 2014; Ho 2012). Richard Florida’s work on the creative class and urban renewal has been highly influential among planners and cultural institutions (Morgan and Ren 2012), arguing that cities that nurture creativity and embrace diversity are best placed for economic growth in the twenty-​first century. Many areas of western Sydney are recognized as emerging local and regional hubs for the creative industries (Salazar 2010, 56), and ICE projects increasingly incorporate aims to develop leadership and employability in the creative industries (ibid., 8). Yet, critics have long pointed out hierarchies within the creative industries, where ‘community arts have been given a “multicultural label” and as such are a “category of marginalization, something other than mainstream” ’ (Kalantzis and Cope 1994, in Idriss 2016, 418). Emerging research in western Sydney and in comparable sites such as Hackney in London suggests that the creative industries are classed and raced, producing exclusions or only precarious belonging for many aspiring media and cultural producers in the western suburbs. Analysing the class geography of the creative economy in Sydney, Morgan and Nelligan (2018) argues that ‘the new economy, far from being the egalitarian sphere that some have suggested, actually can accentuate existing power relations and sources of disadvantage’ as the ambitions of aspirants are limited by structural factors such as high rents, low incomes and ‘a lack of social capital that would open doors’ (41). For young people living in the rapidly gentrifying London suburb of Hackney, Melissa Butcher and Johanna Wadsley (2015) found significant barriers to achieving employment in the nearby Tech City  –​Europe’s top technology start-​up hub. While the cluster’s growth has outstripped the supply of skilled or qualified talent, young people from poorer parts of Hackney lack the social and cultural capital necessary to develop work experience or job opportunities. The authors find an ‘inherent tension’ between efforts to make Tech City more accessible to young south Hackney residents and the digital technology innovation economy with the associated organizational culture of

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start-​ups. Material barriers also exist, as young people from disadvantaged neighbourhoods may not be able to afford to take on unpaid internships in Tech City or, in the case of western Sydney, to afford the public transport or housing costs required to build networks with the inner-​city creative scene (Morgan and Nelligan 2018, 43). The class geography of the creative economy intersects with racialized hierarchies of exclusion or marginalization. Sherene Idriss interviewed young, male, Arab Australian creative workers from western Sydney to find in Australia, artists of ethnic minority backgrounds are generally offered marginal spaces in which they can express themselves. They tend to be called upon by the state to act as cultural brokers or offer representations of their supposedly neatly bounded communities. (2016, 406)

Social networking is an integral component of the creative industries (Idriss 2016, Morgan and Nelligan 2018, Butcher and Wadsley 2015), and yet an Arab Australian creative worker interviewed by Idriss found networking challenging as people ‘were reluctant to work with him because of his Arab and Muslim background’ (2017, 412). Butcher and Wadsley (2015) found comparable barriers to networking for Hackney youth living near Tech City. Arab Australian creatives are confined to the role of ‘ethnopolitical entrepreneurs’ and are celebrated as storytellers but not critiqued as artists (Idriss 2016, 418). Given these findings, it was no surprise to see a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) report on media diversity in Australia that found the average employee in our media and entertainment sector is 27, male, Caucasian and lives in Sydney’s Eastern suburbs or the Inner West. Similar to the world we see depicted by media, entertainment and media businesses do not reflect an Australia that’s becoming more diverse by the day. (2016)

The PwC report indicated 82.7 per cent of the Australian media workforce is monolingual, speaking only English at home. The report that Australian mainstream media have scarcely any cultural diversity in either content or producers showed remarkably little change from findings two decades earlier (Jakubowicz et al. 2016). Overall, then, the creative industries offer limited long-​term opportunities and largely precarious forms of belonging for the cultural and media producers associated with the locales and communities of western Sydney. While a project such as ICE’s Pop Series can generate an important moment of industry listening, and more and more public and commercial media organizations are

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engaging in western Sydney, hierarchies of employment, like perceptions, are difficult to shift.

Media and the Uneven Politics of Belonging This chapter has considered the role of media in the contested politics of belonging in contemporary Australia with a focus on western Sydney, long framed as the marginalized and racialized ‘other’ to Sydney’s glamorous beaches and harbour. People and communities who live and work in Sydney’s western suburbs have predominantly been represented in mainstream media as lacking and uncultured or as threatening, deviant and dangerous. Against this backdrop, a diverse range of actors and organizations have developed media strategies and projects for empowering unheard voices, telling different stories and speaking back to media stereotyping. Where mainstream media has often stigmatized, marginalized or excluded, community media interventions in western Sydney can enable ‘acts of belonging’ (Vanni 2014). In the analysis presented here, I have focused on the concept of ‘listening’ to broaden the discussion of media, voice and belonging. Specifically, I provided a brief overview of the ‘listening spaces’ produced at public events facilitated by ICE, one of many community cultural and media production organizations working with marginalized communities in western Sydney. By generating forms of listening including community affirmation, intergenerational listening, cross-​community listening, competition and critique, and counter-​ publics, voices and stories rarely heard in mainstream media were valorized and celebrated, claiming vital forms of cultural citizenship (Salazar 2010). Extending the analysis of ‘listening’ in response to ‘voice’ enabled by community media interventions, I discussed the evidence for social or macro-​level listening impacts. While participants in speaking up and talking back projects valued the forms of listening generated, there are lingering concerns at limited listening on the part of decision makers and institutions. The evidence for shifting wider perceptions of western Sydney is also mixed, while hopes that cultural producers from western Sydney might find a place employed in the creative industries were met with considerable obstacles. The overall picture that emerges is of highly uneven and contingent possibilities for belonging, and hierarchies of differential or precarious belonging. There is absolutely no doubt that projects for voice, storytelling and speaking back are a vital and productive intervention in the contested politics of belonging in Australia. Attention to listening spaces  –​or what comes after voice and where stories go  –​can further amplify the impacts for project participants and for listeners. From the perspective of receptivity, recognition and response, however, the evidence for listening is patchy, revealing limits,

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resistance and refusal to listen as well a shifting of perceptions. Speaking up and talking back projects provide a vital intervention, but transforming the uneven politics of belonging requires changing practices and hierarchies of listening in response to the creative assertion of voice.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dr Jemima Mowbray and Dr Poppy De Souza for expert assistance on the research and writing of this chapter. I would further like to thank Information Cultural Exchange, Dr Christina Ho, Dr Justine Lloyd and Dr Ilaria Vanni for input on the initial research. The research and writing for this chapter were supported by Australian Research Council funding (LP0882092 and FT140100515).

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Chapter 4 TALKING ABOUT THE OTHER: SUDANESE AUSTRALIANS AND THE LANGUAGE OF DIFFERENCE ON TALKBACK RADIO Scott Hanson-​Easey

Introduction Dominant categories of speech and of thought define the economically successful and the politically powerful as meritorious, and the unsuccessful and politically deviant as mentally or morally inadequate. For the same reason, policies that serve the interests of the influential come to be categorised as routine and equitable outcomes of duly established governmental processes. (Edelman 2013, 39)

Language is a fundamental communication modality through which we make sense of our world, defining who we are, who we are not, whilst explaining why these differences exist. This chapter draws on a body of critical discursive analytic work (Hanson-​Easey and Augoustinos, 2010, 2012; Hanson-​Easey, Augoustinos and Moloney, 2014)  examining how language, or ‘discourse’, socially constructs cultural identities and differences between Anglo-​Celtic and other non-​indigenous Australians, and Sudanese Australians who have been represented as ‘Others’. I hope to illustrate how speakers manage the complex rhetorical issues implicated in formulating complaints against ‘visibly different’ (Colic-​Peisker and Tilbury, 2007) humanitarian refugees –​these interactional issues are closely wrapped up with the ideological business of differentiating social groups along cultural and racialized lines. The study of ideology in talk, and at the broader analytic level, collective discourse (Fairclough, 2001; Foucault, 1980), is used here to interrogate how language structures and rationalizes social hierarchies and justifies controversial refugee

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policies, rendering them fair, reasonable and even essential to protecting the social status quo. The tranche of research that informs this chapter on the language of othering employs a social constructionist epistemology (Burr, 2015)  and, more specifically, the analytic framework of discourse analysis (Jørgensen and Phillips, 2002; Wetherell, 1998). Very generally, social constructionism holds that social identities, entities or events cannot be made meaningful without first being represented though communication and social interaction (Burr, 2015; Parker, 1998). Human beings are understood to interpret events and entities by drawing on discourses –​particular ways of talking about and understanding the world. Discourses are closely related to the political and social conditions in which they operate and are embedded. At the core of social constructionism is the idea that discourse is constitutive:  it constructs realities and is constitutive of social life –​it builds (represents) what we know about things, processes, social identities and relations (Wetherell, 2001). Importantly, discourses are not neutral reflections of reality; rather, they construct particular ‘versions’ of reality, and are hence rhetorical and ideological in nature (Billig, 1991). Discourses, when used rhetorically, are designed to be persuasive, serving the strategic interests of the speaker or author. Socially constructed discourses also serve a communication function; they help people make sense of new and potentially threatening phenomenon, endowing them with a common frame of reference through which they can be made meaning of, discussed and debated. Throughout this chapter I  attempt to characterize some of the myriad discursive, rhetorical and ideological processes at play in the portrayal of Sudanese Australians on talkback radio (henceforth, TR) in Australia. A selection of talkback radio extracts (and one political ‘doorstop’ interview) is used to exemplify how the language of ‘othering’ is used ideologically, positioning Sudanese Australians as different and thus deserving of illiberal treatment. Although the present analysis primarily focuses on discursive representation of Sudanese Australians, insights can be generalized to how the idea of ‘difference’ is constructed in the media more broadly, targeting social groups that sit outside the historically defined dominant culture (e.g. Muslim Australians) (Hage, 2012). The historical treatment of new non-​Anglo-​Celtic groups entering and settling in Australia, especially if they are conspicuous in their difference, has all too frequently been ambivalent, at very best. My thesis here is that the chief tool of exercising prejudice, racism and xenophobia is language. Throughout Australia’s experience of accepting new migrants and refugees, discourse –​ text, talk and imagery –​most often shared and mediated though the media, has been put to work to construct new cultural groups as different –​as not sharing

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fundamental Australian qualities necessary for their full national belonging. Importantly, moreover, in Australia, time has not necessarily diminished the phenomenon of othering. One in five Australians experienced racial discrimination in 2016, a marked rise from previous years (Markus, 2016). Linguistic practices that accomplish identity construction, elemental to the practice of othering (e.g. Said, 1978) are, I posit, foundational to this ideological pattern, and accordingly, are the focus of this chapter.

Talkback Radio Giving a voice to public concerns, opinions and views, TR has been argued to play a democratizing role in society (Turner, 2009). Dubbed ‘God’s great leveller’ (Bodey, 2007, 15) by one of its earlier producers, TR’s ubiquity has joined with talkback’s perceived democratic, participatory footings, significantly popularizing the format (Turner, 2009; Ward, 2002). Although TR partially enables the general public to engage in its making, it also shares many of the ‘elite’ characteristics of other mainstream media formats: it is the host and producer who are empowered to select callers they wish to speak to, to leave on hold (sometimes indefinitely) those they do not, and to privilege a specific issue over another. In the cruder, more populist version of TR, ‘shock-​jock’ hosts make sport out of denouncing and ridiculing callers they disagree with, with a view to entertaining and riling their listeners. For the most part, ‘shock-​jock’ talkback is not interested in being impartial; rather, it feeds on populist opinion, ‘entertainment value’, confrontation and sensationalism. My research examining the language of othering in the media employs TR calls and interviews, chiefly because talkback provides rhetorical and discursive contexts whereby detailed analysis of talk’s forms, structure and ideological patterning can be investigated in close detail for what they are doing in interaction (Hanson-​Easey and Augoustinos, 2017; Heritage, 1984). This is particularly important when speakers are, putatively, motivated to present their descriptions of events or cultural groups as veridical, persuasive versions of ‘how the world is’, free from personal bias and, importantly, racist or prejudiced intentions. Political interviews on the radio also provide rich opportunities to analyse how language and discourse are moulded to the argumentative context at hand. This setting can allow for valuable insights into how particular discourses and rhetoric function contingently in relation to political and social practices, including blaming, policy justification, and the ideological work language is doing to construct group identities and sustain social structures and power differentials (Wetherell and Potter, 1992).

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Moreover, TR is highly conducive for the diffusion and (re-​)representation of political and public opinion, leading to serious negative upshots for migrant groups and their settlement in a new country. It has been suggested that the racist, nationalist animosity that led to the so-​called ‘Cronulla riots’ were, in part, fuelled by TR (see Poynting, 2006, 2007). In December 2005, in the southern beachside suburb of Sydney, over 5,000  ‘Anglo’ Australians (Australians who identify as possessing British heritage) physically attacked, verbally abused and threatened anyone whom they viewed a ‘Middle Eastern’. The mob violence was triggered by a fight between a group of lifesavers and a group of Lebanese Australian youths on Cronulla Beach a week earlier. Alan Jones, Sydney’s most listened-​to TR host, read aloud to his audience one of the many inflammatory text messages that were widely circulated after the fight, beseeching Anglo-​ Australians to ‘come to Cronulla to take revenge’ (Poynting, 2006, 87). Numerous proximal and distal (historical) causes led to the pogrom-​like events at Cronulla, and TR can only be partially associated with this. Yet, there is evidence that when news media and TR engage in what Perry (2001) calls ‘permission to hate’ talk, this can send a powerful condoning message to those who wish to perpetrate racial vilification and violence (Poynting, Noble, Tabar and Collins, 2004). To be sure, TR wields considerable influence, and this has been well understood and exploited by Australian politicians who favour the platform to disseminate their messages (Turner, 2009; Ward, 2002). As Turner (2009) contends, Australian politicians prefer the TR medium to current affairs television interviews, largely because they are considered less rhetorically challenging. This is especially the case when politicians strategically select whom they will be interviewed by (Turner, Tomlinson and Pearce, 2006). Agreeing to interviews with preferred presenters, who share a similar ideological orientation, can reduce the threat of policies, and of politicians themselves, being exposed to unwanted critique.

Offering Refuge –​Australia’s Ambivalent Refugee History It is important to contextualize the present analysis in the context of Australia’s historical treatment of humanitarian refugees. It would be fair to suggest that Australia has had a long, significant, yet capricious, history of accepting and resettling humanitarian refugees escaping the cataclysm of war and political and religious persecution. From the very beginning, the fear of difference and continuing concern for conserving the ‘ethnic balance’ (National Population Council, 1991) has remained a clear echo within the media, refugee policy, politics and public opinion (Gale, 2004). Scholars suggest that Lutherans, escaping religious restrictions in Prussia, who began settling in South Australia in 1839, were Australia’s first refugee

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group. After 1901, small numbers of mainly European refugees, who met the punitive racial criteria imposed by the Immigration (Restriction) Act 1901 (i.e. White Australia Policy), were resettled (Jupp, 2002). Australia first provided large-​scale refugee assistance in 1938 when the Lyons government offered 15,000 Jews fleeing Nazi Germany safe haven (Hugo, 2002). Only 6,475 Jewish refugees made it to Australia before Adolf Hitler’s Germany blocked their escape. Ironically, the anti-​Semitic outcry over the resettlement of this modest number was bitter, reactive and protracted (Lack and Templeton, 1995). After the Second World War  –​in a progressive move away from race-​ based immigration policy that ostensibly precluded immigration from non-​ Anglo-​Celtic counties  –​Australia accepted 181,700 displaced persons from Europe. Yet, even when Australia slowly began to fully digest the scope and implications of the atrocities perpetrated in Nazi concentration camps, and the scale of the refugee challenge, the Australian press promulgated myths and racist stereotypes of Jews that resonated with public fears of being ‘flooded’ with ‘rich refugees’ (Lack and Templeton, 1995). It was not until 1981, in accordance with the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees of 1951, that Australia formalized an ongoing humanitarian resettlement programme (Hugo, 2002). Previous refugee intakes had been in direct response to geopolitical upheavals, and, prior to 1975, these had focused on resettling central European refugees. The end of the ‘Vietnam’ (American) war in 1975 and the refugee crisis resulting from the war in Lebanon (1982) radically altered the cultural composition of Australia’s refugee intake. Predictably, perhaps, old historical imaginings of an ‘Asian invasion’ resurfaced in the Australian media as the Vietnamese diaspora, who mostly entered Australia via the ordered and selective ‘clearing’ of refugee camps in Indochina and not, as publicly imagined via boat, grew in population (Betts, 2001). In fact, the Liberal-​National Coalition government and Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, in the lead-​up to the 1977 federal election, was becoming increasingly perturbed by the saturated reportage that fixated on the supposedly permeable nature of Australia’s borders and the erosion of Australia’s ‘right’ to select the migrants it judged as the best fit for Australian society (Marr and Wilkinson, 2003). To combat a potential loss of support in the lead-​up to the federal election, the Fraser government stemmed the first ‘wave’ of boat people from Vietnam by instituting a policy of ‘forward selection’, that is, selecting refugees from the camps in Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand to pre-​empt boats leaving these ports (Betts, 2001; Marr and Wilkinson, 2003). The strategy worked. For nearly a decade no more boats made the perilous journey across the Indian Ocean. Despite only 2,050 Vietnamese refugees arriving as boat people in this ‘first wave’ (1975 to 1981) (Viviani, 1984), public attitudes remained ambivalent.

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According to a number of opinion polls from December 1977 to March 1979, between 7 and 13 per cent of Australians wanted ‘any number’ of refugees to stay, whilst 20 to 30 per cent wanted to ‘stop them from staying here’, and 59 per cent of respondents stated that they wanted to ‘limit their numbers’ (Betts, 2001). What can be taken from this truncated reading of Australia’s refugee history is that the process of offering humanitarian support to highly vulnerable, displaced and often destitute peoples is, more often than not, met with fraught and politicized responses. Moreover, the patterned discourses in refugee politics have been ideological notions of race, xenophobic threat, essentialized (fixed and reified) cultural difference and perceived collective fear of new cultural groups destabilizing Australia’s perceived ‘way of life’. Indeed, although the language of race and othering is continually being remoulded to suit changing social and political conditions, resonances with historical discourses stubbornly remain. Of course, asylum seeker discourse and especially those who attempt to enter Australia by boat, are constructed differently to that of humanitarian refugees (see Every and Augoustinos, 2007; Lynn and Lea, 2003: Marr and Wilkinson, 2003; Pickering, 2001; Saxton, 2003). Asylum seekers are more likely to be represented by political actors as ‘illegal’, and thus, as representing a threat to Australia’s sovereignty and safety, or abnormalized as morally aberrant (O’Doherty and Lecouteur, 2007). In contrast, offshore humanitarian refugees who enter Australia via the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) humanitarian programme are less vulnerable to attacks on their moral integrity, legality and legitimacy. The construction of difference for these groups is, then, produced and managed through alternative discourses, that is, discourses that draw on cultural assumptions, previous experiences and, specifically, the causal influence of culture on rate of settlement and ‘social fit’ (Walton and Cohen, 2007).

Sociopolitical Background and Sampling Methodology Before moving on to analysis and discussion of the talkback data, I  briefly provide some contextual background to the calls and the criteria by which they were selected. Two key events are salient here. First, in 2007, the then-​ Australian minister for immigration, Kevin Andrews, recommended that the offshore African refugee quota be reduced because of fears that ‘some groups don’t seem to be settling and adjusting into the Australian way of life as quickly as we would hope’ (‘More Dogwhistling’, 2007; Topsfield and Rood, 2007). This comment elicited a wave of media interest in Andrews’s assertion and, in particular, its veracity, justness and political motivation. Accused of playing

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the ‘race card’ and actively inflaming racial discrimination, Andrews was subsequently forced to answer questions on TR and in doorstop interviews about the evidentiary basis of his comments. The interviews with Andrews analysed in this chapter relate to this controversy. Secondly, most of the lay talkback calls analysed here pertain explicitly or tacitly to the widely reported fatal stabbing of Daniel Awak, a 14-​year-​ old Sudanese Australian, during a fight with another Sudanese Australian adolescent in the central business district of Adelaide. These events, as some callers to The Bob Francis Show intimated, resonate with other well-​publicized (negative) events in Australia that generally construct Sudanese refugees as violent and experiencing integration problems (see Hanson-​Easey and Augoustinos, 2010). Data collection Collection of the Kevin Andrews data began with a broad Internet-​based search, which led me to Andrews’s ministerial website, containing transcripts of news-​radio interviews he had conducted in 2007. Further inspection of these transcripts led to the identification of interviews that broached the topic of the Sudanese quota reduction. Audio recordings of the five news-​radio interviews were sought from Media Monitors,1 a news and media-​monitoring agency. The second data corpus comprises 16 calls to The Bob Francis Show on FIVEaa, a commercial Adelaide-​based station. Data collection began with a search on the Media Monitors database for the category term ‘Sudanese’ in talkback calls on The Bob Francis Show, between 12 November 2008 (the date of stabbing of the young Sudanese Australian, Daniel Awak) and 21 May 2010. Twenty-​three ‘call summaries’ met these criteria. The summaries were further analysed to determine whether they (a) provided adequate detail and content for analysis, or (b) portrayed Sudanese refugees in a pejorative fashion. Fifteen calls met these criteria.

Constructing Causality for Differentiating the Other The politics of reality construction is pivotal to garnering policy acceptance. Politicians appearing in the media are often required to justify and legitimate their decisions  –​finesse authentic and persuasive versions of ‘how things are’  –​with a view to appeasing and sometimes cajoling a suspicious and jaded public. Controversial policy adjustments or reforms need to be carefully rationalized if they are to be accepted. That is, they need to be recognized as addressing real and salient problems to ward off counterclaims

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and attacks from journalists, the public and political adversaries. These political challenges, and their responses, are fundamental to political praxis, which positions political discourse as paramount to the success of policy legitimation and the broader maintenance of power structures and social relations (Van Dijk, 1995). In the political context, then, the careful construction of social problems is as imperative as the remedying policy that seeks to address them. Indeed, as this chapter goes on to discuss, social problems are regularly glossed with a political goal in mind, that is, to make certain policy measures seem reasonable, just and wholly necessary. With this in mind, policies that could be potentially appraised as prejudicial towards a newly arrived and visibly different humanitarian refugee group present a particularly knotty proposition for politicians. For instance, how can such a group, brought to Australia under the auspices of the federal government and the UNHCR, be criticized without seeming harsh, callous, intolerant or reactive? The following extract, taken from a doorstop interview in the Australian city of Melbourne (3 October 2007), exemplifies one of the discursive strategies used by Andrews to justify his comments (and quota adjustment). In the interview, Andrews is asked by a journalist, ‘In what way have African refugees had more trouble settling in than refugees from other generations in the past?’ Andrews’s answer is instructive, providing insight into how categories such as ‘Western democratic culture’ and cultures from ‘Asia’ are introduced and deployed in talk to differentiate between social groups and their perceived rate of ‘settling’ (e.g. integration). Journalist:  In what way have African refugees had more trouble settling in than refugees from other generations in the past? Andrews: Well, each generation comes from different backgrounds. When you talk about refugees, for a long time the major source of refugees to Australia, if you go back to the beginnings of this programme after the end of the Second World War, many of the people who came to Australia as refugees came as refugees from Europe, who came from largely the same Western liberal democratic culture as we share in Australia. They may have spoken different languages, eaten different foods, etcetera, but largely there was a sharing of culture in terms of the people that came to Australia. More recently we’ve had people from parts of Asia, for example, in which there has been some similarities, again, in terms of the culture. Now, this is not to denigrate or to suggest that there is something wrong with particular cultures, it’s just being realistic enough to say that if we’ve got some challenges then we ought to be sensible enough to say let’s look at those challenges and let’s work in a way with the people concerned to ensure that we can meet their aspirations, meet the aspirations of Australians in general.

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Andrews’s response to this question is premised on the assumption that culture differences are contingent on which continent or nation a person emigrates from and, additionally, on an implicit fixed ‘culture difference’ reasoning for explaining refugee integration problems. This discourse differentiates and ‘essentializes’ culture (see Augoustinos, Hanson-​Easey and Due, 2015)  on a normative scale, indexing cultural (dis)similarity (Hanson-​ Easey and Augoustinos, 2010). Ranging from earlier-​arriving refugees from Europe to later-​arriving ‘Asian immigrants’, respective groups are constructed as sharing differential cultural commonalities with ‘Western democratic cultures’, regulating their respective rate of settlement. Conversely, refugees from Africa are implicitly categorized as devoid of such similarities, and these dissimilarities constitute the nub of the problem, and the raison d’être for the refugee quota reduction from Sudan. Notable here by its absence is an explicit reference to African refugees. Instead, Andrews uses ‘culture’ and gross continental heritage (i.e. refugees from Asia, refugees from Europe) as a stand-​in, which subtly achieves a number of rhetorical upshots. First among these is what this move offers Andrews’s argument in pre-​ emptively guarding against anticipated accusations of ‘racism’. As Martin Barker (1981) and others have argued, racist practice now pivots on assumptions related to cultural incompatibility with other groups, rather than genetics or race. More subtly, by avoiding national categories, Andrews’s answer draws on and reinforces hegemonic notions about the nature of culture. Tacit assumptions about African culture and its deep-​seated incompatibility with ‘Western liberal-​democratic culture’ are treated as common sense –​a given –​obviating the need to justify or define these cleavages beyond catch-​all category terms of ‘liberal’ and ‘democratic’. Equally, Western culture is treated non-​problematically, constructed as a homogeneous, static and coherent political and social system. Yet, for Andrews, cultural discord is only one of a number of problems thwarting African refugee resettlement  –​some of the social implications arising from having a refugee history are, ironically, employed as a rationale for reducing the refugee quota from Sudan. Explicating this logic in the extract below, Philip Clarke, from the radio station 2GB, in Sydney, (gently) questions Andrews about the assumed connected issues of ‘African refugee resettlement’ and ‘young men from The Sudan’ as reasons for reducing the quota. Clarke: Okay, now, there has been some controversy in the past about African refugee resettlement, and the ability of some, particularly young men from The Sudan, and their ability to settle easily into Australian society. Was this a factor in this decision?

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Andrews: Yes, yes, it was a factor Philip. One of the things we’ve been mindful of over the past year is the additional challenges with some people from Africa, that we know, for example, if we’re talking about the Sudanese, and this is not to demonize them, it’s just to face the reality that we’ve got. They have very low levels of education, on average we’re looking at about grade three level; that’s a lot lower than any other group of refugees. You’ve got people, particularly young men in their teens and early twenties, difficult therefore for many of them to get a job, they tend to drop out of school a lot earlier and then there’s a whole lot of other cultural issues. Coming from Africa compared to modern Australia.

As with all descriptions of an entity or event, they include a selection of details whilst omitting other equally apposite descriptive terms (Potter, 1996; Woolgar and Pawluch, 1985). For example, in this extract, the category term ‘Sudanese refugees’ could have been replaced with a number of alternative categories available in popular discourse, such as ‘humanitarian refugees’ or simply, ‘refugees’. Further, they could also be portrayed as a group who, because of the tragic situation in Sudan, were highly motivated to make the most of their new situation. Category description combinations are inexhaustible. The point here, however, is that the deployment of the national category (‘the Sudanese’), and the contrastive work that describes them as having ‘very low levels of education’ or as being ‘particularly young’, draws a tight rhetorical boundary around Sudanese Australians. This has important upshots for the overall representation Andrews is fashioning and for the political function it is serving in this context. Causality for resettlement problems is produced through these discrete descriptive categories (e.g. ‘young’ and ‘uneducated’), representing Sudanese Australians as mostly ill-​equipped to engage productively with society. Furthermore, through the selection of these categories, Andrews’s account implicitly assigns the lion’s share of the blame for settlement problems to Sudanese Australians themselves, largely exonerating the government’s role. Also notable in this extract is how descriptive categories introduced by the interviewer become rhetorical resources that Andrews draws upon in his argument. Clarke’s descriptive categories such as ‘young men from the Sudan’ are picked up (oriented to) by Andrews and elaborated upon. He expands on Clarke’s description and characterizes Sudanese Australians as possessing low levels of education that predispose them to drop out of school, which precipitates difficulties in finding employment. The selection of gender (male) and poor education as defining attributes of Sudanese Australians furnishes a representation that has clear resonances with other reportage that was circulating in 2007. News media, the police and TR hosts were all (and more recently, see Chingaipe, 2016)  vigorously

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portraying young Sudanese Australian males, in particular, as overrepresented in crime statistics and susceptible to violence (e.g. Windle 2008). Arguably, the causal, sociological narrative Andrews is manufacturing resonates with this portrayal  –​‘low education’ leading to chronic ‘unemployment’ narratively constructs Sudanese Australians as socially disengaged and, more subtly, predisposes them to falling into antisocial lifestyles. Also of note here is how the category ‘low education’ is used as the causal glue that binds this group together, setting them apart from other refugee groups (Jayyusi, 1984). Consequently, heterogeneity within the group is all but erased –​all Sudanese Australians are tarred with the same racialized brush. An inherent propensity for violence linked to ethnicity, culture, and low levels of education was more explicitly asserted by Andrews in another TR interview, this time with Fran Kelly on ABC Radio National. Kelly asks Andrews to provide ‘evidence’ and ‘data’ for his decision to reduce the intake of Sudanese refugee numbers. This question cuts to the quick of the controversy Andrews is embroiled in, and he is pressed to outline his reasoning for the quota decision in the face of it being labelled as ‘pretty harsh’. Kelly:  Minister. The Courier Mail today had a photo of a Sudanese family on the front page with a splash headline: ‘Blacklist. Government says Sudanese don’t fit’. It’s pretty harsh stuff. What evidence, what data do you base your decision to limit the Sudanese refugee numbers on, the facts and figures that the last man was asking for. [11 lines removed]. Andrews: Now, coming to the matter you asked about. I get regular reports from my department, provided information through various community groups and ethnic organisations, from other sources, police and otherwise, and there’s been a number of matters which have continually been brought to my attention, about things like the establishment of race-​based gangs, altercations between various community organisations, tensions between families, and a range of other things. Then on top of that, we know when we look at the data, that this is a group that have special or unique challenges beyond those of other groups of refugees. For example, the average schooling age is four compared with seven compared to just three or four years ago, a lot more, forty percent have spent time in refugee camps compared to just fifteen percent in two-​thousand and two-​three, the reading ability is quite low.

One of the more interesting facets of this interview is Andrews’s invocation of ‘race-​based gangs’ as a central descriptive category feature of Sudanese Australians, and how this works to differentiate them from other refugee communities. In particular, the term ‘race’, and the inferential work it does in defining how gangs are ‘established’, is central to Andrews’s argument. First,

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this account implies that these gangs are not your everyday criminal or youth gang organized around, for example, social disenfranchisement or some other common objective, be that drug-​related violence or crime. Instead, these gangs are connected by shared ‘race’. The spectre of gangs, organized around an affiliation with ethnicity or ‘race’, conjures images of US-​style gangs and an extreme level of potential violence. Second, evoking ‘race’ as a modulating term to signify how gangs are organized, presages Andrews’s generalization that the Sudanese Australian community, as a whole, is problematic. Indeed, ‘disagreements between community organisations’ and ‘tensions between families’ not only construct the community as vexatious and socially maladjusted but also collectively so. Once again, their ‘unique challenges’ are predicated on the assumption that low levels of education and protracted time spent in refugee camps are a root cause, and more implicitly, that these influences are not easily reconciled with the process of resettlement. What we can take from this analysis is that in order to promulgate persuasive accounts about social groups in the media, an important first step is to construct the group as sharing some kind of shared attribute (e.g. low education, nationality, refugee background) that might be already salient in the discursive context. This allows for groups to be represented as a group, and gross attributions for their behaviour to be constructed more logically and compellingly. As I have shown above, such an argument can be rhetorically bulwarked if causal attributions linking these attributes to problematic behaviours can concomitantly be constructed. Thus, ‘evidence’ is established for the ontological existence of the group in the first place and, second, how and why they might differ from other groups (i.e. because of the discrete attributes that have come from being a refugee). Furthermore, categorizing Sudanese Australians in this way allows for behaviours to ‘represent the character and activities of the other members of the group’ (Jayyusi, 1984, 48). Accordingly, Sudanese Australians are constructed as performing frequent antisocial and violent acts fundamentally because as prescribed group members, and as part of a homogenized collective, they share ‘race’, educational deficits and pre-​arrival deprivation as common characteristics. Importantly, for the political actor, account formulations built on generalizations and causal reasoning can fruitfully obscure the socioeconomic and institutional factors that may be contributing to the resettlement process –​ unemployment, poverty and institutional and everyday racism can thus be concealed as causal factors, unburdening the government of responsibility for the issue. In other words, Andrews can dodge accusations that his department and government are in any way complicit in problems. Instead, the new arrivals themselves –​their culture and refugee experience –​are singularly to blame.

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The construct of ‘culture’ and its role in determining behaviour was a recurrent refrain in the talkback data analysed. The next section of this chapter explores how the idea of an innate and immutable culture can be employed to characterize the Other and, critically, to differentiate them from the normative ‘Us’.

Fixing Culture The notion of collective ‘culture’ –​group beliefs, morals, knowledge, customs and general ‘way of life’ –​can be understood as a discursive construction that has rhetorical and ideological utility for categorizing who belongs and who are Others. As an ideological resource, if culture can be constructed as an inherent, fixed trait that stubbornly resists efforts to bend to, and mesh with, dominant culture, it can hence be drawn upon as a convenient political argumentative device for social exclusion. As Barker (1981) argues, contemporary theories on culture difference do not explicitly refer to cultural superiority per se, but rather, conceive culture as a natural component of ‘human nature’, with the corollary that it is equally natural to want to mark out and defend cultural territory, demarcating who ‘we’ are, and thus, who we are not. In the field of social psychology, holding beliefs about inherent and immutable cultural or racial traits that characterize and determine behaviours, constituting differences between social groups, has been conceptualized as psychological essentialism (Hanson-​Easey, Augoustinos, and Moloney, 2014; Haslam, Rothschild and Ernst, 2000, 2002; Holtz and Wagner, 2009; Kashima, 2004; Kashima et al., 2010; Yzerbyt, Rocher, and Schadron, 1997). According to this theory, essentialized traits, though often hidden from direct view, tacitly generate observable qualities such as cultural behaviour and skin colour. Essences are believed to be deeply rooted (i.e. pseudo-​genetic) and to lock in membership to a particular social group; hence, individual group members are considered homogeneous, and migration between groups difficult (Haslam et al., 2000). The social psychologist Gordon Allport (1954) in his book The Nature of Prejudice, proposed that essentialist thinking was a consequence of the ‘autistic’ cognitive processes of ‘prejudiced people’ (175). Allport’s cognitive and individualistic account of essentialism expounds why people might use essentialist attributes (i.e. skin colour, behaviours) to construct ‘monopolistic categories’ (homogenized groups). This, Allport claimed, was driven by the ‘principle of least effort’ (i.e. the lazy cognitive miser). For the (lazy) prejudiced individual, essentialist cognitions are characterized by an imperative for simplifying a far too complex world, intolerance of ambiguity and perceptions of ingroup heterogeneity and outgroup homogeneity. As a consequence of the

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prejudiced individual’s cognitive austerity, essentialist beliefs (functioning as ‘energy-​saving’ shortcuts) about social groups emerge. Allport’s contentions about essentialism have been criticized as overly mechanistic and dislocated from the social and political contexts in which they manifest. Alternatively, for our present purposes, the concept of essentialism can be more usefully characterized as a discursive resource (as opposed to an internal cognition). Essentialist talk has a particular rhetorical utility when individual and group behaviour is represented as aberrant, and symbolic of a more widespread social problem with a group deemed Other. Yzerbyt et al. (1997) sum up this approach to essentialism thus: In our subjective essentialistic view of stereotyping, groups’ ‘inherent’ characteristics are some sort of social creations, that is, arbitrary qualities, that are attributed to social entities in order to explain their behaviours in a given cultural and historical context and to perpetuate the social system’. (47)

In other words, it is the ‘social system’ (discursive-​ political context) that provides an imperative for essentialist beliefs (and rhetoric), assisting people to ‘perpetuate the social system’ (47). When people wish to give account of why one group is deserving of punitive action or differential treatment, they often turn to essentialist discourses that ‘promote the idea that it [the existing socio-​ economic and political situation] stems from the nature of things’ (Yzerbyt et al., 1997, 49). Essentialized rhetoric about the ‘nature of things’ and the role of culture in differentiating social groups was a prevalent theme in the data corpus (present political discourse in Australia does not suggest this kind of talk is becoming any less prominent). The following extract from the Bob Francis Show exemplifies this kind of essentialist reasoning. The caller, Tom, provides an account of why people who come to Australia from Sudan may experience a different rate of integration compared to previously immigrated people with ‘European ancestry’. Tom:  I try to look at it with a degree of coolness. It wasn’t too difficult, although it was somewhat difficult, for people of European ancestry –​Italians and Lithuanians and other people –​to find a niche for themselves in Australia. Particularly, as it was all those years ago when we were a little less easy to get  along with. But it’s gunna be very, very difficult for gentlemen who have been raised in these societies, like the Sudan and places of that nature to find it easy to settle into places like Australia.

Of particular interest here is the caller’s use of the term ‘ancestry’ (a category term that stands in for ethnic and cultural background) and how it is used to

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scale integration rates for different groups over time. This explanation anchors ‘ancestry’ as an inherent feature of European and Sudanese immigrants alike, which through time, endows differential influence over people’s capacity to integrate into Australian society. This account tacitly suggests that one reason Europeans have been successful in finding their ‘niche’ in Australia is because there existed a culturally compatible niche for them to fill in the first place. That is, there was enough cultural imbrication, or overlap, between Australia and Europe for the post–​Second World War European diaspora to expedite their settlement process. In stark contrast, however, people from Sudan and elsewhere in Africa are positioned as sharing little in the way of Australian cultural characteristics to enable them to find a similar cultural niche (see Hanson-​Easey and Augoustinos, 2011, for a discussion on ‘human capital’ and Sudanese refugees). Also undergirding this argument is the inference that ancestry (culture) is an essentialized trait. In this way, ancestry is provided an immutable and reified (i.e. to make concrete or real) quality that, for people emigrating from places such as Sudan, confounds their ability to settle adequately in culturally dissimilar places like Australia. My chief point here is that ancestry –​essentialized as a natural, taken-​for-​granted entity for both immigrant groups  –​remains a key determinant of how successfully each group integrates into a putative (white) Australian mainstream culture. Along these lines, it is African ancestry that undermines this group’s ability to settle, and its influence is implied to be enduring and generally fixed. None of this essentialist rendering of culture, and its role in constructing arguments that work to protect the conception of homogeneous and Anglo-​ Celtic national identity is particularly new in historical debates on multiculturalism and immigration in Australia. As Ghassan Hage (2002, 2012) chronicles, xenophobic discourses of threat to, and preservation of, the national identity have been with us since colonization. In line with assimilation ideology, some cultures have been presumed to be amenable to mediating their culture, values and beliefs, to ‘fit into’ the Australian system of values and way of life. Other groups, however, have been depicted as less agreeable to change –​and some, as fundamentally nonassimilable. The former Australian prime minister John Howard’s views on Australia’s core values are telling in this respect. For Howard, Australia has managed to ‘preserve a core set of Australian values that maintain a long continuity of values connecting us now in the last years of the 20th Century, with the beginnings of Australian federation almost 100  years ago’ (Address to the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, 1998; qtd. in Hage, 2002, 433). ‘Values’, as a constituent component of culture, are discursively mobilized by Howard in essentialist terms, and the Australian character is defined by a perennial and

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non-​negotiable allegiance to a range of values and social norms, which are not made totally explicit nor are demonstrably unique to Australian social society. According to Howard’s assimilationist ideology, Australia’s manifest cultural diversity, and multiculturalism’s precepts of free cultural expression, threatens core cultural components that make Australians, Australians. More recently, One Nation leader and member of the Australian senate, Pauline Hanson, rearticulated Australia’s historical fears about threats to its national identity, that is, being ‘swamped by Muslims’ (ABC, 2016). Like Howard, Hanson’s discourse similarly draws on essentialist constructs. Riding a building wave of fear in the Western world after the first Gulf War and 9/​11, Hanson’s language of othering and, vis-​à-​vis, ‘belonging’, draws upon a conception that cultures, and the values associated with them, are naturally differentiated and, sometimes, fundamentally incompatible. Like ‘Asians’ before them, Muslims are now portrayed as holding beliefs, a religious faith and values that are inherently at odds with Australian values. Again, we can see here the underlying essentialist assumptions about culture, constructed as a pseudo-​genetic-​like attribute, a manifest ‘thing’ that causally demarcates between peoples on observable dimensions of ‘race’, religion, nationality and ethnicity. An empirical example of essentialist discourse can be observed in Hanson’s ‘second maiden speech’ (sic) to the Australian Senate. The senator draws heavily (and, arguably, with less nuance than Howard) on the ideology of cultural and religious ‘essences’ to justify her call for a wholesale ban on Muslim immigration. Now we are in danger of being swamped by Muslims, who bear a culture and ideology that is incompatible with our own. […] Australia had a national identity before Federation, and it had nothing to do with diversity and everything to do with belonging. Tolerance has to be shown by those who come to this country for a new way of life. If you are not prepared to become Australian and give this country your undivided loyalty, obey our laws, respect our culture and way of life, then I suggest you go back where you came from. If it would be any help, I will take you to the airport and wave you goodbye with sincere best wishes. (Hanson, 2016. Quoted in ABC)

Without going into a detailed analysis of Hanson’s rhetoric (which it fully deserves), what is plainly on display here is how ‘culture’ and ‘ideology’, constructed as essentialized, inherent and fixed traits of ‘Muslims’, are rendered incompatible with the ‘Australian national identity’. To be clear, the Australian identity is also essentialized and, indeed, treated as a transhistorical (Hage, 2002) entity, that is, as a national identity (i.e. white, Anglo-​Celtic,

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Judeo-​Christian culture) that remains constant through time. Further, Hanson exhorts that before 1901 (Federation) the Australian identity was culturally homogeneous (which it ostensibly was –​the ‘White Australia Policy’ ensured this (Markus, 1994)). Drawing on assimilationist ideology, cultural homogeneity is formulated as an aspirational ideal. Of course, since 1901, and especially after 1945, the Australian demographic became increasingly culturally heterogeneous, as the White Australia Policy was relaxed and Australia gradually became more or less multicultural (demographically, at least). In spite of this, Hanson is tacitly arguing for a return to an assimilationist approach that underpinned immigration policy until the 1970s (Lack and Templeton 1995; Markus, 1994). Ostensibly, what Hanson is proposing is that it is incumbent upon new arrivals to ‘fit into’ Australia’s purportedly dominant Anglo-​Celtic culture and, in doing so, shake off their old cultural identity and trade it in for an updated, Australian version. The point here is that assimilationist discourse leans heavily on essentialist thinking about the nature and function of culture. Interestingly, in my talkback data, culture was regularly flexibly constructed as a reified entity that was more deeply ‘set’, or evident, in some groups (e.g. Muslims, Sudanese Australians) than in others (e.g. Eastern European immigrants). This essentialist logic ultimately functions to demarcate between groups that have an innate ability to be acculturated, and those Others, who have little to no chance of becoming ingratiated with the dominant culture, and hence may be positioned, indefinitely, as not belonging.

Conclusion In this chapter I  have attempted to characterize how discourse  –​linguistic categories, causal narratives, stereotypical representations  –​is employed on TR to construct Sudanese Australians as fundamentally different to, and in some cases inherently incompatible with, Australian culture. I have explicated how subtle causal and essentialist assumptions are used by speakers to build representations of Sudanese Australians that are at best illiberal, and at worst, fundamentally racist. The political and ideological imperative for formulating convincing and authentic-​sounding accounts of othering in the media is strong. In Australia, at least, the consequences arising from building implausible or transparently biased or prejudicial arguments can be grievous for political actors, the plight of their policies and even their respective political futures. Yet, the potential implications for the subjects of this rhetoric are incomparably worse (Due, 2008; Nunn, 2010; Windle, 2008). When (some) media outlets singularly focus on ‘immigrant’ violence, cultural incompatibility and entrenched settlement

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issues (Marlowe, 2010; Nolan, Farquharson, Politoff and Marjoribanks, 2011), fertile ground is sown upon which nationalist, racist and anti-​immigration politicians and groups garner legitimacy and advance punitive policies. It has been consistently noted that racist language in the media has the potential to incite racial violence (e.g. Poynting, 2006, 2007). In the United Kingdom, for example, an exponential rise in racial violence and hate speech during the ‘Brexit’ campaign in 2016, and since the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, has been reported and linked to divisive, intolerant and racialized political and media discourse (Deardon, 2016; ECRI, 2016). Most clearly, language as it is used in these contexts is more than ‘just words’ –​it is a powerful social behaviour that establishes and sustains power relations between groups that have serious material and psychological implications for those deemed Other. The language of othering, and the construction of a homogeneous Australian identity by which Others are measured and judged, is situated at the heart of current debates on multiculturalism, immigration and refugee policy in Australia, as it is in Europe and the United States. Yet, the tone and shape of this discourse continuously evolve to suit changing social mores and institutionalized norms. The nature of contemporary racism (Barker, 1981) means that the notion of ‘race’ has now been generally sublimated by the construct of ‘culture’ as the origin of integration problems. Accordingly, the dominant norm against sounding racist is now dextrously managed by political and lay actors targeting minority group culture, including religious affiliation, as the root problem, effectively deracializing their arguments whilst achieving the same racist ends. Recently, the sharp turn towards nationalism in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia reminds us of the multifaceted and fluid nature of rhetoric as it is employed to render national and ethnic identity differentially on scales of belonging. Language related to this nationalist turn serves clear ideological functions, manufacturing the groundwork upon which policy actions appear justifiable, necessary and ‘common-​sense’. As Michael Billig (2010) argues, political evocations of nationalist belonging, nationhood, and who counts as ‘us’ and ‘them’, taps into established social constructions of national identity (and, indeed, the notion of ‘nations’ themselves) that are widely diffused amongst the public, which has become ideology, simply the ‘way things are’ (Billig, 2010). What might this mean for the politicians prescribing immigration, asylum-​seeker or refugee policies that are controversial? Invoking national identity and notions of ‘the nation interest’ has been shown to radically swing public opinion on controversial policies, and approval ratings of politicians (Billig, 2010). In this way, behind the discursive operation of othering and the construction of ‘difference’, lurk ideological

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representations on the nature of nationalism. As the present chapter has hopefully underscored, precepts of nationalism, national identity, culture, and the practice of othering, are intimately entwined, and function together in a given discursive context. Undoubtedly, the mass media (and more recently, social media) is variably complicit in the manufacture and promulgation of cultural identities that reproduce stereotypes, sanction racism, and compound social marginalization. Although the media can echo and amplify prejudiced discourses, it also has the power to make visible and interrogate ideological assumptions that render minority groups as Other and ‘not belonging’. Language is the medium that constitutes, sustains and naturalizes representations that bulwark social structures and social hierarchies –​the natural order of things. Yet, representations and meanings are never finally fixed; they slip, drift and can take sharp turns (Hall, 1997). For the critical analyst, then, the plasticity of discourse provides opportunities to disrupt and counter what may once have seemed like indisputable and immovable common sense. Such opportunities may be rare, but are never insignificant.

Note 1 See http://​www.isentia.com/​.

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Chapter 5 IN A CONTEXT OF CRIME: SUDANESE AND SOUTH SUDANESE AUSTRALIANS IN THE MEDIA Karen Farquharson and David Nolan

Introduction This chapter examines how Australian newspapers and television news programmes represented Sudanese and South Sudanese peoples in Australia between 2007 and 2012.1 People from the former Sudan (including the current nations of Sudan and South Sudan), began coming to Australia in large numbers in 2000, most often as refugees through the Australian Humanitarian Programme. Through a longitudinal content analysis of print and television news items over a six-​year period (2007–​12), this chapter analyses how this group was represented in Australian news media. Our findings highlight an overwhelming preponderance of coverage focused on Sudanese Australians in the context of crime, whether framed as perpetrators or as victims. In considering the significance of this, we contextualize media coverage within what we discuss below as Australia’s contemporary racial formation (cf. Omi and Winant 2015), and consider how crime and violence have been positioned as products of a problematic ethnic ‘otherness’ that stands as anathema to a pre-​existing, and assumedly ‘white’, ‘way of life’. Such positioning, we ultimately argue, can be understood as an effective mechanism of ‘symbolic containment’ that serves to sustain and extend racial inequality. However, we begin outlining our theoretical approach to ‘race’ and racialization before turning to consider the broader sociopolitical context in which a growth in Australia’s Sudanese population occurred, and in which Sudanese Australians became a focus of media attention.

Racial Formation and ‘Racialization’ The question of how to understand race, ‘racialization’ and racism represents a highly contested ground, in which theoretical debates have been influenced

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by, and have reciprocally informed, public and policy discussion. In drawing on the model of ‘racial formation’, our discussion is informed by Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s (2015) contention that, although the idea of ‘racial types’ as a theoretical basis for categorization is today widely discredited, race nevertheless persists as a significant discursive basis of a politics of belonging that intersects with, but is irreducible to, other modes of identity categorization (inter alia, class, gender, age, sexuality, religion, nationality and ethnicity). In using this concept, they point to the flexibility and variability of race as a historical and discursive basis for both practices of racial discrimination and ‘othering’, and practices concerned to resist such processes and to achieve racial equality and justice. Informing and emerging through ‘racial projects’ (Omi and Winant 2015, 124–​27), and in complex and mutually informing interplay with other axes of identity-​based categorization, discrimination and resistance, ‘racial formation’ refers to ‘the sociohistorical process by which racial identities are created, lived out, transformed and destroyed’ (Omi and Winant 2015, 109) Importantly, this process-​based approach to understanding and analysing the social operations and consequences of racial politics connects cultural representations, social structures and everyday experience. In this respect, it is an approach that calls for attention to the historically and contextually specific forms of racial formation characteristic of particular locales. Importantly, Omi and Winant (2015) also stress the importance of ‘race’ as a mode of categorization based upon bodily difference, and the degree to which this historical formation informs the everyday process of ‘seeing’ other humans: While acknowledging the inherent instability and socially constructed characteristics of race, we argue that there is a crucial corporeal dimension to the race-​concept. Race is ocular in an irreducible way. Human bodies are visually read, understood and narrated by means of symbolic meanings and associations. (Omi and Winant 2015, 13; italics in original)

As we discuss below, this ocular dimension to race is an important aspect when considering the representation of Sudanese people in Australian media. However, to consider the persistence of racial discrimination in avowedly non-​ racist societies such as Australia, it is also important to examine the relationship between racialization and ‘ethnic othering’ in the context of Australia’s specific racial formation. ‘Racialization’ is a term whose meaning is contested, and which has variously attracted controversy as to its validity and utility (see Murji and Solomos 2005; Solomos and Back 1996). Here, we use this term to refer to the persistent deployment of modes of racial categorization that

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extend beyond those that are identified as overtly ‘racist’. In Australia, forms of racial categorization based on biological determinism played a strong role in shaping its history, particularly through the social and institutional impacts of a racially based immigration policy. The racially based ‘White Australia policy’ was instituted with the passing of the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 immediately following Australia’s federation as a nation state, restricted to ‘white’ (initially British and Irish) migrants. Alongside this overtly racist approach to immigration, the denial of citizenship rights and cultural recognition to Indigenous people for much of the twentieth century facilitated a continuous pattern of colonial violence and dispossession characteristic of colonial black-​white relations. Since the middle of the last century, however, following the international repudiation of ‘race’ as a basis for species classification and discrimination, policy frameworks and public debates have given way to a focus on cultural difference. This shift, from an earlier racism grounded in a biological determinism toward a view of culture and ethnicity as providing the fundamental basis for categorizing and understanding human difference, nevertheless often rested on the same fundamental processes of essentialist thinking that inform racial categorization. Thus, as Andrew Markus has noted, there have been continuities between racist and many ‘culturalist’ modes of classification: The bedrock of the racist or culturalist idea is not the claim of superiority; rather, it is the belief in the existence of distinctive human populations with a timeless character and the impossibility for an individual to become assimilated into a group different from the one into which he or she was born. It is this idea that justifies discrimination. (2001, 5)

The historical shift whereby racializing logics, positing the existence of essential identities that are assumed to be discrete, persistent and inherited, are transferred to culture and ethnicity have been analysed as ‘the new racism’ (Barker 1982) or ‘neo-​racism’ (Balibar 1991). As it informs discriminatory policies and practices, ‘culture’ is seen to provide a basis for explaining group dispositions and behaviours assumed to be the products of inherent qualities that are culturally rooted and normally reproduced by the group. This view supports further significant racializing consequences. While conceptions of biologically determined racial traits are associated with a discredited racial ideology located in the past (Goldberg 1993), differences in appearance, including skin colour, remain as markers around which cultural identity, including forms of problematic and incommensurable difference, are seen as visibly embodied. In addition, the idea that cultures are discrete and persistent serves to fuel forms of ‘cultural protectionism’ concerned to maintain the essential qualities of a

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valorized national, regional or civilizational culture and identity, and a view of what are assumed to be ‘other’ forms of cultural identity as potential threats to the integrity, coherence and harmony presented as its hallmarks.

Racial Formation in Australia To understand how Australia’s shifting ‘racial formation’ has affected its Sudanese ethnic population, it is vital to consider how Sudanese migration coincided with a period during which racial politics, particularly surrounding immigration and multiculturalism, were highly charged. In the early 2000s, a rise in Australia’s Sudanese population occurred largely as a consequence of an increased intake of African migrants under Australia’s Special Humanitarian Programme, a state-​sponsored scheme that targeted refugees on a regional basis based on assessments of humanitarian need (Department of Immigration and Citizenship 2009). The broader political economic context for this intake was that ‘drought, famine and war resulted in large numbers of Sudan-​born refugees fleeing to neighbouring countries, and many were resettled in Australia’ (Department of Immigration and Citizenship 2014). In 2004, US secretary of state Colin Powell identified the conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan as genocide, and it has been estimated that the second Sudan civil war, which ran from 1983 to 2005, resulted in two million deaths and the displacement of more than four million people (Department of Immigration and Citizenship 2007). Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data shows that for the 10-​year period from 30 June 1997 to 30 June 2007, Sudanese people made up more than half (54 per cent, 22,445 out of a total of 42,489) of all African Humanitarian Programme arrivals, more than any other African country by almost tenfold (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2008). This change in policy led to a shift in the demographic make-​up of Australia which, whilst culturally diverse, previously had only a small number of ‘black’ Africans. Although African Australians continue to account for a relatively small percentage of Australia’s population, their rapid growth and ‘visible difference’ (Colic-​Peisker and Tilbury 2008; Colic-​Peisker and Tilbury 2007; Hebbani and McNamara 2010) in the context of the historical make-​up of Australia’s population has, as we discuss below, been publicly positioned and problematized as a signifier of racial/​cultural otherness. The growth of an ethnic Sudanese population in Australia coincided with a period during which Australia’s racial politics have been transformed by the displacement of multiculturalism as both a prominent articulation of identity politics and a framework guiding policies, in favour of what has been termed ‘the new integrationism’ (Nolan, Burgin, Farquharson and Marjoribanks 2016; Poynting and Mason 2008; Tufail and Poynting 2013; van Krieken 2012). The

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degree to which multiculturalism has ever represented a truly radical discourse or policy framework has been questioned by various critics, who note that its conceptions of cultural pluralism often reproduced and reified essentialist modes of ethnic categorization (Lentin 2005; Stratton 1999), and that in its dominant public and policy articulations it has represented a valorization of cultural diversity within ‘limits’ that do not threaten core ‘white’ cultural norms and institutions (Hage 1998; Stratton 1999). However, Dunn (2005) has argued that despite valid criticisms of its historical limitations as a policy approach, multiculturalism can present, in its more radical articulations, a vision of a nation constituted by its cultural diversity and a polity in which all citizens are equally empowered to contribute to processes of establishing and debating collective norms and institutional practices. Nevertheless, Dunn notes, ‘multiculturalism is by no means sedimented as a national norm in Australia’ (2005, 35). Indeed, as discussed in Chapter 1, in recent years there has been a retreat from (albeit qualified) official representations of Australian national identity as both constituted and enhanced by cultural pluralism, in favour of a framework centred on the imperatives of ‘social cohesion’ and ‘harmony’ (Ho 2014). Operating alongside and informing this shift is a view of cultural difference as itself a potential cause of disharmony, an aspect that has informed a demand that ‘ethnic’ minorities, including migrants, embrace and ‘integrate’ within a core ‘Australian’ culture. While Australia has not officially abandoned multiculturalism, its focus on cultural pluralism has been subjected to notable shifts, wherein rights afforded to cultural minorities and migrants are repositioned as granted by the nation in exchange for respect of ‘Australian values of equality, democracy and freedom’ (Australian Commonwealth 2003). While such values appear unexceptionable, it is significant that the imperative to conform to them is framed as a requirement to adopt a particular ‘Australian’ identity, wherein ‘Australian values’ are positioned as products of a ‘white’ history and a British cultural heritage (Johnson 2007; van Krieken 2012). The political context for this shift has been an increased representation of cultural otherness as a threat. Thus, alongside a critique of approaches to governing that positioned policies that sought to protect the rights of minority groups as pandering to ‘special interests’, the conservative Liberal-​National coalition government under Prime Minister John Howard (1996–​2007) came to power on the back of a campaign that claimed to represent a ‘mainstream’ and govern ‘for all of us’ (Greenfield and Williams 2001; Johnson 2000; Markus 2001). Alongside a communitarian and strongly nationalist celebration of ‘us’, Australian identity was repeatedly and consistently contrasted with a series of threatening Others, in what proved a successful, if highly divisive, electoral strategy. The Howard government actively contributed to the rhetorical construction of a series of threatening Others (most notably

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Asians, Asylum seekers and Muslims) as endangering ‘ordinary Australians’’ economic, physical and national security, a strategy that strongly contributed to an increased public hostility to ethnic minorities (Perera and Pugliese 1997). Survey research undertaken by Kevin Dunn, James Forrest, Ian Burnley, and Amy McDonald (2004) during this period found that Muslims and people of Middle Eastern origin were frequently understood as ‘not belonging’ in Australia; people of Asian origin were also considered outsiders; and levels of intolerance were also expressed towards Indigenous Australians and Jewish Australians (Dunn et al. 2004). These shifting politics surrounding race, multiculturalism and immigration provided the context into which Sudanese migrants entered Australia in the early 2000s. As a mainly refugee population, many of whom had suffered from the experience of trauma and forced migration, many Sudanese people were significantly disadvantaged. As Rebecca-​Lea Perrin and Kevin Dunn (2007) note, Sudanese people have faced the additional disadvantage of being a population of mainly refugee arrivals who came to Australia during a period in which not only had refugee issues, particularly surrounding boat arrivals, been highly politicized, but also refugees themselves have been explicitly demonized as ‘illegals’ and ‘queue jumpers’ and, by reference to the governmental imperative of ‘border security’, as potential threats to Australians’ physical and economic security (Harindranath, Georgiou, and Bailey 2007; Mummery and Rodan 2007). Sudanese people were also themselves framed as representing a potential threatening ‘Other’ by the Howard government. Thus, with another federal election looming, federal immigration minister Kevin Andrews targeted the Sudanese through the familiar tactic of constructing ethnic minorities as threats that had previously proved politically successful. In the wake of the fatal assault of a 19-​year-​old Sudanese man, Liep Gony (for which two ‘white’ assailants were later convicted), Andrews responded to a question regarding settlement services for new migrants with the following statement: I have been concerned that some groups don’t seem to be settling and adjusting into the Australian way of life as quickly as we would hope and therefore it makes sense to put the extra money in to provide extra resources, but also to slow down the rate of intake from countries such as Sudan. (Quoted in Farouque, Petrie and Miletic 2007, 2)

In subsequent public statements Andrews referred to the ‘low levels of education’ of Sudanese people as a factor that makes their ‘integration’ into Australia more difficult, alongside ‘a whole lot of other cultural issues coming from Africa compared to modern Australia’ (quoted in Hanson-​Easey and

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Augoustinos 2010, 302) as grounds for restricting the immigration of this particular group. As Scott Hanson-​Easey and Martha Augoustinos have noted, echoing our earlier discussion of how references to ethnicity can often belie a racializing logic, ‘a discourse that firmly and essentially ties pre-​arrival deprivations, race and culture deterministically to problematic behavioural representations, and portrays these as inherent attributes of a homogenized collective in order to justify a policy to reduce refugee numbers, is fundamentally racist in nature’ (2010, 318). As we have discussed in previous work (Nolan et al. 2016, Nolan et al. 2011), however, it is a mistake to assume that discursive terms of public debate are set by political players and passively reproduced by the media. Hall (1981, 12) has noted that the positioning of racialized minorities ‘as a “problem population” and the police practice of containment mutually support and reinforce one another’. Philip Bell suggests media both assume and reinforce an institutionally and culturally embedded ‘race relations’ paradigm that, as Robert Miles (1983, 1993) has argued, works to sustain the naturalization of ‘race’ as a site of social conflict: Just as racists point to biological differences (skin colour, facial features) to explain or justify political and social generalisations, so the popular media posit race as an inevitable cause of social division, conflict and difference. (Bell 1997)

Aside from external influences and shared cultural institutional paradigms, media agendas also serve a significant influence in their own right. Here, the challenges of news production, the adoption of particular editorial stances and deep-​seated ‘news values’ that define conflict, drama, controversy, violence and deviance as ‘newsworthy’ all play a part. Such acculturated modes of news definition are also strongly influenced by economic factors, which can ‘contribute to press sensationalism, populist forms and formats, and can lead to the orchestration of “race” controversy in the pursuit of readers, ratings and revenues’ (Cottle 2000, 20). While the wider cultural and political context serves as an influence on media coverage, it may also be reinforced by it. As Jock Collins , Greg Noble, Scott Poynting, and Paul Tabar note, ‘the very existence of public controversies about Asian immigration, immigration generally, Australian national identity and multiculturalism […] provided a climate in which incidents of “ethnic crime” would be irresistible to newspaper editors and radio-​talk-​back show producers’ (2000, 91–​92). Andrews’s comments were themselves conditioned by, and resonated within, a news context that had (entirely wrongly) positioned Gony’s death as an example of internecine ‘gang warfare’, that, it was suggested, was endemic to the ‘Sudanese community’, a framing that had served as the stage for a

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mediated ‘moral panic’ (Cohen 1972; Windle 2008). Collins et  al. (2000) studied a similar ‘moral panic’ that focused on ‘Lebanese youth gangs’ in the 1990s, and it is instructive here to draw on their insights in considering the role of media in constructing moral panics around ‘ethnic crime’. This media framing, they argue, served as a mechanism whereby ‘the problems of youth crime in Sydney were racialized, with reports linking the events to the criminal Lebanese culture’ (2000, 2). As they document, while there is no reliable evidence systematically linking ethnic identity to a proclivity to crime, the use of language that identifies potential suspects by ethnicity and ‘race’, and the use of an ‘ethnic gang’ framing, serves to position ethnicity itself as a causal factor in the incidence of crime. A key issue here is that, where ‘white’ suspects are normally treated as individual miscreants, the use of language that highlights the ethnicity or migrant status of suspects serves to tacitly interlink particular incidents as a problem of ‘ethnic communities’, serving to fuel anxieties about the threatening nature of cultural otherness (Mukherjee 1999). As Collins et al. (2000) summarize, It is the ideology of racism, offering superficial diagnoses and remedies at the level appearances […] which makes these appear as relations of ethnicity, while class interests disappear from the account in the construction of an overwhelming ‘community’ consensus about what the real problem and its causes are.

In focusing on class, they point out both that socioeconomic factors provide a much stronger correlation with crime than ethnicity. They also detail how high levels of youth unemployment may contribute to perceptions of ‘gangs’, as unemployed youth with limited finances tend to have fewer recreational options, and are thus more reliant on public spaces to hang out with friends. Nevertheless, they draw the important distinction between ‘criminal gangs’ explicitly engaged in organized crime, and ‘ethnic youth who hang out together and occasionally become involved in criminal activity’ (Collins et al. 2000, 80). The Sudanese community was particularly vulnerable to such framings, as a migrant community that had a strong youth profile, low levels of income, limited language skills and an educational profile that had frequently been disrupted by forced migration and affected by trauma (Australian Commonwealth, 2003). Discourse analysis of media coverage conducted by Joel Windle (2008, 556)  found ‘a density of epithets relating to racial, age, migration, collective and migration attributes’ that marked Sudanese people by their difference. Windle noted in particular a strong focus on the physical attributes of the ‘problem group’ compared to the references to local residents who, implicitly ‘white’, are never described in this way. Windle also noted how sources (particularly police) contributed to an ‘ethnic gang

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warfare’ framing, in which intra-​group conflict was positioned as stemming from a ‘culture of warfare’ and ‘tribalism’ associated with Africa, such that the Sudanese were positioned as ‘inherently prone to conflict’ (2008, 558). As he argues, positioning Sudanese culture as a ‘violent other’ involved a simultaneous disavowal of Australia’s historical and contemporary implication in violence, which ‘amounts to a denial of the colonial legacies and neo-​colonial relations which tie “civilized” nations like Australia to the corruption, conflict and instability which characterizes the global economic system’ (2008, 558). Similar findings have been produced by subsequent studies (Hanson-​Easey and Augoustinos 2010; Hanson-​ Easey, Augoustinos, and Moloney 2014; Nolan et al. 2016; Nunn 2010), while Nolan et al. (2016) also highlight the significant role that the denial of racism played in media coverage. This echoes van Dijk’s earlier finding that media coverage, while repeatedly focusing on ‘minority crime’, tends to ‘deny prejudiced opinions’ simply ‘by claiming to publish the ‘truth’ (1992, 90). However, while numerous studies to date have examined how coverage focused negatively on Sudanese as racialized ‘others’ (Due 2008; Hanson-​ Easey and Augoustinos 2010, 2011; Hanson-​Easey et al. 2014; Hanson-​Easey and Moloney 2009; Matereke 2009)  with the exception of David Nolan, Karen Farquharson, Violeta Politoff, and Timothy Marjoribanks (2011), the research outlined above has relied on small, interpretive studies of media. In addition, none has examined television discourses. We thus turn to address this gap through a media content analysis that focused on news reports from the five main free-​to-​air Australian television stations and from newspaper stories (including reports, editorials, letters to the editor and opinion pieces) in the three main newspapers in Melbourne.

Methods This analysis is part of a broader project that looked at the Australian news media and Sudanese and South Sudanese migrants in Melbourne, the AuSud Media Project. The AuSud Project was funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) grant, and supported by the ABC and Adult Multicultural Education Services (AMES) to both explore how Sudanese migrants were represented in the media and to provide journalism training to a group of Sudanese migrants to enable them to develop a media voice. The content analysis reported here was part of the effort to systematically assess how Sudanese migrants were represented. The broader project was focused on migrants to Melbourne, so the newspapers selected were those that were most read in Melbourne. These were The Age (a Melbourne-​based broadsheet), the Herald Sun (a Melbourne-​based

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Table 5.1  Newspaper items on Sudanese Australians, 2007–​12 Newspaper The Age The Australian The Herald Sun Total

N

%

224 115 286 625

36 18 46 100

Table 5.2  Television news items on Sudanese Australians, 2007–​12 Network SBS ABC Channel 7 Channel 9 Channel 10 Total

n

%

26 72 38 25 25 186

14 39 20 13 13 100

tabloid) and The Australian (a national broadsheet). To identify the news stories on Sudanese and South Sudanese Australians, a keyword search for ‘Sudan*’ was undertaken of the Factiva database from 2007–​12 inclusive, and all items identified were downloaded. As this chapter focuses on how Sudanese and South Sudanese Australians were represented, all items referring to Sudanese and South Sudanese peoples outside of Australia were excluded, and the subset of items that focused on Sudanese and South Sudanese peoples in Australia was analysed. The number of items analysed by newspaper is shown in Table 5.1. We have previously reported on how Sudanese Australians were represented in these newspapers for the period of September 2007 through April 2008 (Nolan et al. 2011). The current analysis looks at coverage over a six-​year period, with a somewhat different coding scheme that included codes that were also relevant to the television news. A similar keyword search was undertaken of the Informit television database. The television channels selected represent the main free-​to-​air channels. These are broadcast nationally, though some news programmes contain local content. This elicited 186 items between 2007 and 2012, as shown in Table 5.2. As it was not possible to tell whether a story was local or national, all were included. All articles were coded using a coding scheme that was developed inductively. This meant carefully reading many articles and identifying the key themes that were used in discussions of Sudanese and South Sudanese migrants. There were

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two elements of the coding scheme. The first was to identify the different thematic categories in which Sudanese and South Sudanese migrants were considered newsworthy. The second was to identify the elements of stories invoked to explain the narrative reported in a story. The categories identified were Crime/​Violence in Australia; Refugee or Sudanese community issues; Multiculturalism and cultural diversity; Sport; Integration, race relations or anti-​migration issues; Law or policy; Migrant success story; Immigration duties, citizenship, humanitarian responsibilities; and ‘Other’. Items were coded by which theme provided the dominant framing for the story. An additional aspect of coding, allowing a more detailed understanding of story framings, focused on story details and explanatory elements included. In this second phase, we coded stories according to what elements were included that served to provide an explicit or implied explanation for what had happened. For example, in a case of violence by a South Sudanese migrant against another South Sudanese migrant, invoking the troubled background of migrants may, as we have seen, imply an explanation that links pre-​ arrival deprivations to violent tendencies among migrants. Through an inductive coding process, the following categories were identified: • Mentions difficulties of life in Australia for Sudanese peoples • Mentions violence/​ crime/​ deviancy AGAINST Sudanese Australians in Australia • Mentions violence/​crime/​deviancy committed BY Sudanese Australians in Australia • Describes Sudanese as problematic for Australia • (If describes Sudanese as problematic for Australia) challenges the description of Sudanese as problematic • Mentions difficulties in Sudan or troubled pasts in the lives of Sudanese before coming to Australia • Mentions the positive attributes of Sudanese in Australia • Explicitly discusses racism/​anti-​migration attitudes • Suggests that violence/​crime/​deviancy in Australia is racially motivated • Mentions that previous difficulties can be overcome in Australia • Invokes troubled backgrounds as an explanation for crime committed by Sudanese Australians in Australia This coding scheme was applied to all news items whether on television or in print. The newspaper coding was conducted by one coder. The television coding was conducted by two coders. To ensure consistency, operational and nominal definitions were established in discussions beforehand, and an inter-​ coder reliability test on was conducted on 50 stories, which demonstrated over 95 per cent consistency between coders.

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The number of items in the newspapers outnumbered the number from television news by a factor of more than three. This is not surprising as the number of daily items in a given newspaper is far greater than the number on a television news programme. The data were analysed quantitatively using Excel. In the following section we report the findings on the most common categories and explanatory elements for stories on Sudanese migrants.

In a Context of Crime Sudanese peoples were in the news for a range of reasons. Stories were not only about crime or violence in Australia but also about refugee issues, cultural diversity and sport, among other topics. Nevertheless, Table 5.3 indicates that Sudanese peoples were most often represented in stories focused on violence or crime, with more than half of television news (54 per cent) and 40 per cent of print news items placing them primarily in this context. This was distantly followed by stories on refugee or Sudanese community issues, and then by sport (but only in newspapers). The sport coverage was mainly in 2011 and 2012, and followed the selection of the South Sudanese Australian Majak Daw as a professional Australian rules football player. While stories that focus on crime and violence are inherently negative, many of the others categories are not necessarily so. However, our findings suggested that stories reported within them frequently were. For example, 41 per cent of the 49 items in newspapers where Sudanese peoples were primarily represented in a context of ‘Immigration Duties, Citizenship and Humanitarian Responsibilities’ also mentioned crimes or violence committed by Sudanese peoples in Australia, and 53 per cent Table 5.3  Main category of news item (per cent) Genre Crime/​violence in Australia Refugee or Sudanese community issues Multiculturalism, cultural diversity Sport Integration, race relations or anti-​migration issues Law or policy Migrant success story Immigration duties, citizenship, humanitarian responsibilities Other Total (%) Total (n)

TV

Newspapers

54 18 9 9 5 2 2 2

40 15 7 13 5 3 8 8

0 100 186

1 100 625

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described Sudanese as problematic for Australia. For example, a 2005 Herald Sun article titled ‘Premier Backs Troubled Refugees’, coded primarily in this category, also mentioned crime, difficulties in Sudan and suggested Sudanese migrants were problematic for Australia, among other explanatory elements: Despite settlement problems, the Sudanese would make a valuable contribution to Victoria, [then Premier of Victoria] Mr Bracks said yesterday. ‘I am sure like all groups before them, the Sudanese will adapt to an Australian way of life while retaining their own customs and traditions,’ he said. ‘Just as the community here will become more welcoming and accepting as time goes on.’ Mr Bracks made the comments in response to a Herald Sun report that revealed rising concern among police and welfare agencies about crime and settlement problems in the Sudanese community. … While not commenting on individual cases, the Immigration Department said refugees who committed serious crimes after arriving in Australia could still escape deportation. The spokesman said Australia did not deport people if to do so would breach its protection obligations under international refugee and human rights treaties. ‘Consideration of relevant international obligations is part of the visa cancellation process,’ he said. All people seeking visas had to meet character requirements. (Masanauskas 2005)

While this newspaper article situates Sudanese migrants in a context of Australia’s humanitarian responsibilities, and suggests migrants can make a ‘valuable contribution’, this again involves adapting ‘to an Australian way of life’, and the framing of these responsibilities is in relation to ‘crime and settlement problems’. Thus, despite a focus on the refugee status of migrants and humanitarian responsibility, the risk presented by Sudanese people and the question of deportation for ‘serious crimes’ ultimately frame the story. The ‘migrant success story’ was the only category that was inherently positive. It reported occasions where Sudanese migrants had achieved success, usually against the odds. Given its small size relative to other migrant communities the Sudanese Australian community, as Table 5.3 shows, there were a large number of stories about it, and these particularly focused on crime and violence. There were more stories on crime and violence in television news than on all the other categories combined. There were three times as many stories on crime and violence in the newspapers than in any of the other categories. It is striking how

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Table 5.4  Other elements included where the main context was crime (per cent)* Element

TV

News​papers

Mentions difficulties of life in Australia for Sudanese people Mentions violence/​crime/​deviancy AGAINST Sudanese Australians in Australia Mentions violence/​crime/​deviancy committed BY Sudanese Australians in Australia Describes Sudanese as problematic for Australia (If describes Sudanese as problematic for Australia) challenges the description of Sudanese as problematic Mentions difficulties in Sudan or troubled pasts in the lives of Sudanese before coming to Australia Mentions the positive attributes of Sudanese in Australia Explicitly discusses racism/​Anti-​migration attitudes Suggests that violence/​crime/​deviancy in Australia is racially motivated Mentions that previous difficulties can be overcome in Australia Invokes troubled backgrounds as an explanation for crime committed by Sudanese Australians in Australia

81

39

77

60

44

55

42 23

57 29

33

39

26 25 19

16 33 24

14

17

13

25

*Items can include more than one aspect so columns do not total 100

often Sudanese and South Sudanese migrants were reported on in the context of violence and crime. Television news was also, notably, more frequently negative than newspaper stories, with most television stories focusing on crime/​violence and the issue of Sudanese people fitting into Australian society. Since crime or violence was the most common primary context in both television and newspaper coverage of the Sudanese in Australia, Table  5.4 presents the findings from the second part of our content analysis, which sought to provide a more nuanced exploration of the ways that Sudanese and South Sudanese Australians were portrayed in those items. The coding indicates how Sudanese and South Sudanese peoples were being constructed in media reports. They show that life is presented as difficult for Sudanese peoples in Australia, that the Sudanese are associated with violence (whether as victims, perpetrators, or both), that they have experienced previous difficulties that need to be overcome, and suggest that a failure to do so causes them to behave in deviant ways. Almost half of the television stories (42 per cent) and more than half of the newspaper stories (57 per cent) positioned Sudanese and South Sudanese migrants as problematic for Australia in these reports of crime and violence.

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There was a markedly different pattern of coverage between television and newspapers in terms of the explanatory factors included in the stories. Television items that represented Sudanese peoples in a context of crime or violence were also very likely (in 81 per cent of such reports) to also mention that life was difficult for Sudanese people in Australia, while newspaper reports only did so 39 per cent of the time. Both discussed crimes committed against Sudanese Australians as well as crimes committed by Sudanese Australians, but those committed against the Sudanese received more attention in both print and television. As shown in Table 5.4, most of these crimes were reported as being committed by Sudanese peoples against Sudanese peoples. Again, the most prominent story about Sudanese crime was about the murder of Gony in 2007 (discussed earlier in this chapter). More than half (57 per cent) of newspaper items where crime or violence was the primary topic also situated the Sudanese as problematic for Australia, with an overwhelming majority of these referring to the problem of ‘integration’. Interestingly, fewer than half (40 per cent) of television reports did the same. Both, nevertheless, raised questions about the ability of Sudanese peoples to ‘fit in’ to Australian society. Some suggested that Australia could not accommodate Sudanese refugees because of their troubled pasts. For example, the following quote from then-​Deputy Police Commissioner Ken Jones was included in a 2011 article in The Australian: ‘Young refugees from war-​torn countries often struggled to adapt to new laws and ways of living in other countries’, he said. ‘The youngsters coming out of there have known little else and it does take them a long time to make the transition,’ he said. (Akerman 2011)

It is notable in this excerpt that an equivalence is presented among what are quite distinct elements. ‘Adapting to new laws’ appears to imply a different legal system, but the situation described is one of a more chaotic, ‘war-​torn’ situation, while ‘ways of living’ refers to neither laws nor a political state, but to culture (positioning this as integrationist discourse). However, through conjoining ways of living with a war-​torn background, the idea of violence as situational (i.e. war) is conflated with the idea of violence as a state of being inherent in individuals who ‘have known little else’ and whose history marks them as bringing fundamentally other ways of living, derived from a culture of violence. Given that it is the same violent history that forced Sudanese peoples to flee, the use of this history to signify a state of non-​belonging works counter to the principle of offering refugees safe haven. Some items were more positive. For example, 26 per cent of television items and 16 per cent of print news items about crime or violence also mentioned

10

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positive attributes of Sudanese peoples such as their resilience, and 14 per cent of television items/​17 per cent of print items mentioned that previous difficulties experienced by the Sudanese could be overcome in Australia. However, the overwhelming picture one gets of Sudanese in Australia from this coverage is of people whose troubled pasts possibly makes them violent or criminal and who have trouble fitting into Australian society. Portraying Sudanese as victims of crimes may seem to be less damaging than as perpetrators, but it nevertheless works to position Sudanese people continually in a context of crime and violence. Caitlin Nunn (2010) has discussed how Sudanese people are over-​represented in news genres focused mainly on troubling events, and underrepresented in media ‘genres of sociability’, a finding that reiterates previous work on media representations of ethnic minorities (Jakubowicz et al. 1992). It is, in addition, notable that whether positioned as victims, perpetrators or both, Sudanese people were subject to ethnic labelling, where reports of crime relating to, or committed by, non-​‘ethnic’ (or ‘white’ Australian) subjects are not normally reported in ways that emphasize ethnicity. While television news usually includes visual images that may serve as markers of ethnicity even without overt labels, the use of labels and details that emphasize ethnicity serves to problematically emphasize an association between ethnicity and criminality. This has consequences for public perceptions, contributes to policy frameworks, and plays a part in the personal experiences of social groups, an issue we highlight, in concluding, below.

Conclusion This chapter has added to existing analyses of representations of Sudanese Australians during the initial decade in which they arrived in Australia, a key period during which the media representations of new migrant groups is key to their experience of belonging. Through a longitudinal content analysis, it confirms previous findings that have noted how media coverage has represented Sudanese people in the context of a focus on ethnic crime and violence. The concept of ‘ethnic crime’ is one that is based on an assumed rather than empirically supported relationship, but it is one that retains a hold in media discourse that, in turn, contributes to public discussions and ultimately public policy. This is, in part, a consequence of the persistence of a ‘race relations’ paradigm that continues to position ‘race’ and culture as fundamental and inevitable sources of social conflict. Although it should be noted that this assumption is not exclusive to media, and extends to other institutions that media rely on as sources, media nevertheless play a powerful role by presenting stories that give such assumptions credence and apparent self-​evident factuality as they are deployed

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as frames through which particular events come to be viewed. In the context of periods where the problematization of cultural ‘otherness’ has been presented as a threat to ‘ordinary Australians’’ security, such framings also appeal to the media’s desire to focus on public controversies in their identification of news that will generate strong public engagement. Media representations of Sudanese and South Sudanese Australians are shaped by the context of Australia’s contemporary ‘racial formation’, in which culture and ethnicity are frequently positioned as embodied attributes, and cultural ‘otherness’ represented as a cause of crime and violence. In the context of an ‘integrationist’ discursive and public policy setting, the consequence of this racialized positioning has been to position Sudanese people as ‘ethnic suspects’, a positioning shared by other groups such as Muslims, who have also been positioned as ‘violent outsiders’ (Sohrabi and Farquharson 2012) to what is presented as a benign and normative ‘Australian way of life’ within which ‘ethnic’ (i.e. non-​‘white’) groups are expected to ‘integrate’, while their capacity to do so is continually in question because of their embodied otherness. This serves to entrench what is, because it stems from a racialization of ethnicity, a racial inequality manifested in discrimination in areas such as policing (Muller, Farquharson and Nolan, this volume), but also in other areas such as employment and Sudanese Australians’ everyday experience of discrimination in public spaces. In doing so, such representation contributes to a ‘symbolic containment’ that limits the opportunities available to Sudanese people as a consequence of a cultural otherness symbolized by their ‘visible difference’. Thus, where public discussion and public policy might more productively focus on addressing disadvantage, the role it plays in supporting discrimination tends instead to exacerbate it.

Acknowledgements Thanks to Alice Burgin and Aisling Bailey for coding the newspaper and television items. Particular thanks to Alice for organizing the context analysis. Particular thanks also to Violeta Politoff for helping create the initial coding scheme that this one was developed from. This project was supported by ARC Linkage Project Grant LP 110100063. The Linkage partners were the ABC and Adult Multicultural Education Services (AMES). We are grateful to them for their support of the project.

Note 1 In 2011, the nation of Sudan split into the nations of Sudan and South Sudan. As this occurred partway through the project, we refer to both ‘Sudanese’ migrants or

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refugees, and ‘Sudanese and South Sudanese’ migrants. ‘Sudanese’ in this chapter refers to people originally from both Sudan and South Sudan. The newspaper and television reports we analysed rarely distinguished between the two, even after 2011.

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Nolan, D., K. Farquharson, V. Politoff and T. Marjoribanks. 2011. ‘Mediated Multiculturalism:  Newspaper Representations of Sudanese Migrants in Australia’. Journal of Intercultural Studies 32, no. 6: 655–​71. Nunn, C. 2010. ‘Spaces to Speak: Challenging Representations of Sudanese-​Australians’. Journal of Intercultural Studies 31, no. 2: 183–​98. Omi, M., and H. Winant. 2015. Racial Formation in the United States. 3rd ed. London and New York: Routledge. Perera, S., and J. Pugliese. 1997. ‘Racial Suicide: The Re-​Licensing of Racism in Australia’. Race and Class 39, no. 2: 1–​19. Perrin, R., and K.  M. Dunn. 2007. ‘Tracking the Settlement of North African Immigrants:  Speculations on the Social Impacts of a Newly Arrived Immigrant Group’. The Australian Geographer 38, no. 2: 252–​73. Poynting, S., and V.  Mason. 2008. ‘The New Integrationism, the State and Islamophobia: Retreat from Multiculturalism in Australia’. International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice 36, no. 4: 230–​46. doi:10.1016/​j.ijlcj.2008.08.001. Solomos, J., and L. Back. 1996. Racism and Society. Houndmills: Macmillan. Stratton, J. 1999. ‘Multiculturalism and the Whitening Machine, or How Australians Become White’. In The Future of Australian Multiculturalism:  Reflections on the Twentieth Anniversary of Jean Martin’s The Migrant Presence, edited by G. Hage and R. Couch, 163–​88. Sydney, NSW: University of Sydney. Tufail, W., and S. Poynting. 2013. ‘A Common “Outlawness”: Criminalisation of Muslim Minorities in the UK and Australia’. International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 2, no. 3: 43–​54. van Dijk, T. A. 1992. ‘Discourse and the Denial of Racism’. Discourse and Society 3, no. 1: 87–​ 118. doi:10.1177/​0957926592003001005. van Krieken, R. 2012. ‘Between Assimilation and Multiculturalism: Models of Integration in Australia’. Patterns of Prejudice 46, no. 5: 500–​17. doi:10.1080/​0031322x.2012.718167. Windle, J. 2008. ‘The Racialisation of African Youth in Australia’. Social Identities 14, no. 5: 553–​66. doi:10.1080/​13504630802343382.

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Chapter 6 JOURNALISM PRACTICE, THE POLICE AND SUDANESE AUSTRALIANS Denis Muller, Karen Farquharson and David Nolan

Introduction When a newly arrived immigrant group runs afoul of the major institutions in their adopted country, it becomes acutely difficult to develop a sense of belonging. This was the fate of Sudanese refugees who were settled in Melbourne in the first decade of the twenty-​first century. They ran afoul of a police force that discriminated against them on the grounds of race and that led to media coverage which stereotyped them as associated with crime and violence (Nolan, Farquharson, Politoff, and Marjoribanks 2011). In turn, this created a climate of public opinion which the minister for immigration was able to exploit by pandering to right-​wing fears of the ‘Other’ in an election campaign notable for its racist virulence. In these ways, the institutions of police, media and parliament showed themselves prejudiced. Fortunately, the institution of the judiciary proved to be a bulwark against this prejudice, leading to a measure of justice for some of those on the receiving end of harsh and unjust treatment, particularly by the police. This chapter tells this story. It discusses the media coverage and the relationship between the media and the police, details the police misconduct and subsequent judicial proceedings, and touches on political opportunism. We argue that negative media discourses and discriminatory police conduct used racial stereotypes to target African Australians for imagined proclivities towards criminality. The extra policing experienced by African Australians and the media attention they receive provide politicians with the opportunity to single out African migrants for political purposes. We conclude by detailing how, despite experiencing systematic barriers to their integration into Australian society, through persistence, resilience and mobilization of the law, Sudanese peoples have achieved some success in their struggles to belong in Australia.

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We start with a discussion of media use of police sources that present and reinforce negative stereotypes of African migrants.

Policing the ‘Cronullas’: Media Coverage, Racist Discourse and Practice The media perform a crucial role in shaping how different groups in society are seen by the society as a whole, which in turn can influence attitudes towards them, affect their civil rights, influence government policy towards them and may influence how individual members of those groups fare in everyday relationships with the wider society (Cottle 2000). This is certainly the case for media coverage of Sudanese and South Sudanese Australians, which reinforces the racist stereotype that African migrants are deviant, in particular violent, others to Australian society (Nolan et  al. 2011; Farquharson and Nolan, this volume). These news stories frequently rely on police sources. On 20 August 2012, Melbourne’s broadsheet metropolitan newspaper The Age published an article with the headline ‘African Youth Crime Concern’ (Oakes 2012). The article stated that Sudanese and Somali-​born Victorians ‘are about five times more likely to commit crimes than the wider community’, and reported police warnings that this ‘trend must be addressed to prevent Cronulla-​style social unrest’. As discussed below, these statistics were factually incorrect; however, the article perpetuated an image of African migrant youths as violent, dangerous outsiders. Notably, this story drew entirely on police sources in developing this framing, with the two major sources being police statistics presented to the reporter (but never publicly released) and an extensively quoted interview with the Victorian deputy commissioner of police, Tim Cartwright. At the centre of the story was the following lengthy quote: ‘We’ve got to fix this now and make sure it doesn’t continue, so the kids who are now 10 years old aren’t in this offender bracket in five years time. So we don’t get the Cronullas happening,’ Victoria Police Deputy Commissioner Tim Cartwright said. [At Cronulla] you had a big chunk of the community disengaged and coming to a point where you have large-​scale civil unrest. That’s abhorrent to us, to think that you would have that. ‘You look at the UK riots and you think, we don’t ever want to go there, we don’t ever want to see segments of our community saying they just don’t care what the rest of the community does, they don’t care for us, they have no engagement, don’t recognize the legal system, don’t recognize education.’

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Particularly striking in this representation is Cartwright’s reference to ‘the Cronullas’, referring to a major incident in 2005 most commonly referred to as the ‘Cronulla riots’ in Australian public discourse (Poynting 2006). However, as the police report that investigated these events itself noted, this was not a ‘race riot’ in the sense of a conflict between different ethnic groups (Strike Force Neil 2006). Indeed, Cronulla itself is situated in a predominantly ‘white’ and socio-​economically middle-​class area of Sydney. Rather, it involved a group of approximately 5,000 ‘white’ and predominantly male young people, many of whom carried or wore Australian flags, who, having initially gathered for an organized protest against the alleged behaviour of young Lebanese men, went on a rampage of racist violence targeting men of ‘Middle-​Eastern’ appearance (Noble 2008). If Cronulla is thus better understood as a ‘racist riot’, Cartwright’s reference here diagnoses ‘the Cronullas’ as the product of a disengaged ‘chunk of the community’ that ‘just don’t care what the rest of the community does, they don’t care for us, they have no engagement, don’t recognize our legal system, don’t recognize education’. While he does not explicitly state which ‘chunk’ he is referring to in the case of Cronulla, his reference to not caring for ‘us’ implicitly diagnoses the Cronulla riots as caused by the presence of an ‘Other’ that does not respect ‘our’ community, institutions and values. This diagnosis of an otherness that produces social division and conflict is then positioned as a more general threat by reference to the UK riots, here positioned as the dystopian endpoint of a failure to control this ‘chunk’. Equally, this relies on a misrepresentation of the UK riots as an expression of the ‘disengagement’ of ethnic youth. Initially triggered by perceptions of police racism in the aftermath of the shooting of young black man in the Tottenham Hale district, the 2011 UK riots quickly extended into a wider phenomenon that neither particularly centred on racial politics nor was restricted to particularly ethically defined groups. What is significant here, however, is less its descriptive accuracy than its rhetorical deployment as a grounds for positioning young ‘disengaged’ Africans as a ‘problem group’. There is a certain importance to the way in which this highly problematic ‘diagnosis’ contributes to the framing of this particular story (which also provides a vehicle for its wider public dissemination). More significant, however, was first the degree to which it was symptomatic of a wider framing that had gained prominence in Australian public discourse and, second, the identity of the speaker. Several studies have noted how race has been implicitly or explicitly deployed as a ground for identifying African (and particularly Sudanese) youth as a ‘problem group’ in both media and political discourse (Anyanwu 2009; Baak 2011; Gatt 2011; Hanson-​Easey and Augoustinos 2011; Nolan et al. 2011; Richards, Bowd and Green, 2007; Windle 2008). In light of the documented circulation of such racializing discourse in Australian public

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culture, Cartwright’s representation of ‘African youth crime’ can be read as a reiteration that relies upon and reproduces what had, by 2011, become a fairly prominent form of (racist) ‘common sense’: that anti-​social and divisive behaviours were inherent to this particular ‘chunk’, and that this called for differential (prejudicial) treatment. Such evidence suggests that forms of racist practice were supported by an institutional culture that assumed and (at times) actively promoted a racist logic that homogenized and reified a particular group as both essentially different and fundamentally problematic. At the same time, as we have noted, this institutional culture shared aspects in common with, and was most likely also influenced by, a wider political and public culture which had come to position ethnic identity (African/​Sudanese) as expressive of a more fundamental difference that was both inherent and problematic. A powerful message that emerges from such coverage is that these negative experiences might make it difficult for Sudanese people to adapt to Australian culture and integrate into Australian society.

Policing Sudanese and South Sudanese Migrants In Victoria, there was a great deal of media focus on violence in the Sudanese community and in particular on the dysfunctional relationship that had developed between the Sudanese community and Victoria Police (Nolan et al. 2011). These troubles had begun in 2005, when police in the Moonee Valley area, in the north-​western suburbs of Melbourne, noticed what they called a spate of robberies, armed robberies and assaults which the victims had said were committed by ‘groups of “dark-​skinned” or “African” youths’. In 2006, police at the Flemington police station, south of Moonee Valley, launched Operation Molto as a response to these developments. Operation Molto was designed to run for one month from 5 February 2006 to 3 March 2006. According to the police operations order that established it, its stated purpose was to ‘address the increasing criminal activity and anti-​social behaviour occurring in a small area of the Flemington Police Response Zone’ (Flemington & Kensington Community Legal Centre 2013). The order stated that ‘the as yet unidentified suspects for these serious offences are primarily young African males who either live at, or from time to time attend, the Flemington Public Housing Estate. Operation Molto will focus police uniform resources to the targeted problem areas’. The operation was coordinated by Acting Sergeant Nick Konstantinidis, who prepared the orders. A further objective of Operation Molto was stated to be the engagement of the African youth in the area and the building of positive relationships where possible. In the attempted fulfilment of both these objectives, there was

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a significant increase in the interactions between police and ‘black’ African youths, which, according to the Flemington & Kensington Community Legal Centre (2013), caused a rise in tensions between the two. A central difficulty was that Operation Molto involved the targeting of an entire class of persons based on their colour and ethnicity without discriminating between those suspected of actually committing crimes and those who were not. Tensions increased to the point where the assistant commissioner of police then responsible for the district, Ken Lay, commissioned a review of the relationship between the police and the African community at Flemington. This was carried out in April and May of 2006, a few months after Molto’s operational timeline had expired. The review recommended strategies aimed at improving community relations and policing practices, but as police statistics were later to show, nothing changed, and by the end of 2006 a survey of young people conducted by the local council showed that 40 per cent of respondents said they did not feel safe in the neighbourhood. Of those 40 per cent, 18 per cent said it was the police who made them feel unsafe (Duff 2006). At about that time, the Flemington & Kensington Community Legal Centre submitted a number of complaints to the Office of Police Integrity (OPI) based on instructions the Centre had received from many young people about their treatment by police. These included allegations that two young people had been punched and kneed by police outside a petrol station after having been stopped by the police for no reason. Another had been punched in the head and told he was a ‘black cunt’. Another had been stopped in the street by the police for no reason and forced to lower his jeans and underpants to his ankles. Between October 2004 and January 2013, the legal centre lodged more than 30 complaints with the OPI. All were dismissed by the investigating police. Operation Molto was succeeded by Operation Square. It began in November 2007 and was said by police to be a response to antisocial behaviour around the Flemington shopping centre and the public housing estates in Flemington and the adjoining suburbs of Kensington, North Melbourne and Ascot Vale. According to the submission on racial profiling subsequently sent to Victoria police by the community legal centre and the law firm Arnold Bloch Leibler (Flemington & Kensington Community Legal Centre 2013), in its execution it specifically targeted young Africans, and involved the police videoing, driving past, questioning and removing phones from them at the Flemington public housing estate. Tensions rose higher. Throughout 2007, the community legal centre received a constant stream of complaints about police harassment and brutality, including reports of African men being punched, beaten with torches and batons, and subjected to racial abuse and arbitrary arrest. In December 2007, about 350 members

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of the local African community held a meeting at the North Melbourne Community Centre to ventilate their complaints about the police, including failures by the police to assist community members when they called for help. In December 2008, the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission published a report expressing concern that ‘Victoria Police interactions with [the African community] were not always aligned with the overall intent of the Human Rights Charter, and specifically the rights to equality and freedom of movement’ (Victorian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 2008). That same month, 16 young African men lodged a complaint of racial discrimination against Victoria Police with the Australian Human Rights Commission. They alleged that between October 2004 and the time of the lodging of the complaint, they had been repeatedly stopped, harassed and abused by members of Victoria Police in a pattern of behaviour that represented systemic racial profiling by the police. Racial profiling occurs when police initiate contact with people on the basis of their race or ethnicity (Cuneen 2012). For nearly two years, the Human Rights Commission attempted unsuccessfully to resolve the complaint through mediation. However, in September 2010 the Commission terminated the proceedings, and in November the 16 young African men and one Afghan man commenced proceedings in the Federal Court against a number of named members of Victoria Police plus the chief commissioner of police and the State of Victoria. The applicants alleged that four named police officers who were stationed mainly at Flemington, including Acting Sergeant Konstantinidis, had subjected them to racial discrimination while conducting police duties. The applicants alleged that in this way the officers had breached the Racial Discrimination Act. The Racial Discrimination Act states that it is unlawful for a person to do any act involving a distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of any human right or fundamental freedom in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life. (Racial Discrimination Act 1975)

The applicants alleged that between 2005 and July 2010 they were subjected to serious assaults, excessive force, stopping and questioning, and racial taunts and abuse by members of Victoria Police, and that these acts had been perpetrated for reasons that included the fact that the applicants were black or of African race. On this basis it was alleged that the police actions constituted a breach of the Act (Haile-​Michael & Ors v Konstantinidis, the Chief Commissioner

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of Victoria Police, the State of Victoria & Ors 2010). The applicant whose name was attached to the action was Daniel Haile-​Michael. On the evening of 20 October 2005, Haile-​Michael and two of his Year 10 classmates were hanging out on the oval between the Flemington high-​rise flats and the local high school, Debney Park Secondary College. It was the evening of muck-​up day, a day when graduating school students traditionally dress up and perform pranks, and they decided to walk over to the school to see what the Year 12 students were doing. On the street between the oval and the school, they saw two security guards. Apprehensive, they turned back, walking and then running in the opposite direction. Outside a service station, they stopped. Shortly thereafter a police divisional van pulled up and two police officers got out. Haile-​Michael’s recollection of what happened next was recounted in an article published by an online human rights magazine in November 2013, after the ensuing drawn-​out legal proceedings had concluded (Green 2013). His account was contested by the police, but it provided the starting point for the subsequent legal proceedings: Haile-​Michael no longer remembers the night as a moving image, only in snapshots:  he is on the oval; then at the petrol station; he’s slumped on the ground, kneed by a police officer; he’s alone in the back of the police car. He is at the police station. He is crying.

Haile-​Michael was arrested for allegedly assaulting police. He was 15 years old at the time. No charges were ever laid. Through the Flemington & Kensington Community Legal Centre he complained to the OPI, alleging that he had been assaulted by the police, including being kneed in the testicles and repeatedly punched. He also alleged that excessive force had been used and that the police had displayed racist attitudes and used offensive language. There was also an independent civilian witness to Haile-​Michael’s arrest. Seven police officers were named in the complaint. It was referred by the OPI to a police inspector for investigation, but no subsequent action was taken by Victoria Police. After his arrest, Haile-​Michael was clearly in the police force’s sights. The submission on racial profiling compiled by the legal centre (Flemington & Kensington Community Legal Centre 2013)  stated that Haile-​Michael claimed that he was unlawfully stopped and questioned by police on at least eight occasions between 10 February 2006 –​four months after his arrest –​and 21 July 2007: eight times in 18 months. None of the stoppages resulted in a criminal conviction. One of the stoppages occurred when Haile-​Michael was in a car with four other African youths. The three police officers who stopped them said they had done so because the street in which the youths were driving

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was an area of interest because of recent robberies and other criminal activity. The Victorian Crimes Act imposes a legal restraint on the police, stating that they may stop and search people only when they have committed or are about to commit an offence or may be able to assist in the investigation of an offence (Crimes Act 1958). When called upon to give evidence in the subsequent legal action, none of the officers purported to have any memory of the incident. What little is known about the incident came from a field contact report, which is a contemporaneous record that police keep of their stop-​and-​search activities. The legal firm Arnold Bloch Liebler (Flemington & Kensington Community Legal Centre 2013) recounted a series of incidents based on police running sheets obtained through the discovery processes in the course of the legal proceedings attesting to the fact that police in Flemington frequently stopped and questioned African youths. Haile-​Michael was just one of many to be targeted in this way. Another applicant in the case brought before the Federal Court said that he was stopped and questioned on at least 28 occasions between 7 January 2006 and 20 September 2009. The applicants claimed to the court that as a result of this conduct by Victoria Police, they suffered serious harm and ongoing detriment, including physical injuries, psychological harm, stress, distress, embarrassment and humiliation. In building up their case of alleged racial profiling by the police, the applicants obtained from the Federal Court in March 2012 an order for discovery that resulted in the production of a number of files containing statistics from the police database. These files concerned all police interactions between 2005 and 2008 with males born between 1 January 1987 and 1 January 1993, and living in Flemington or North Melbourne. An analysis of this data showed that the percentage of qualifying males of African ethnicity recorded as having been the subject of police ‘field contact’, at 43 per cent, was 2.4 times greater than the percentage of corresponding males in Flemington and North Melbourne (18 per cent) as shown in the 2006 census (Gordon 2012). In other words, African males of these ages and living in these areas were approximately two-​and-​a-​half times more likely to be intercepted by the police than their incidence in the population suggested they should be (Gordon, 2012). This finding was statistically significant and not the result of random variation (Gordon 2012). Dr John Henstridge, a statistician retained by Victoria Police, concurred with these findings. In addition, the average number of offences committed by African males of these ages and living in these areas was 7.8, significantly lower than for equivalent males of any other ethnicity (12.3) (Gordon 2012). Putting these two findings together, then, it could be determined that African males of these ages and living in these areas had a lower crime rate than equivalent males of other ethnicities, yet

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were nearly two-​and-​a-​half times more likely to be stopped and questioned by the police. Moreover, qualifying males of non-​African ethnicity who were alleged offenders were 8.5 times more likely not to be the subject of a police field contact. In other words, while the police were busy intercepting African youths who were less likely to be committing crimes than young men of other ethnicities, those in the community more likely to be committing crimes were getting less police attention. Professor Andrew Goldsmith, a criminologist retained by the police, described this statistic as ‘confronting’. African males of these ages and living in these areas were significantly more likely to be intercepted by the police on grounds described in the police records as ‘gang’, ‘no reason’, ‘nil reason’ and ‘move on’, than were equivalent males of other ethnicities (Gordon 2012). The disparity was 16 per cent for males of African ethnicity and 10 per cent for males of other ethnicities. The senior command of Victoria Police denied that their members engaged in racial profiling. However, Professor Chris Cuneen, a criminologist at the University of New South Wales retained by the lawyers for the applicant, stated his opinion that the over-​representation of African males revealed in the police statistics provided strong evidence that racial profiling was occurring (Cuneen 2012). In response to the applicants’ case, Victoria Police stated that what they did was common practice late at night in areas with a high crime rate and that it was part of intelligence gathering. Specifically, in March 2013, Victoria Police put out a media statement rejecting the proposition that Operation Molto had involved racial profiling. The statement said, ‘The operation targeted serious offences of robbery and armed robbery in a small defined Flemington area and was predicated on credible intelligence and witness reports. We do not accept that Victoria Police undertakes racial profiling. We have significant concerns that some sections of the community do believe that Victoria Police acts in a racist manner. This is a perception we are determined to reverse. We have been actively working with the Australian-​African community to build closer relationships so there is a greater level of trust and understanding between us’ (Waters 2016). The ranking police officer in charge of the Flemington district at all relevant times was Assistant Commissioner Ken Lay. By 2013, he was chief commissioner. In that position, and in conformity with the stated public position of Victoria Police, he made statements to the media in 2013 denying that the police were involved in racial profiling. But the new chief commissioner was on a learning curve. In June that year, the Herald Sun newspaper, Melbourne’s morning tabloid, published a story detailing the use by police at the Sunshine station of beer coasters depicting Africans as ‘mud fish’. This was police slang for Africans, and the coasters had been created by a small group of officers at that station. Later that same month, it was reported that two female officers

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had been suspended for taking what was described as a ‘trophy photo’ of a Sudanese man in their custody. Chief Commissioner Lay was reported as saying, ‘It has shown me there is a dark, ugly corner of Victoria Police and I don’t like it. [My] overwhelming feeling was just one of utter disbelief ’ (Nine News, 2013). Meanwhile, of the original 17 applicants in the Federal Court case, 11 withdrew for a variety of reasons, including changes in personal circumstances, impatience with the slowness of the legal proceedings, a desire to move on and in some cases subtle pressure from family and community members to withdraw (Flemington & Kensington Community Legal Centre 2013). The six who remained were all young black men of African origin who were living in Flemington, Kensington or North Melbourne at the time the various incidents occurred. In February 2013, two weeks before the matter was due to come to trial, the applicants’ lawyers subpoenaed Chief Commissioner Lay. He would be the first witness in the case, and he would be cross-​examined by Jeremy Rapke, QC, a former director of public prosecutions in Victoria who was now acting for the applicants. In preliminary proceedings, Rapke indicated that he would be asking the chief commissioner what he did and did not do in response to the long list of complaints about police misconduct towards the young men, and the various internal reports and investigations that the police had undertaken into these matters. Suddenly, in February 2013, having spent $3 million defending itself, Victoria Police settled before the trial began. The presiding judge, Justice Shane Marshall, observed that ‘the police commissioner is off the hook’. As part of the settlement, Victoria Police agreed to hold two inquiries, one into its cross-​cultural training and one into the way officers dealt with people they stopped in the street. The singling out of African migrants can be seen as part of an institutional approach by Victoria Police whereby racial profiling led to extra police attention to these migrants, which in turn reinforced negative racial stereotypes. Particular suspicions and perspectives, then, derived from the police’s racial profiling practices. For example, between 2007 and 2010, a Victoria Police training seminar, titled ‘African/​Sudanese Community Cross Cultural Advice’, advised that this group had been ‘typically inducted into a rebel army or warrior tribe as part of their teen years and consequently, develop a strong “warrior” ethic’, ‘will openly challenge anyone who threatens them regardless of potential consequence’, and that ‘despite not even knowing you, they may hate you’ (quoted in Green 2013). Such training, based on stereotypes rather than evidence, essentially assumed African migrants from refugee backgrounds would not be able to integrate smoothly into Australian society. This in turn led to racial profiling, which resulted in African migrants experiencing abuse from

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police. These stereotypes were also present in media coverage of Sudanese and South Sudanese migrants which placed them in the context of violence through discussions of war, genocide and child soldiers (Nolan, Farquharson, Marjoribanks and Muller 2014). Discussions of Sudanese people in the context of difficulties in Sudan position them as potentially damaged by their experiences prior to relocation, a damage which is seen as threatening to the civil peace in Australia. Discrimination has been shown to have measurable negative effects on people’s health, economic success, educational attainments and relations with various authorities and institutions, including police and the criminal justice system. In addition, discrimination has been shown to adversely affect subjective feelings of belonging and well-​being, with significant consequences for mental health, civic participation and social conduct (Gifford, Bakopanos, Kaplan and Correa-​Velez 2007). Indeed, one academic expert, Professor Yin Paradies, was retained by the applicants to give evidence on this issue of harm presented on the effects of racism on public health. In an address to the Law Institute of Victoria, Paradies stated that stress associated with being the target of racism had long-​term physiological and psychological effects which contributed to increased morbidity in a wide variety of ways, including changes in immune-​system and cardiovascular functions (Paradies 2013). Throughout the four years of the court case, and for several years before it, the issue of whether Sudanese people were ‘fitting in’ –​to paraphrase former immigration minister Andrews –​had received sustained attention in the news media.

Politics We have suggested that, because police were key sources for information and were racially profiling Sudanese youth as particularly problematic, media had reported a disproportionate amount on perceived Sudanese violence and crime. This was evident in the coverage of the death in late 2007 of 19-​year-​ old Sudanese student Mr Liep Gony, who was fatally bashed by two ‘white’ men at a railway station in the Melbourne suburb of Noble Park. When the story first broke, the media inaccurately reported that Mr Gony had been murdered by members of a Sudanese gang. This story of Sudanese violence was mobilized by the then-​minister for immigration, Mr Kevin Andrews, who made a public statement commenting on Mr Gony’s death. Even though it was two ‘white’ men who were eventually charged with Mr Gony’s murder, Mr Andrews commented that some immigrant groups ‘don’t seem to be settling and adjusting into the Australian life as quickly as we would hope’. He then announced a cut from 70 per cent to 30 per cent in the share of humanitarian visas that were to go to Africans, many of whom were refugees

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from war in Sudan. Police racial profiling shaped media discourses around the Sudanese, which were further reinforced by politicians. Sudanese and South Sudanese migrants, which the police’s own statistics showed were less likely to be arrested than other groups, were singled out as problematic Others in Australia. Andrews’s comments and the subsequent reduction in the share of humanitarian visas going to Africans had a disproportionately negative impact on the Sudanese community. He was speaking in the midst of an Australian federal election campaign that was being conducted in a febrile political atmosphere where issues of race, immigration and asylum seekers were being ventilated in sometimes extreme and discriminatory terms. Consequently, this and subsequent statements by Andrews reverberated throughout the Australian community and played into a wider political narrative in which refugees and asylum seekers were being portrayed as a threat to national security and civil peace.

Discussion and Conclusion Police institutional practices around racial profiling, media institutional practices around sourcing, and political opportunism have worked together in Australia to place Sudanese and South Sudanese migrants as problematic others to an imagined ‘white’ Australia (cf. Hage 1998). Media discourses of nation and violence, largely reliant on police and government sources, intersected and raised questions about whether we (implicitly ‘white’) Australians should allow Sudanese (implicitly ‘black’) migrants to come here, due to their (apparently embodied) inability to ‘integrate’ within what is positioned as a pre-​existing ‘Australian way of life’. In this regard, the combined coverage of issues around nation, violence and life in Sudan created a particular representation of Sudanese people that portrayed them as ‘different’ and as the ‘outsider other’ in contrast to the normalized ‘white’ majority who ‘belong’ in this national space. In this way, and without being overtly racist, the ‘subtler, flexibly managed and locally contingent discussion of problems’ (Simmons and Lecouteur 2008) that is evident in media representations of Sudanese people served to create a continuing concern about protection of the national space. The outcome for Sudanese and South Sudanese Australians is a life context where they have been negatively singled out for no real reason, affecting their lives on a daily basis. It is sobering to reflect on how powerful institutions in a mature and stable democracy such as Australia can so comprehensively fail to uphold standards of integrity and competence which the principles of the social contract require of them. Here, the police, the media and a senior federal minister all failed these standards in one way or another. In the end it was an appeal to the judiciary, and as a consequence of the resilience of the young Sudanese

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men who had been prepared to take a stand and the work of the community lawyers who represented them, that highlighted the abuse of civil liberties that had occurred. It is also sobering to reflect on how difficult it is for a newly arrived community with little English and no access to the platforms of the media to make their voices heard in defence of their liberties and communal reputation. They are at the mercy of those who do have the privilege of the platforms, and when that privilege is abused, the victims have limited effective means of redress. What this case highlighted was not only the vulnerability of those with limited voice to the experience of discrimination and racial harassment but also the way in which such practices occur in a context shaped by the terms selected by the media for their portrayal.

References Anyanwu, J. C. 2009. ‘Socioeconomic Benefits of Migration: African Migrants in Australia and Media Representation’. Paper presented at the ANZCA Conference, 2009, Brisbane, Australia. Baak, M. 2011. ‘Murder, Community Talk and Belonging: An Exploration of Sudanese Community Responses to Murder in Australia’. African Identities 9, no. 4:  417–​34. doi:10.1080/​14725843.2011.614415 Commission, V. H. R. a. E. O. 2008. Rights of Passage: The Experiences of Australian-​Sudanese Young People. Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission. https://​ www.humanrightscommission.vic.gov.au/​home/​our-​resources-​and-​publications/​ reports/​item/​163-​rights-​of-​passage-​the-​experiences-​of-​australian-​sudanese-​young-​ people-​dec-​2008. Accessed May 2017. Cottle, S. 2000. ‘Media Research and Ethnic Minorities:  Mapping the Field’. In Ethnic Minorities And The Media:  Changing Cultural Boundaries, edited by S. Cottle, 1–​ 30. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Crimes Act, § S456AA sub-​para (1). 1958. Cuneen, C. 2012. Second Report of Professor Chris Cuneen. VIC 969/​2010. Duff, A. 2006. The Needs of Young People Living in Flemington, North Melbourne, Kensington and Ascot Vale. Melbourne, Victoria:  Mooney Valley City Council. https://​www.google. com.au/​url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0ahUKEwjFjO29iY7 ZAhUY5rwKHaOwDD4QFggmMAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.communitylaw. org.au%2Fflemingtonkensington%2Fcb_​pages%2Fimages%2FFinal%2520Flemin gton%2520report%2520Cou.doc&usg=AOvVaw2Tp8jNTBdDtAZ9bEaKnpHL. Accessed May 2017. Flemington & Kensington Community Legal Centre. 2013. Racial Profiling in Victoria: Submission to Victoria Police. Retrieved from http://​www.communitylaw.org.au/​ flemingtonkensington/​cb_​pages/​files/​Victoria%20Police%20Inquiry%20ABL%20 FKCLC%20Submission.pdf. Gatt, K. 2011. ‘Sudanese Refugees in Victoria:  An Analysis of Their Treatment by the Australian Government’. International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice 35, no. 3: 207–​19. doi:10.1080/​01924036.2011.591904 Gifford, S. M., C. Bakopanos, I. Kaplan and I. Correa-​ Velez. 2007. ‘Meaning or Measurement? Researching the Social Contexts of Health and Settlement among

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Newly-​Arrived Refugee Youth in Melbourne, Australia’. Journal of Refugee Studies 20, no. 3: 414–​40. Gordon, I. 2012. Statistical Commentary on Federal Court proceeding NO VID 969 of 2010. Flemington & Kensington Legal Centre. Communitylaw.org. http://​www.community law.org.au/​flemingtonkensington/​cb_​pages/​race_​discrimination_​case_​documents. php. Accessed May 2017. Green, M. 2013. ‘The Long Road to Change’. Right Now Magazine, November. Communitylaw.org. http://​www.communitylaw.org.au/​flemingtonkensington/​cb_​ pages/​files/​Long%20Road%20to%20Change%20-​%20Softcopy.pdf. Accessed May 2017. Hage, G. 1998. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy and a Multicultural Society. Sydney: Pluto Press. Haile-​Michael Ors v Konstantinidis, the Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police, the State of Victoria & Ors, Federal Court proceeding number VID 969 of 2010 C.F.R. 2010. Hanson-​ Easey, S., and M.  Augoustinos. 2011. ‘Complaining about Humanitarian Refugees:  The Role of Sympathy Talk in the Design of Complaints on Talkback Radio’. Discourse & Communication 5, no. 3: 247–​71. KhosraviNik, M. 2009. ‘The Representation of Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Immigrants in British Newspapers during the Balkan Conflict (1999) and the British General Election (2005)’. Discourse & Society 20, no. 4: 477–​98. Lynn, N., and S. Lea. 2003. ‘ “A Phantom Menace and the New Apartheid”: The Social Construction of Asylum-​Seekers in the United Kingdom’. Discourse & Society 14, no. 4: 425–​52. Noble, G. 2008. ‘ “Where the Bloody Hell Are We?” Multicultural Manners in a World of Hyperdiversity’. In Lines in the Sand: The Cronulla Riots, Multiculturalism And National Belonging, edited by G. Noble, 1–​22. Sydney, NSW: Federation Press. Nolan, D., K. Farquharson, T. Marjoribanks and D. Muller. 2014. The AuSud Media Project 2011–​2013 Final Report. University of Melbourne. http://​arts.unimelb.edu.au/​_​_​data/​ assets/​pdf_​file/​0006/​1760163/​Report_​AuSud_​Media_​Project2014.pdf. Accessed May 2017. Nolan, D., K. Farquharson, V. Politoff and T. Marjoribanks. 2011. ‘Mediated Multiculturalism: Newspaper Representations of Sudanese Migrants in Australia;. Journal of Intercultural Studies 32, no. 6: 655–​71. Oakes, D. 2012. ‘African Youth Crime Concern’. The Age, 20 August. http://​www.theage. com.au/​victoria/​african-​youth-​crime-​concern-​20120819-​24glt.html. Accessed 5 February 2018. Paradies, Y. 2013. ‘Racism, Racial Profiling and Health’. Paper presented at the Public Forum 2013: After the Race Discrimination Case: Proceedings of the 2013 Flemington and Kensington Community Legal Centre Public Forum. Poynting, S. 2006. ‘What Caused the Cronulla Riot?’ Race and Class 48, no. 1: 85–​92. Racial Discrimination Act. The Federal Register of Legislation § para 9 sub-​para 1, Part II Stat. 1975. Richards, I., K. Bowd and K. Green. 2007. ‘Reporting Diversity: Journalism in Multicultural Australia’. Paper presented at the 2007 IAMCR Conference, Media, Communication, Information:  Celebrating 50 Years of Theories and Practice (Paris, France, 23–​25 July 2007). Saxton, A. 2003. ‘ “I Certainly Don’t Want People Like That Here”:  The Discursive Construction of “Asylum Seekers” ’. Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy 109, no. 1: 109–​20.

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Simmons, K., and A. Lecouteur. 2008. ‘Modern Racism in the Media: Constructions of “the Possibility of Change” in Accounts of Two Australian Riots’. Discourse & Society 19, no. 5: 667–​87. Strike Force Neil. 2006. Cronulla Riots: Review of the Police Response, Report and Recommendations. Sydney: NSW Police. ‘Victoria Police Suspended for Racist Incident’. 2013. Nine News. http://​www.9news.com. au/​national/​2013/​06/​26/​10/​19/​no-​place-​in-​vic-​for-​racist-​cops-​ken-​lay. Accessed 26 June 2013. Victorian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. 2008. Rights of Passage: The Experience of Australian Sudanese Young People. https://​www.humanrightscommission. vic.gov.au/ ​ h ome/ ​ o ur- ​ resources- ​ a nd- ​ p ublications/ ​ reports/ ​ i tem/ ​ 1 63- ​ r ights- ​ o f-​ passage-​the-​experiences-​of-​australian-​sudanese-​young-​people-​dec-​2008. Accessed 5 February 2018. Waters, J. 2016. ‘Secret Police Operation “Targeted” African-​ Australians’. ABC, 30 December 2013. http://​www.abc.net.au/​news/​2013-​03-​08/​secret-​police-​operation-​ targeted-​african-​australians/​4561566. Accessed May 2017. Windle, J. 2008. ‘The Racialisation of African Youth in Australia’. Social Identities 14, no. 5: 553–​66. doi:10.1080/​13504630802343382.

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Chapter 7 CONSTRUCTING THE HEROIC OTHER AND ‘THEY ALWAYS ASKED ABOUT AFRICA, THEY NEVER ASKED ABOUT ME’: THREE SCREEN REPRESENTATIONS OF SUDANESE AUSTRALIANS Paola Bilbrough

Introduction In mid-​2015 a television advertisement for Western Sydney University (WSU) entitled ‘Deng Thiak Adut Unlimited’ (Morrison 2015) went viral on YouTube, and eponymous star Deng Adut received extensive media attention, with one article claiming, ‘This extraordinary and moving ad for an Australian university is like nothing you’ve ever seen before’ (Thomsen 2015). The focus of the advertisement and subsequent media coverage was Adut’s trajectory from child soldier and refugee to successful Sydney lawyer (see Thomsen 2015; Mottram 2015; Dapin 2016). The advertisement resulted in Adut giving an Australia day address in Sydney the following year, and to date ‘Deng Thiak Adut Unlimited’ has garnered over 2.5 million views. Two other ‘Unlimited’ advertisements featuring WSU alumni were released simultaneously with the same soundtrack. However, to date neither has had even a quarter of the views of ‘Deng Thiak Adut Unlimited’. From one perspective, ‘Unlimited’ is simply a universal story of loss, courage and redemption: the advertisement is a reconstruction of aspects of Adut’s life, which evokes a Hollywood tear-​jerker in both narrative structure and production values. Discussing production choices in Reality Television (RTV), Laura Grindstaff (2002, 260) has commented on the influence of ‘journalistic notions of what constitutes a good story, a dramatic event, or a compelling performance’. ‘Unlimited’ delivers all of this in less than one and half

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minutes. However, given the government’s treatment of asylum seekers and a lack of ethnic diversity on Australian screens, the popularity of ‘Unlimited’ may also be partly due to the novelty of a Sudanese Australian from a refugee background starring in an advertisement. While this was a first for Australian advertising, a prequel of sorts was the RTV show Living with the Enemy: Episode 3: Immigration (SBS 2014). In each episode of the six-​part documentary series, participants, whose lifestyles and beliefs contradict each other’s, spend 10 days living together. Immigration features Abraham Nouk, a Sudanese-​born slam poet, and Nick Folke, a white, self-​described ‘race realist’ who is opposed to African immigration to Australia. A decade ago these two screen representations would have been unthinkable. In 2007, when the murder of student Liep Gony by two white Australians was initially blamed on Sudanese Australian gang violence, the trope of the young Sudanese Australian man as a gang member irrevocably entered the Australian media zeitgeist. A body of research (Due 2008; Windle 2008; Gatt 2011; Nolan and Farquharson et  al. 2011; Nunn 2012; Ndhlovu 2013)  has evidenced the way the Australian media has represented people from a Sudanese background as a threatening cultural ‘Other’, who do not fit in with ‘normative conceptions of Australian identity’ (Ndhlovu 2013, 2). As such the representations of Abraham Nouk in Living with the Enemy and Deng Adut in ‘Unlimited’ are of indisputable significance. As Ruby Hamad (2015) has noted, ‘When we see ourselves occupying space in the culture around us, it reinforces our own humanity, our very existence’. Despite the positive visibility of the Sudanese Australian protagonist in ‘Unlimited’ and Immigration, I  propose that both representations evidence the emergence of another media trope:  that of the exemplary heroic Sudanese Australian, and that each screen text enacts a sophisticated variety of modern racism. I utilize Teun A van Dijk’s (1995) conceptualization of ‘modern’ racism as systemic discrimination expressed in multiple forms of action and discourse in everyday situations. This paradigm shifts the blame to the victim and ensures that those in power are represented as not only as ‘non-​racist but also as tolerant and helpful’ (van Dijk 1995, 9). Both protagonists are framed as heroic by an ability to transcend hardship and attain exemplary levels of achievement. In Abraham Nouk’s case this hardship is the racism he faces in Australian society, in Deng Adut’s it is his past as a child soldier. While ‘Unlimited’ emphasizes Australia’s largesse and benevolence towards refugees like Deng Adut, Immigration perpetrates a discourse that ‘attributes racism to the white lower class’ and ‘ideologies of the extreme Right’ (van Dijk 1995, 5). Simultaneously, the viewer is never able to forget the refugee-​ness of either protagonist –​despite the fact that each has lived in Australia for well over a decade. To some degree the hero trope takes its cue from filmic portrayals of the ‘Lost Boys of Sudan’, who are

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characterized by the ‘sufferings and resilience’ of the eponymous protagonists (Harris 2012, 36). It also encompasses a range of complex associations linked to the category ‘refugee’ in contemporary Australia. According to Clemence Due (2008, 2), the treatment of refugees is connected to the treatment of Aboriginals, the myth of terra nullius and the ‘imagining of Australia as normatively home to white people’. Arguably, the term ‘Sudanese’ refugee is associated with war and loss and notions of Africa as a ‘place of negatives, of difference, of darkness’ (Aidichie 2009). As such, to refer to someone (who may actually be a permanent resident or citizen) as a ‘refugee’ is a variety of ‘orientalism’ (Said 1978): a way of othering Australians who do not visibly belong to the ‘idea of whiteness, of white sameness, purity and homogeneity’ (Allen 2011, 3). This chapter is in two parts. In the first part I  discuss Living with the Enemy:  Episode 3:  Immigration (SBS 2014)  and ‘Deng Thiak Adut Unlimited’ (Morrison 2015). In the second part I turn to my own work as a collaborative documentary practitioner and use a critical ethnographic approach (Sauuko 2003; Soyini Madison 2011) to reflexively discuss the process of making ‘This Is Me: Agot Dell’ (Bilbrough dir. 2015), a three-​minute film commissioned by Centre for Multicultural Youth (CMY), and made partially in response to mainstream media portrayals of Sudanese Australians. From here on in my discussion, I use the first names of Deng Adut and Abraham Nouk, as this is how each man is referred to in the respective screen text they appear in. Similarly, in the second part of the chapter I use Agot Dell’s first name. Throughout the chapter I use the concept of ‘framing’ to discuss the construction of representations, which serve a particular ideological discourse. Framing has been used to theorize the representation of particular groups and political issues in the media by a range of scholars (see Ewart, Rane and Martincus 2014; Windle 2008; Norris, Just and Kern 2003). In the current discussion, I  utilize Robert M.  Entman’s (1993) definition of framing as ‘a way to describe the power of a communicating text’ (1993, 51). According to Entman, framing involves highlighting a particular issue or piece of information, first via selection of the issue, then by attributing importance to the issue via the way it is communicated. Frames typically ‘define problems’, ‘diagnose causes’, ‘make moral judgments’ and ‘suggest remedies’ (italics in original). A frame may include all or some of these functions (Entman 1993, 52). Additionally, I  draw on Trinh T.  Minh-​ha’s (2007) notion of ‘giver’ and ‘framer’, which emphasizes the potential for paternalism in documentary practice, even in representations, which may have advocacy aims: In affirming righteously that one opens a space for those who do not have a voice, one often forgets that the gaining of a voice happens within a framed

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context, and one tends to turn a blind eye to one’s privileged position as a ‘giver’ and a ‘framer’. (2007, 115)

Extending on Trinh’s point, I  suggest that intrinsic to ‘giving’ is an equal element of taking, and I examine the representational contradictions in each of the three screen texts in regards to Sudanese Australian identity and to racism through attention to ‘voice’ and ‘framing’. Before focusing on Immigration and ‘Unlimited’, I provide context via a brief discussion of diversity on Australian television, with reference to broader scholarship on RTV.

Part I: Constructing the Heroic Other Television representations: The pervasive ‘white imaginary’ It has been widely acknowledged that Australian television does not reflect the diverse ethnic make-​up of the population (Screen Australia 2016; Terzis 2016; Hamad 2016; Hamad 2014; Nunn 2012; Hague 1998). A recent report reveals that of the 199 dramas that aired between 2011 and 2015 only 18 per cent of main characters in the period were from non-​Anglo Celtic backgrounds, compared to 32 per cent of the population (Screen Australia 2016). An exception is the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), which is a national broadcaster of ‘multicultural and multilingual programming’ mandated to ‘reflect the multicultural nature of Australia’ (SBS n.d.). However, as Caitlin Nunn (2012, 185) has commented, SBS is ‘a marginal space within a wider media realm that persists in perpetuating a White Australian imaginary’. As such, the representations of diversity that are available risk gaining ‘an allegorical’ significance where individuals are believed to represent ‘a vast and presumably homogenous community’ (Shohat 1995, 169). People of colour have similarly been largely absent from Australian television advertising (Hamad 2015; Blight 2011; Higgs and Milner 2005). A survey in 2011 found that the average ratio of non-​Anglo-​Saxon people in television advertising created by 25 major brands was 5 per cent and that generally these characters were in the background (Blight 2011). However, the last year has seen a wave of advertising featuring Australians from diverse ethnic backgrounds in a range of ads for companies such as Officeworks (‘Let Their Amazing’ 2015); Australia Post (‘Change Our Tune’ 2016); The Meat and Livestock Corporation (‘You Never Lamb Alone’ 2016); and Australian Super (‘It Matters’ 2016). ‘Deng Thiak Adut Unlimited’ (2015) is part of this trend. In contrast to other forms of screen entertainment, RTV is more reflective of the actual population. It has been widely noted that RTV programmes are largely created through the interaction of people from a diverse range of

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backgrounds (Ouellette and Murray 2004; Orbe 2008; Griffen-​Foley, 2004), and as such, the genre ‘opens up new possibilities and limitations for representational politics’ (Ouellette and Murray 2004, 8). However, RTV programmes which rely on the clash of ‘cultural world views’ (Orbe 2008, 349) have also been widely critiqued as enabling viewers to voyeuristically project society’s ills –​sexism, homophobia and racism –​onto participants ‘who are held up to be the evil perpetrators of society’ (Jangodozinki 2003, 326). Blaming racism on individuals has been identified by van Dijk (1995) as one of modern racism’s strategies of denial. A focus on the beliefs and attitudes of individuals on RTV reassures viewers of their own open-​mindedness, while also obscuring the far more significant issue of systemic racism. Elizabeth R Schroeder (2006, 181) has argued that particular characters in MTV’s The Real World are framed as ‘objects of ridicule’ and perpetrators of discrimination, to ‘create a politically and ideologically scripted viewer response’. Similarly, Jon Kraszewski (2008, 208)  proposes that production practices in The Real World construct a reality where racism is a ‘phenomenon that is located within rural conservatives’. As a result MTV’s liberal audience is freed from ‘any implications in racism’. In an Australian context Ramesh Fernandez (2015) has critiqued SBS’s Go Back to Where You Came From (an RTV programme that replicated the refugee journey to Australia) as encouraging latte sipping lefties to feel good about themselves by watching rednecks on a leaky boat with paramedics trying to ‘recreate’ the ‘refugee experience’ –​without the reality of being locked away indefinitely in offshore Australian detention centres.

Fernandez (2015) has also pointed out that the refugee participants in Go Back to Where You Came From are not the main protagonists –​rather they are ‘realistic extras’ in white Australians’ ‘emotional journey’. The unlimited refugee: Immigration and ‘Deng Thiak Adut Unlimited’ Immigration and ‘Unlimited’ feature Sudanese Australians who are protagonists rather than ‘realistic extras’ (Fernandez 2015)  –​yet while Immigration ‘gives’ a voice to Abraham and voices Deng’s story, it is worth considering what is ‘taken’ in the process. In a discussion of media representations of Australians from diverse ethnic backgrounds, Hamad (2016) has observed that one of ‘society’s unspoken but firmly entrenched notions’ is that ‘white people are authorities who can objectively speak about all manner of topics, whereas the rest of us are subjective and can only speak from direct experience’. While RTV as a genre focuses on participants’ personal experience, and similarly

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biographical detail is intrinsic to all Western Sydney University’s alumni advertisements, both Abraham and Deng are undeniably confined to their identities as refugee-​others. Each text frames its subject with more than an echo of an orientalist discourse that has traditionally portrayed non-​Europeans as ‘childlike’ and “different” (Said 1978, 40). ‘Unlimited’ and Immigration evidence a contemporary spin on orientalism where hardship –​and evidence of ‘sufferings and resilience’ (Harris 2012) –​are valourized. The beginnings of ‘Unlimited’ and Immigration are remarkably similar, serving to frame Sudan and, more broadly, Africa as a place of ‘catastrophe’ (Aidichie 2009), and signalling each of the protagonist-​hero’s war-​torn backgrounds. Immigration provides context for the narrative with footage of tanks and soldiers in Sudan and civilians in a displaced person’s camp: a familiar news representation of a distant humanitarian crisis. A voice-​over provides the bare facts: ‘Sudan: home of Africa’s longest civil war’. In ‘Unlimited’, in a reconstruction of scenes from Deng’s childhood, tanks and soldiers storm a village, choreographed to a catchy sentimental pop song. This choice of soundtrack both trivializes and romanticizes the events depicted, highlighting the advertisement’s utilization of a civil war in Sudan as depoliticized entertainment for Western viewers. Deng is voiceless –​rather than telling, the story he is the story. Titles succinctly communicate the transformation of a helpless child at the mercy of a civil war into a humanitarian lawyer: At six Deng was taken from his mother. Marched 33 days to Ethiopia. Forced to fight the rebels. At twelve he was shot in the back. Smuggled out of Sudan. The UN got him out. Western Sydney took him in. At fifteen he taught himself to read. A free man he chose to live in his car. A law degree enables him to protect others. Deng continues to fight. (Morrison 2014)

Visual shorthand ensures Deng’s work as a lawyer is equated with his childhood experience and his status as refugee. A shot of Deng standing in court (after defending a man who may also be Sudanese Australian), his face suffused with emotion, fades to a flashback of his mother’s face. ‘Unlimited’ finishes with the title ‘Deng Thiak Adut’ Refugee’ with ‘Lawyer’ fading in to leave the viewer with ‘Refugee Lawyer’. A direct comparison can be made to the way Abraham is represented in Immigration. SBS promotion describes him in the following way (some of this information is also repeated in a voice-​over at the start of the programme): When Abraham arrived in Australia he knew two words of English, ‘yes’ and ‘no’, and he consistently confused the two of them. He is now the Slam Poet champion of Victoria and recently came third in the national titles. He is also

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about to have his second book published and perform at the Glastonbury festival. However, he still can’t get a job, is subjected to daily racism and won’t travel on the train after dark. (2014)

English language literacy –​an integral part of belonging to a normative white Australia –​and the speed at which both men excel, is highlighted in both representations. However, Abraham’s literary achievements are prefaced by details of a childlike confusion over ‘yes and ‘no’, and in ‘Unlimited’ the selection of particular details to communicate Adut’s story serves a paternalistic discourse that hinges on notions of Western charity and benevolence to the Other (cf. Hague 1998; Cole 2012). The statement ‘Western Sydney took him in’ is matched with an image of a young Deng cycling past picturesque suburban houses, a stark contrast to the shots of tanks and soldiers 30 seconds earlier. This is clearly a reference to the western suburbs (and, by extension, Western Sydney University) as a place of opportunity, generosity and safety. While there is a cathartic sense of relief that the protagonist is over the worst, the detail of the car has the ring of ‘poverty porn’ (Collin 2009) –​evidence of Deng’s ongoing ‘sufferings and resilience’ as an ex-​child soldier and refugee. It seems unlikely that anyone would choose to live in a car while studying, which ironically serves to contradict notions of western Sydney as generous. Trinh’s (2007, 115) paradigm of the ‘giver’ and the ‘framer’ provides a way to make critical sense of ‘Unlimited’: while the dominant narrative is one of giving: a celebration Deng’s success, the underpinning discourse is one of taking. ‘Unlimited’, a reconstruction of Deng Adut’s story and a commodification of his refugee experience, sits at an uneasy juncture of entertainment, education and commerce. In direct contrast to ‘Unlimited’, Abraham Nouk’s voice is central to Immigration and provides a wry, reflective commentary on Nick Folke’s explicitly racist views. After Abraham has visited Nick’s political party, who are united in their perspective on the dangers of African immigration, Abraham declares to a camera ‘diary’, ‘Well Australia, this man is a product of your negligence’. Yet despite the prioritization of Abraham’s voice, Immigration presents conflicting discourses about racism and Sudanese Australian identity. The programme itself perpetrates a form of oppression via the heroic role Abraham is forced to play. In the first few minutes of Immigration, the viewer is presented with a range of voices (all white Australian) describing or expressing racism towards Sudanese Australians, a production choice which frames Abraham as an outsider and a representative of a social issue. The viewer is told via voice-​over that, ‘for many Sudanese adjusting to life in Australia has been hard; as the community has grown so has the discrimination’. News footage from 2007

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follows this statement with part of a report on the murder of Liep Gony, which includes a quote from one of his killers: ‘these blacks are turning this town into the Bronx. I’m looking to kill the blacks’. This foregrounds the viewer’s introduction to Nick, who informs the camera, ‘Bringing in people from vastly different cultures, especially these African cultures that have come out of war zones, you’re only asking for trouble’. According to Nick, ‘African immigration to Australia has been a total disaster; higher welfare dependency, criminal behaviour, rape, anti-​social behaviour, like gangs and that sort of thing’. Expressed in the language of modern racism, Nick’s beliefs focus on the incompatibility of ‘African’ culture to the Australian way of life. A ‘redneck’ (Fernandez 2015)  and the Australian equivalent of a conservative southern ‘hick’ (Kraszerski 2008), Nick represents an exaggerated version of what has historically been the Australian media’s representation of Sudanese Australians. The sequencing of footage also implies a connection between Nick’s views and the violence of the men who murdered Liep Gony. While this framing is an acknowledgement that racism exists on a spectrum, a complex series of blame shifting is also evident: while Nick targets Sudanese immigrants as the source of violence, rather than the victims of violent discrimination, Immigration deflects attention from systemic racism, constructing individuals such as Nick and Gony’s killers as the problem. Immigration and ‘Unlimited’ have similar narrative symmetry, demonstrating a ‘drive to conform to ‘journalistic notions of what constitutes a good story’ (Grindstaff 2002, 260). Yet this symmetry also operates as a framing device that confines the protagonists to the category of refugee (albeit a heroic refugee who gives back to society). Deng’s refugee past is explicitly linked to his success as a lawyer for people from refugee backgrounds, while Abraham’s past finds expression in his slam poetry and mentoring of young people in hip-​hop emceeing for ‘Creative Rebellion Youth’, an organization he leads. Abe’s first words to the camera explicitly address the issue of society’s negative assumptions about Sudanese Australians: ‘I’ve experienced racism all my life. It’s always refugees, troubled background, war mentality. We’ve been judged on our past.’ This statement acts as a reflexive commentary on the footage of Sudan at the start of Immigration and sums up Nick’s perspective. It is also echoed in the final scene of Immigration where Abraham performs in a slam poetry event. During an argument leading up to the event, Nick tells Abraham, ‘Your people have no regard for human life, because you’re always fighting each other.’ Onstage Abraham gives an impassioned response via a poem, which begins, ‘you will never understand that I’m the product of a society that used its children as child soldiers’. While Abraham’s voice is in stark contrast to the voice-​less Sudanese in the news footage at the start of Immigration, the selection

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of the performance as a finale ensures that Abraham’s refugee background remains his salient characteristic. Arguably, systemic racism beyond the RTV production forces Abraham into the position of hero-​exemplar. Appearing on Immigration would be a particularly heavy ‘burden of representation’ (Cottle 1997)  for any Sudanese Australian, and if Abraham were to display any of the aggression freely expressed by Nick, he would be at risk of letting down the entire African Australian community. Abraham’s role in Immigration might be understood as that of a social worker patiently trying to understand a difficult client –​in this case, two hate-​filled white men who, in an exaggerated example of the use of ‘reverse racism’ (van Dijk 1995), insist on their own victimhood. Typically, Abraham prefaces questions to Nick with a diplomatic ‘How do you feel?’ Seven minutes into the episode, after a racist tirade from Nick, he asks, ‘Do you feel a lot of Aussies feel the same way you feel but just don’t want to be frank about it?’ An outburst of emotion from Nick, which in its hypocrisy and hyperbole frames him as ‘an object of ridicule’ (Schroeder 2006, 181), provides Abraham with an opportunity to empathize. While resolutely unsympathetic to African refugees, Nick presents Abraham with a tiny ‘mamushka’ doll on the journey from Sydney to Melbourne and, holding back sobs, reveals that his mother was a Russian refugee. Abraham states to the camera, ‘To see Nick the way he was just shows how much alike we are. His fears are real and just the same as mine.’ When Abraham and Nick visit Nick’s ‘political mentor’, Drew Fraser (an American-​born professor who was sacked by Macquarie University for his racist views), Drew makes it clear that he believes that black people are violent and of lower intelligence than whites, who are an ‘endangered species’. Despite these neo-​Nazi articulations, Abraham points out calmly that Drew is as much of ‘an outsider’ as he is. Later, he confides to the camera, ‘That was very comical that a man of his age with his academic prestige would say such things’. Nick’s beliefs are framed as marginal throughout Immigration via a conspicuous lack of supporters in each scene. While Abraham’s family, friends and members of Creative Rebellion youth appear on the programme, Nick’s family is absent. At an Australia Day barbeque his handful of ‘friends’ (who may actually be neighbours) disagree with Nick’s views and are vocal in support of Abraham as a fellow Australian. When Nick makes a speech for the political party he leads, his audience of supporters is tiny. Similarly when Nick’s party stages a protest with placards linking asylum seekers with sexual predators, there are only a few protesters. These production choices further serve to frame racism as a problem of ignorant individuals rather than a systemic issue.

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Despite this framing, Immigration gives Nick a public platform for racist rhetoric. As Ghassan Hage (1998, 247)  has observed, ‘Violent racists are always a minority. However their breathing space is determined by the degree of ordinary ‘non-​violent’ racism a government and culture will allow.’ Nick and Drew are violent in speech, and the uninhibited expression of their views on television serves to validate their inherent belief in white supremacy. ‘Breathing space’ (Hage 1998, 247) is also given to racist discourse via the way Immigration seeks to answer Nick’s discriminatory statements. After visiting Abraham’s home in an inner-​city block of housing commission flats, Nick is even more certain of his victimhood as a white Australian. He refers to the residents of the flats (whom he assumes are all African) as ‘colonizers’ and accuses Abraham of being ‘on welfare’. The voice-​over on Immigration is quick to correct this idea, stating, ‘Abraham isn’t on welfare: he earns his living performing at events like the one tonight.’ This perpetrates a discourse of the deserving, hard-​working refugee/​immigrant who must prove that they are not a burden to the state. It seems unlikely that Abraham would consistently earn a living from poetry performances, just as it seems unlikely that studying law while living in a car would be a lifestyle choice. In any case, although Nick concedes that Abe could be ‘an agent of good’ for the Sudanese Australian community, at the end of Immigration his perspective on African immigration remains unchanged. Ultimately, Abraham’s role is reminiscent of Audre Lorde’s famous comment that ‘Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity […] The oppressors maintain their position and evade responsibility for their own actions’ (1984, 115).

Part II: ‘They Always Asked Me about Africa, They Never Asked about Me’ ‘This Is Me:  Agot Dell’ is a three-​and-​a-half-​minute collaborative film that I was commissioned to make for CMY, a non-​profit organization that provides services and advocacy for young refugee and migrant background people. Agot Dell identifies as Sudanese Australian and wanted to make something that explored her experience of belonging, while critiquing mainstream media perceptions of Sudanese Australian identity. After we completed the film, Agot and I co-​wrote and presented a paper for the 2016 Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM) conference. The following discussion, which draws on this paper, presents a partial answer to the representational concerns raised in the first part of the chapter. Before focusing on ‘This Is Me’, I briefly contextualize my practice with reference to documentary scholarship and contemporary ethnographic approaches to media/​art.

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The narrative of ‘This Is Me’ demonstrates the ‘contradictions and inconsistencies’ in media representations (Nolan and Burgin et  al. 2016, 61), not only in terms of ideological discourses but also in relation to the unpredictability of human emotions and the balancing of ethical and aesthetic considerations in documentary practice. The question of what a practitioner’s responsibility might be in terms of representing a participant’s story and image has been widely discussed in documentary scholarship (Aufderheide 2012; Nichols 2010, 1991; Aufderheide, Jaszi and Chandra 2009; Chapman 2009; Pryluck 2005; Plantiga 2008; Ruby 2005, 2000; Pryluck 2005 (1976)). David MacDougall (1998, 38)  has observed that representation itself is a ‘presumptuous act’, and that ‘by freezing life, every film to some degree offends against the complexity of people and the destiny that awaits them’. Although it is impossible to predict the exact outcome of a project, collaborative practices can go some way to mitigating the danger of ‘freezing’ people in ways they may not have knowingly selected themselves. Increasingly, media and arts practitioners have adopted collaborative, ethnographic methods of working with specific communities underpinned by diverse aesthetic, social and political concerns (Hjorth and Sharp 2014), key tenets of an ethnographic approach are the ‘reflexive negotiation of self, power, labour and participation’ (Hjorth and Sharp 2014, 128). ‘This Is Me’ is part of a growing body of work where arts/​ media practitioners and scholars have collaborated with members of the Sudanese Australian community on screen projects, enabling individuals to actively voice their own stories rather than being the object of stories (see Batalibasi 2016; Bilbrough 2010; Bilbrough 2013; Harris; 2012; Nunn 2012). Drawing on the work of film-​maker-​anthropologist Jean Rouch, Harris (2012) has coined the term ‘ethnocinema’ to describe a film-​making practice which prioritizes social concerns and where respect and mutuality between filmmaker and participants is paramount. Similarly, my own documentary work and scholarship (Bilbrough 2013)  has focused on the importance the film-​ maker-​participant relationship and a process of shared creative input, which draws on Anne Oakley’s (1981, 49) notion of ‘no intimacy without reciprocity’ in regards to in-​depth personal interviews. Working with Agot as a documentary practitioner, my responsibility was to make a film which enabled the expression of Agot’s voice while paying rigorous attention to my role as a ‘framer’ (Trinh 2007, 115) and mediator. However, such concerns also had to be balanced with ‘journalistic notions of what constitutes a good story’ (Grindstaff’ 2002, 260). Although Agot was free to make a film on any topic, it was her own experience of being overdetermined by her African background that had the strongest pull. As such, while the content of ‘This Is Me’ appears to demonstrate Hamad’s

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(2016) criticism of people of colour being relegated to their ‘direct experience’ in the Australian media, it also points to the need for there to be ‘spaces to speak’ (Nunn 2012) for young Sudanese Australians. Critiquing the dominant discourse through talking about personal experience is an important part of ‘taking’ space. In previous films such as No One Eats Alone (Bilbrough 2010), I  have employed a poetic aesthetic to bypass reductive, allegorical representations of participants (Bilbrough 2013; 2014), a practice which draws upon Agnes Varda’s notion of poetry as opening ‘gates and windows’ for the audience ‘to leave the film and go and vagabond’ (von Boehm 2009, 5:56–​6:31). These ‘gates and windows’ are integral to the aims of ‘This Is Me’  –​Agot and I wanted there to be space for the viewer’s own imaginative and critical processes around issues of belonging and racism. The decision to film Agot in a tram from the 1930s, which is situated on a hillside far from the city, was a method of playing with and opening up meaning; a type of ‘relational aesthetics’ (Bourriard 1998), where the viewer ‘is a community to be collaborated with to create intersubjective encounters’ (Hjorth and Sharp 2014, 128). In ‘This Is Me’, Agot approaches the tram through a stretch of dry grass, which she has said reminded her of Kenya. Initially, she is a passenger on the tram, but by the end she is in the driver’s seat. At the beginning of the film-​making process, Agot was tentative about narrative and aesthetic decisions. However, she knew she wanted the film to have political weight, commenting, Instead of expecting young migrant people to be like Australians, this country needs to give them a chance to stand up and say what they want. Give them room to express who they are and be accepted here –​let them grow and add flavour to Australian society. (Bilbrough and Dell, 2016)

Agot’s interest in the issue of ‘fitting in’ and her feeling of frequently being on the ‘outer’ rather than being ‘part of things’ informed the film. At our initial meeting we had discussed the frequency with which people ask Agot where she is from. As Aniko Hatoss (2012) has noted, this banal, everyday variety of racism has the effect of making those on the receiving end feel like outsiders. This feeling had been a significant part of Agot’s experience at secondary school, where she said she had often felt overdefined by her African background. In the film, she observes, ‘They always asked me about Africa, they never asked about me’. A filming-​ making process, which prioritized feeling over logic, meant that the content of ‘This Is Me’ is somewhat contradictory. Despite Agot’s awareness of being constantly positioned as an outsider, we selected footage

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for the final film where Agot is asked where she is from and recollects the experience with warmth. In this case the question is from an elderly woman to whom Agot says hello on the tram. Perhaps what is important here is that Agot is already on the tram when the woman gets on: in a symbolic sense she is the local, welcoming the new arrival. It transpires that Agot and the woman have both spent a significant part of their lives in Kenya, and Agot reminds the woman of a happy period in her youth. Although the exchange starts with a query that emphasizes difference, it develops into a conversation about something shared: commonality and mutual acceptance is the point that Agot most wanted to make in ‘This Is Me’.

Conclusion In this chapter I  have discussed three disparate screen texts, connected via their representations of Sudanese Australians and complex discourses relating to identity, belonging and racism. I have proposed that ‘Unlimited’ and Immigration herald a new media trope –​that of the exemplary Sudanese Australian hero. An indisputably positive departure from earlier media representations of young Sudanese Australians as gang members, this trope is also of significance in a media realm that persists in perpetuating a ‘White Australian imaginary’ (Nunn 2012, 185). However, the respective framing of Deng Adut and Abraham Nouk in ‘Unlimited’ and Immigration evidences a variety of Orientalism (Said 1978)  that serves to overdetermine both men in terms of their ethnicity and refugee-​ness. The necessity for Sudanese Australians to possess exemplary, heroic levels of resilience and transcend hardship to demonstrate that they are not a burden to the state is an underpinning discourse in both texts. Each text also enacts colonialist oppression via production practices:  ‘Unlimited’ emphasizes Australian generosity and benevolence while commodifying Deng’s refugee experience for promotional purposes, and Immigration inadvertently validates white privilege through giving ‘breathing space’ (Hage 1998) to the expression of racial hatred. ‘This Is Me:  Agot Dell’ was made collaboratively with Agot Dell, as a response to reductive representations of Sudanese Australians and an awareness of wanting to create space for the viewer’s imaginative and critical processes around issues of belonging and racism. Agot voices the difficulty of being overdefined as African and ignored as an individual. However, the film displays contradictions in terms of notions of racism, and, as such, rather than offering any definitive answers, reflects Agot’s belief (and hope) that people are curious rather than racist and require more opportunities to find out about one another. Although Agot directly challenges the way she has been overdefined by her ethnicity, ‘This Is Me’, like ‘Unlimited’ and

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Immigration, focuses on the ‘direct experiences’ (Hamad 2016) of its protagonist. While I am not refuting Hamad’s point that white people are able to speak about whatever they wish in the media (Nick Folke exemplifies this in Immigration), given the content of ‘This Is Me’ was Agot’s choice, I argue that it reflects a pressing need to illuminate and discoursively interrogate systemic, everyday racism both by those experiencing it, and by media-​makers. Concerns around belonging and identity were key for Agot while making ‘This Is Me’ and were the proverbial elephant in the room that had to be addressed before it was possible to discuss other topics. I  suggest therefore that it may be productive to see each of these three screen texts as part of a step towards a greater diversity of representations of Sudanese Australians, where eventually ethnic background and refugee-​ness is no longer the explicit or implicit focus of the story.

References Aidichie, C. 2009. ‘The Danger of the Single Story’. TED. https://​www.ted.com/​ talks/​chimamanda_​adichie_​the_​danger_​of_​a_​single_​story/​transcript?language=en. Accessed 25 September 2016. Allen, M. 2011. ‘Family Stories and “Race” in Australian History’. Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 7, no. 2. Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association. http://​ www.acrawsa.org.au/​files/​ejournalfiles/​173V7.2_​6.pdf. Accessed 10 October 2016. Aufderheide, P.  2012. ‘Perceived Ethical Conflicts in US Documentary Filmmaking:  A Field Report’. New Review of Film and Television Studies 10, no. 3: 362–​86. Bilbrough P. 2013. ‘Poetic Re-​presentation as Social Responsibility in a Collaborative Documentary’. a/​b: Auto/​Biography Studies 28, no. 2 (Fall):181–​91. ——— . 2014. ‘Opening Gates and Windows:  The Ethics and Aesthetics of Making a Documentary Poem’. Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, vol. 3, no. 3: 298–​313. Bilbrough, P., and A.  Dell. 2016. ‘They Always Asked about Africa, They Never Asked about Me’. Unpublished paper presented at the Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM) Conference, Melbourne. Blight, D. 2011. ‘Australian Advertising Fails to Recognize Ethnic Diversity’. AdNews, 4 November. http://​ w ww.adnews.com.au/​ a dnews/​ a ustralian-​ a dvertising-​ f ails-​ t o-​ recognise​ethnic-​diversity. Accessed 10 October 2016. Bourriaud, N. 1998. Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Les presses du reel. Cole, T. 2012. ‘The White Savior Industrial Complex’. The Atlantic. 21 March. http://​ www.theatlantic.com/​international/​archive/​2012/​03/​the-​white-​savior-​industrial-​ complex/​254843/​. Accessed 10 October 2016. Collin, M. 2009. ‘What Is “Poverty Porn” and Why Does It Matter for Development?’. Aid Thoughts, 1 July. http://​aidthoughts.org/​?p=69. Accessed 17 September 2016. Cottle, S. 1997. Television and Ethnic Minorities: Producers’ Perspectives: A Study of BBC In-​House, Independent and Cable TV Producers. London: Ashgate. Dapin, M. 2016. ‘Child Soldier Turned Blacktown Lawyer: Lunch with Deng Thiak Adut’. Sydney Morning Herald, 29 January. http://​www.smh.com.au/​nsw/​lunch-​ with-​deng-​ thiak-​adut-​20160128-​gmfy49.html. Accessed 1 August 2016.

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Nolan, D., A. Burgin, K. Farquharson and T. Marjoribanks. 2016. ‘Media and the Politics of Belonging: Sudanese Australians, Letters to the Editor and the New Integrationism’. Patterns of Prejudice 50, no. 3: 253–​75. Nolan, D., K. Farquharson, V. Politoff, and T. Marjoribanks. 2011. ‘Mediated Multiculturalism:  Newspaper Representation of Sudanese Migrants in Australia’. Journal of Intercultural Studies 32, no. 6: 655–​71. Norris, P., M. R. Just and M. Kern. 2003. Framing Terrorism: The News Media, the Government, and the Public. New York: Routledge. Orbe, M. 2008. ‘Representations of Race in Reality TV: Watch and Discuss’. Critical Studies in Media Communication 25, no. 4: 345–​52. Ouellette, L. 2010. ‘Reality TV Gives Back:  On the Civic Functions of Reality Entertainment’. Journal of Popular Film and Television 38, no. 2: 66–​71. Ouellette, L., and J. Hay 2008, Better Living through Reality TV:  Television and Post-​Welfare Citizenship. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Pryluck, C. 2005/​1976. ‘Ultimately We Are All Outsiders: The Ethics of Documentary Filming’. In New Challenges for Documentary, edited by A. Rosenthal and J. Corner, 194–​ 208. 2nd edn. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Rane, H., J. Ewart and J. Martincus. 2014. Media Framing of the Muslim World: Conflicts, Crises and Contexts. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave MacMillan. Ruby, J. 2000. Picturing Culture: Explorations of Film and Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —​—​—​. 2005. ‘The Ethics of Image Making or, “They’re Going to Put Me in the Movies. They’re Going to Make a Big Star out of Me…” ’ In New Challenges for Documentary, edited by in A. Rosenthal and J. Corner, 209–​19. 2nd edn. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Said, E. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon. Sauuko, 2003. Doing Research in Cultural Studies: An Introduction to Classical and New Methodological Approaches. London; Thousand Oaks, CA; New Delhi: Sage Publications. SBS (Special Broadcast Service). 2014. ‘Episode 3: Immigration’. 17 September. http://​ www.sbs.com.au/​programs/​article/​2014/​08/​20/​episode-​3-​immigration. Accessed 1 October 2016. —​ —​ —​ . n.d. ‘About Us’. n.d. http://​www.sbs.com.au/​aboutus/​faqs. Accessed 10 August 2016. Schroeder, E. R. 2006. ‘ “Sexual Racism” and Reality Television:  Privileging the White Male Prerogative on MTV’s The Real World’. In How Real Is Reality TV?:  Essays on Representation and Truth, edited by D. S. Escoffery, 180–​95. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 180–​95. Screen Australia. 2016. ‘Milestone Study of Diversity on Television Released’. https://​ www.screenaustralia.gov.au/​sa/​newsroom/​news/​2016/​mr-​160824-​study-​of-​diversity-​ on-​tv-​released. Accessed 1 November 2016. Shohat, E. 1995. ‘The Struggle over Representation: Casting, Coalitions and the Politics of Identification’. In Late Imperial Culture, edited by R. de la Campa, E. A. Kaplan and M. Sprinker, 166–​78. London: Verso. Soyini Madison, D. 2011. Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance. Los Angeles; London; New Delhi; Singapore; Washington, DC: Sage Publications. Terzis, G. 2016. ‘Comedy Is Kin, the Family Law and Diverse Television’. Metro Magazine: Media & Education Magazine, no. 189, 52–​57.

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Thomsen, S. 2015. ‘This Extraordinary Ad for an Australian University Is Like Nothing You’ve Ever Seen Before’. Business Insider Australia, 7 September. www.businessinsider. com.au. Accessed 10 September 2016. Trinh, T. M. 2007. ‘Vietnam/​USA Trinh T.  Minh-​ha in an interview’. Interview with Eva Hohenberger. In Truth or Dare:  Art and Documentary, edited by G. Pearce and C. McLaughlin, 105–​22. Bristol: Intellect Books. van Dijk, T.  A  1995. ‘Elite Discourse and the Reproduction of Racism’. In Hate Speech, edited by R. K. Slayden & D. Slayd, 1-​27. Newbury Park: Sage. Windle, J. 2008. ‘Racialisation of African Youth in Australia’. Social Identities 14, no. 5: 553–​66.

Videography Australia Post. 2016. ‘Change Our Tune’. YouTube. https://​www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=5BGgHdp_​iYo. Accessed 5 October 2016. Australian Super. 2016. ‘It Matters’. YouTube. https://​www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=T6t7DrkMq1A. Accessed 5 October 2016. Batalibasi, A., dir. 2016. ‘Lit’, a video projection with Nyawuda Chuol, West Projection Festival, Melbourne. Viewed 16 October 2016. See: http://​amiebatalibasi.com/​lit/​. Bilbrough, dir. 2015. ‘This Is Me: Agot Dell’. Centre for Multicultural Youth, Melbourne. https://​vimeo.com/​147534094. Accessed 5 October 2016. —​—​—​, dir. No One Eats Alone:  From Sudan to Melbourne. New Hope Foundation, Melbourne, DVD. The Meat and Livestock Corporation. 2016. ‘You’ll Never Lamb Alone’. https://​www. youtube.com/​watch?v=-​9Ka3a7cdYw. Accessed 5 October 2016. Morrison, J., dir. 2015. ‘Deng Thiak Adut Unlimited’. Finch/​ Western Sydney University. YouTube. https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=buA3tsGnp2s. Accessed 5 October 2016 SBS and Shine Australia. 2014. Living with the Enemy: Episode 3: Immigration. Television programme, Special Broadcast Service (SBS), Australia. Varda, A. 2009. ‘Agnes Varda on Poetry’. Interview by Felix von Boehm. cine-​fils magazine, September. YouTube, 1 February 2010. http://​www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=nrL8DGNyDhY. Accessed 7 July 2016.

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Part III SHIFTING THE POLITICS OF BELONGING: MEDIA INTERVENTIONS AND POSSIBILITIES FOR TRANSFORMATION

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Chapter 8 TOWARDS AN AUSTRALIAN FRAMEWORK FOR BEST PRACTICE IN REPORTING NEWS INVOLVING MUSLIMS AND ISLAM Jacqui Ewart and Mark Pearson

Overview of the Project/​Problem It is well established within the research that both in Australia and internationally there have been significant problems with news media coverage of Muslims (Saeed 2003, 2007; Manning 2003; Nacos and Torres-​Reyna 2003; Aly 2007; Manning 2006a, 2006b; Richardson 2001). Hussein Tahiri and Michele Grossman (2013) in their study of factors contributing to radicalization found that mainstream news media coverage of Muslims contributed to community tensions, social division and isolation. However, much less attention has been paid to ways in which the stereotypical and generalized reportage of Muslims can be addressed. There are three exceptions to this, including two reports and an edited handbook which tackled the issue from various perspectives. A report commissioned by the International Federation of Journalists entitled Getting the Facts Right: Reporting Ethnicity and Religion (Rupar 2012) identified the need for journalists to report factually and accurately, in particular on stories about acts of racism and intolerance, and when reporting stories that involve ethnic and religious groups. In addition, Verica Rupar (2012) identified that reports about tensions between communities should be covered sensitively, while avoiding negative stereotypical portrayals of members of religious groups. Importantly, they identified that news media reports about culturally and religious diverse groups should challenge those news sources who made intolerant remarks, and that journalists need to explore and challenge the assumptions that inspire such comments. The report called The Search for Common Ground: Muslims, non-​Muslims and the UK media, produced by the Greater

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London Authority (Greater London Authority 2007), provided a series of professional style and conduct guides for journalists reporting on stories involving Muslims, while also suggesting that news media personnel should review their coverage of stories involving Muslims. That report also advised news organizations to hire journalists of Muslim heritage. In the United States, in a project funded by the US Social Science Research Council, Lawrence Pintak and Stephen Franklin (2013) produced an edited digital handbook, Islam for Journalists:  A Primer on Covering Muslim Communities in America (Pintak and Franklin 2013). The edited compilation provided research and reporting techniques designed to facilitate more detailed and inclusive news media reportage of Muslims. The two reports and the handbook all emphasized the need for improved news media coverage of Muslims as well as the imperative for education and training for journalists covering such stories. In assessing the body of literature regarding the problematic nature of news media coverage of Muslims, it was considered that a project which explored why such coverage occurred through the eyes of those reporting on the particular stories was important, and that resources be produced to assist journalists to improve their knowledge and reporting practices in relation to and with respect to Muslims. This led to what has now become a three-​stage project funded by the Commonwealth of Australia Government, called the Reporting Islam project. Thus, the project, led by the authors, has focused on developing user-​friendly and readily accessible multimedia resources underpinned by research-​based evidence to help journalists more thoughtfully report stories about Islam and Muslims. A  2003 national survey (Dunn 2005) revealed 83 per cent of those surveyed acknowledged they knew little to nothing about Islam or Muslims. We believe that fair, ethical and accurate reporting on matters involving Islam and Muslim communities will help promote social cohesion and may assist in the reduction of community tensions. The three stages of the project include a scoping study (Stage One, the results of which we discuss in this chapter); a resource development and training stage (Stage Two),; and at the time of writing this chapter we have begun Stage Three involving the roll-​out of the training and resources nationally. In Stage Two we developed, trialled and evaluated best-​practice resources for journalists, journalism educators and journalism students. These resources include a mobile device application (app), a website, a reporting handbook and audiovisual materials. We also delivered training to journalists, journalism educators and journalism students in selected Australian capital cities and regional areas based around two key scenarios (a mosque development proposal and a terror arrest), and we evaluated that training. We explain Stage Two briefly in the conclusion to this chapter.

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Two significant aspects of our project have been the involvement of news media organizations and Muslims in the development of the resources, and in the delivery of the training to journalists, journalism students and journalism educators. To that end, an expert advisory panel has been a key component of our consultation and engagement strategy. This panel includes significant members of mainstream news media organizations in Australia, leaders of Australia’s Muslim communities, and national and international academic experts in the area of news media coverage of Muslims. The project has also employed Muslim media trainers to contribute to the training by explaining some of the basic principles of Islam and answering participants’ questions.

Methodology The first stage of the Reporting Islam project undertaken between mid-​2014 and mid-​2015 involved three aspects:  an international literature review; 29 interviews with journalists, editors, in-​house journalism trainers, journalism educators, police media staff, news organizations’ social media editors and Muslim community leaders; and two case studies of various news media coverage of issues pertinent to Muslims in Australia and elsewhere. In this chapter the focus is on the data from our interviews in which semi-​structured, conversational-​style interviews (Denzin and Lincoln 1994) were used to explore some of the key themes informing the approach to the Reporting Islam project. Those interviewed for the project included Muslims and non-​Muslims from Australia and New Zealand. Interviews were undertaken in-​person, by phone and by Skype in late 2014 and early 2015, and interviewees were chosen on a deliberative basis (Hampe 1997; Wimmer and Dominick 2006), where the authors tapped into their existing networks with journalists, journalism educators and Australia’s Muslim communities to find interviewees. We ensured a range of relevant interviewees were selected so that they were representative of those involved in reporting stories about Muslims, in the gatekeeping processes associated with news production and in educating future journalists. The project was granted ethical clearance by the authors’ university ethics committee, and interviewees were given the option to be identified or to remain confidential in respect to the use of their comments in publications. Most interviews took about one hour and were transcribed by a professional transcription service, following which we coded and categorized to identify themes that commonly arose in the interviews in addition to any themes or comments that were significant but not common. We used inductive coding (Joffe and Yardley 2003)  so that when new themes emerged in our interviews we were able to reflect those in the coding and categorization process. We also briefly cover in this chapter our approaches to identifying

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and embedding the research underpinning the resources we developed for journalists and students.

Data and Discussion From the interviews undertaken for this project a number of key themes emerged including the perceptions of our interviewees as to key issues with news media coverage of Muslims; why journalists used particular approaches to reporting on Muslims; and their suggestions of alternative approaches to reporting Muslims.

Problems and Pitfalls with News Media Coverage Interviewees largely agreed with the key research findings which identified that some mainstream news media represented Muslims in stereotypical and negative ways (Saeed 2003, 2007; Manning 2003; Nacos and Torres-​Reyna 2003; Aly 2007; Manning 2006a, 2006b; Richardson 2001). There were some additional sub-​themes in these categories such as the problematic use of images in broadcast, print and online news coverage involving Muslims, and the tendency of some news media to connect terrorism to the religion of Islam rather than to report it as a crime. However, some interviewees thought there were also positive instances of news media coverage of Islam and its adherents, although they cautioned that such stories could sometimes play into concerns non-​Muslims had about Muslims. For instance, one interviewee cautioned that stereotypical reporting was not the sole domain of the tabloid press: On the one hand you see very negative stereotypes. Some of the recent coverage that has appeared in the Daily Telegraph has chosen to go down that particular road […] The whole armoury of smear techniques that have been perfected against so-​called dole bludgers, against Aboriginals, and against pretty much every other ethnic, racial or social underclass that has ticked off the great unwashed over the last century or so […] Australia is every well versed in this type of thing, and we haven’t really got that much further than when The Bulletin had ‘Australia for the White Man’ on the cover. (Senior journalist, Canberra)

In addition, study participants identified that mainstream news media coverage was routinely negative in nature: It [news media coverage] is stereotypical, constant repetition of negative portrayal of Islam as inherently violent and advocates extremism, Islam advocates incompatible values with those of democracy, Muslims are a threat, Muslims

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are violent, Muslims need to be policed. Of course, it’s almost constant, with exceptions. There is an exception to the norm. The norm is negative reporting. (Mohamad Abdalla, associate professor, National Centre of Excellence for Islamic Studies)

A journalist we interviewed elaborated on this point further: Yes is the short answer. There are aspects of media coverage of Islamic communities that are problematic and do exacerbate tensions. I think there’s probably a bit of recent evidence of that which we’ve reported on as well which has increased, or Muslim communities have reported that they’ve experienced an increase in hate speech and harassment. And I think there are, at least partially that’s a result of reporting on the Muslim community particularly centred around ISIS at the moment which is hot news obviously and Muslim individuals in New Zealand who have identified with ISIS. (Journalist, New Zealand)

Some of those interviewed felt journalists should spend time with Muslims to acquire an awareness of the effects of their approaches to such coverage. There was a strong perception that mainstream news media tended to report Australia’s very diverse communities in ways that negated the diversity of those communities. For example, Usually the reporting on Islam, or when the media calls somebody a Muslim, everything is bracketed in that one word, and they fail to take into account that it encompasses a huge range of people who are politically different, who are geographically different, who belong to different countries, who are ethnically different, racially they are different. For example you have Arab Muslims, Pakistani Muslims, you have Indian Muslims, then you have Muslims in Indonesia and Malaysia and Middle East. They are all different from one another –​their politics, their social status, their economic status. One does not necessarily relate to the other. I might not have anything in common with an Arab Muslim, except being called a Muslim. So that is one thing, but when you bracket it and just sweep it as something as ‘this is what Islamic people are doing or Muslim people are doing’, then it is not relevant to the people but they might react defensively to that. (Rukhsana Aslam, journalist and PhD candidate, New Zealand)

Another issue that arose frequently in the course of our interviews was that mainstream news media stories contained a lack of detail and that could be problematic, particularly in relation to stories about Muslims. One interviewee identified how stories that jumped to unsubstantiated conclusions were

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a problem, while another said that detail and fact checks were often absent from these types of news stories: So it’s hard to I’d say give a more balanced approach but that’s not really how I see it because what we are doing is we’re reporting on facts, we’re not embellishing in any way, but I do think it has a really dramatic impact on the way people see the religion because they do see it as overall negative. They can’t see any positive in what they’re hearing. (Senior radio news director, Sydney)

Study participants’ reflections on the problematic nature of some mainstream news media coverage closely mirrored the key issues identified in the body of research. This included the stereotyping of Muslims in some mainstream news media coverage and the negative nature of that coverage. Language usage Study participants believed that the type of language used by some news media outlets could cause community tensions, particularly words such as ‘Islamists’, ‘jihadist’ and ‘terrorist’. While some of our interviewees had put mechanisms in place, such as ensuring correct terminology was used, to ensure they did not conflate Islam with violence, others felt more guidance was needed in the workplace about these matters. For example, This morning, in the news, they used ‘Islamic State jihadists’, they always associate the Islamic State with jihadists and the term ‘Caliphate’. Also, that is used out of context and inappropriately because it doesn’t mean what Islamic State refers to. (Mohamad Abdalla, associate professor, National Centre of Excellence for Islamic Studies)

However, several journalists pointed out that radio and television hard news stories had associated time constraints that meant providing background information and nuanced detail was difficult. One interviewee said that some news workers were unable to determine the difference between sectarian conflicts because of the lack of knowledge the reporters had about Muslims and Islamic countries: For me, I think the biggest issue is often a lack of context among the audience in terms of understanding many of the nuances, both in terms of some of the issues around Islam and the Muslim community, different parts of that community, different sects within Islam. […] And so we’re sometimes not doing anything to improve the audience’s understanding of those issues, and at worst

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sometimes simplifying to a point where many people in the audience would have a very hard time understanding, and making generalizations and things like that that are unhelpful. (Senior television executive and former foreign correspondent who reported on the Palestinian intifada)

Another reporter thought that journalists needed to understand the context in which particular events occurred because of the potential sensitivities to communities. She gave the following example: I worked for BBC World Service in London. I’ve seen it happening over there. There was a community hall. It went on sale. There was a Muslim group who wanted to buy the land, and there was an Indian group, and the BBC made it or turned it into a religious dispute, whereas it was not, it was a community dispute because they were both contenders, for whoever pays more would get the property. (Rukhsana Aslam, journalist and PhD candidate, New Zealand)

An associated issue was the use of images in various news media, specifically images that did not match the content of news stories. In addition, interviewees mentioned the use of images that were inflammatory such as flag burning. The issue of conflict emerged within the social and political contexts of reportage. The emphasis on conflict in stories about Muslims and Islam was viewed as being related to the existing news media environment in Australia, with some interviewees explaining that approaches to reporting these issues by tabloid news media were a survival strategy for these types of news media in a declining market. At the end of the day they want to shift newspapers and we were very conscious of that. So, yeah, tabloid news, so there’s one thing, it’s about the language they use but it’s also about the conclusions they’re willing to jump to and not exercise due restraint. (Charles Morton, Victoria Police media spokesperson.)

Interviewees identified that they were sometimes constrained in their ability to report stories because of production factors. In particular some news formats limited their ability to provide background and context.

Current Journalistic Approaches to News Media Coverage Interviewees provided considerable insights into why mainstream news reportage of Muslims was often approached in stereotypical and negative ways. They identified a range of underlying and contributing factors that influenced approaches to news media coverage including newsroom culture and social

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and political environments. An associated issue that emerged was that of entrenched newsroom cultures and their potentially negative influences on young journalists. For example, reporters who were new to the industry were often inculcated into mainstream newsrooms where stories about Muslims emphasized conflict as a news value or were approached in stereotypical ways. Some of our interviewees raised the issue that there was a dearth of mentoring opportunities for young reporters in mainstream newsrooms, and that this combined with the need to achieve long-​term cultural change in approaches to reporting stories about or involving Muslims. Along with newsroom culture there was the issue of the current news media environment. An associated matter was the existing fiscally constrained news media market, which some interviewees felt made it hard to promote change in reportage approaches. For one interviewee these factors, along with some of the aforementioned issues, combined to result in self-​censorship when it came to covering stories about Muslims because of a range of sensitivities including potential legal minefields. He explained, Well you know I wouldn’t search for ‘jihad’ on Google either. I’d be scared to. So I just think there’s censorship and surveillance that goes on, and I just don’t want to be on any lists. So I steer clear of it. And you know life’s short. I’ve got my interests, and other people are experts in it. And I think that the reporting on that issue really requires, it’s such a huge issue and it’s so complicated, and I think it’s reported so thinly that if, that I would only report on it if I, if I could say with some certainty that what I was saying was pretty accurate. And I don’t think that I could put together stuff in the time I’ve got available that would be accurate enough to be good enough for me. (Michael Smith, blogger, journalist and journalism educator)

Interviewees identified several factors that influenced their approaches to covering stories about Muslims. Newsroom cultures and the prioritization of conflict as the driving news value were key amongst these factors.

Outcomes and Impacts of Mainstream News Coverage of Islam and Muslims Our study participants showed a high-​level ability to reflect on their own practices and the implications of those practices, and we now explore their thoughts about the impacts and outcomes of that in relation to mainstream news media coverage of Muslims. There was considerable awareness amongst our interviewees of the potential effects of negative and stereotypical news media reportage and, alternatively, positive coverage about Muslims. They

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recognized that these impacts extended to the broader legislative, political and social environment. For example, I’ll be as honest and upfront as I can, the obvious upshot can be hatred. And that’s what we’ve most got to be aware of. It’s the hatred with the ill-​chosen word, or the ill-​chosen or lack of understanding of Islam v.  Muslim and all manner of different components. […] What we would push for mostly is to say check your facts and consider the explosive nature of what you’re doing. (Senior print news group trainer, Sydney)

Another study participant said the news media coverage that homogenized Muslims could alienate young Muslims: The Muslim youth –​especially if they have the Kiwi residency or if they are American citizens –​they consider themselves as belonging to that particular culture, so their identity is as much a Kiwi or a New Zealander, an Australian, or American or British, as anybody else is. But simply because they were born in a Muslim family, when you include them in the same boat, it alienates them, and that is something which creates that. Then they go out and they start questioning and asking, ‘Ok why am I still not accepted? I’ve been educated here, I was born here, but why am I still an Islamic person or a Muslim? Why am I not being considered? Is it because of my skin? Is it because of my colour? Is it because of my religion?’ And he might not be praying at all, or he might not be following any of those Islamic ideologies at his home, and might be totally secular in their thinking. But simply because he has been branded by the media and included in that same thing, that will provoke such reactions. (Rukhsana Aslam, journalist and PhD candidate, New Zealand)

Some of those who spoke to us felt that problematic coverage of stories involving Muslims contributed to their marginalization. An interviewee elaborated, And the media going out demonizing them, they’re not even consuming it. […] All it’s doing is alienating, or social stigma from the general population to Muslim people, when it’s by coming out and being all hawkish and, and draconian on how we need to lock these people away. (Marc Bryant, Mindframe National Media Initiative, Newcastle)

The issue of the demonization of Muslims was raised by several other interviewees, who felt that generalizations in news stories about Islam and its followers led to a dehumanization of Muslims. There were associated

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consequences such as a rise in anti-​Islamic sentiment coupled with reports of increased physical attacks against Muslims and Sikhs, the latter group sometimes being mistaken for Muslims. Additionally, populist approaches to news coverage about Muslims was identified by our study participants as contributing to the so-​called Islamic State’s recruitment tactics, as young Muslim men could be provoked to declare their faith in potentially destructive ways. For example, Because if these kids didn’t feel ostracized, marginalized and unlikely to get a fair go in Australian society before, they’d be pretty stupid not to feel that now. Because if you were a 16 or a 17 year old, a young Muslim man or even woman, and you picked up a copy of the Telegraph in which you were basically demonized and your family were demonized, your religious beliefs were demonized, you’re probably going to draw the conclusion that this is a big powerful Australian institution which is representative of the voice of a large number of Australian people, and this is how Australian people feel about you. (Senior journalist, Canberra)

Another journalist said that there were complexities and nuances involved in news media coverage of Muslims. She explained, There are aspects of media coverage of Islamic communities that are problematic and do exacerbate tensions. I think there’s probably a bit of recent evidence of that which we’ve reported on as well which has increased, or Muslim communities have reported that they’ve experienced an increase in hate speech and harassment. And I think […] at least partially that’s a result of reporting on the Muslim community particularly centred around ISIS at the moment which is hot news obviously and Muslim individuals in New Zealand who have identified with ISIS. (Journalist, New Zealand)

The importance of the news media’s role in normalizing the problems young Muslims encountered was raised by one of our interviewees who said that the stigma caused by some news reports led to tensions between Muslims and non-​Muslim communities. He explained, The […] young people will not be scared as such, but they would be angry, frustrated, annoyed, and the negative portrayal of Muslims further marginalizes them, and those who are extremely vulnerable among the young people become more frustrated, angry, especially if they are also not working and can’t find a job because they happen to be a Muslim. And unfortunately, that sometimes makes them susceptible to radical ideology. […] So, as the community generally, the

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community feels and sees the double standards in media reporting. (Mohamad Abdalla, associate professor, National Centre of Excellence for Islamic Studies)

There was a correlation between the issues raised by our interviewees and those identified by the international body of research in relation to how mainstream news media covered stories about or involving Muslims. This included the need for journalists to be more self-​aware of the broader impacts of their reporting practices and approaches and to engender change in some reporting practices. Some additional points emerged from our interviews, including the need for change in the culture of some mainstream newsrooms and the need for journalists to be aware that some aspects of their reporting could be to the benefit of the so-​called Islamic State.

Alternative Approaches to Reporting on Muslims Study participants had a range of opinions on how journalists might report on Muslims more constructively. They suggested these approaches could be used to prepare future journalists and to support journalism educators. For example, some suggested a focus upon critical thinking skills for journalists: I believe you have to teach them red flagging in their mind. [so that they can say] ‘No, hang on, I’m out of my depth here, what don’t I know, what do I need to think about?’ That sort of stuff. (Trainer and former editor in a major digital news group)

In addition, some interviewees suggested that training in the specifics about the religion of Islam was needed for journalists. For example, To make those kinds of decisions as an editor, a subeditor, a reporter, or a photographer, that needs training and sensitisation. (‘Maya’, Muslim journalist, Australia)

However, one interviewee pointed out that other religions were sometimes misreported and that therefore broader training about religion generally would help journalists: understanding religion, and not just concentrate on Muslims alone or Islam alone. There are other religious sensitivities that our newsrooms in Australia are ignorant of, reporters are ignorant of, and they often cross a boundary. (Freddie Cheah, wire agency sub-​editor, Sydney)

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For another study participant, face-​to-​face training of mainstream journalists was crucial. He elaborated, I’m saying you have to have the face-​to-​face training. You can have as much back up material as you like which is always good but you have to actually have the face-​to-​face training to enthuse them, to hook them, to get them involved, to get them excited. If you leave it to them –​you know, ‘Here’s some material, have a look at it in your own good time’, it will never happen with 90 per cent of them. There’ll be some who are keen. (Trainer and former editor in a major digital news group)

There was also a suggestion that reporters needed to change their mindset about the cultural diversity of Australia’s Muslims and that members of Australia’s Muslim communities should receive training about relationship building with journalists. One suggested, I would like to focus on the human aspect, so when you stop looking at the person in a dehumanized manner –​‘Islamist’ –​but look at them as a human being who has a different set of ideologies, who has a different way of life, who has a different way of presentation or carrying themselves in terms of dress or symbol, then probably I would have a little bit more tolerance for that. […] At the same time, such training or sensitisation should go two ways. It should go to the Muslim audience that the media is not your enemy, it can be your ally, or it is your ally. They can only prove it when they actually step forward to meet the Muslim audiences. (Rukhsana Aslam, journalist and PhD candidate, New Zealand)

However, a senior journalist suggested that those interested in informing journalists about the religion of Islam and its adherents might consider alternative approaches to getting their messages across. He elaborated, What you have to do is to look at ways of disseminating alternative information. And one of the reasons you’re seeing this almost spasm from newspapers of this nature is because they realise that, with the advent of the World Wide Web, they no longer have a monopoly on the public’s access to information, and it is possible for organisations to disseminate information in other means, by other means. (Senior journalist, Canberra)

Other study participants suggested dedicated resources should be made available to help journalists in their approaches to reporting Muslims. A journalism student suggested,

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Well, that’s where there should be some sort of resources available about, with advice on what to do. So they can make resources available on the ethical guidelines for reporting on that sort of story available to students. […] I think there should be specific guidelines […] because every race and every religion and culture has different concerns associated with them. (Jack Lawrie, journalism student, Brisbane)

Another study participant agreed that such resources would be valuable. She explained, I think any well prepared information on Muslim communities or overview type information [that] was accessible to reporters would be really useful. And I  think it’s also really useful to have an awareness of how previous reporting has impacted on those communities to get a better understanding of what your reporting’s going to do. I  think it’s something that we should have constant awareness of as journalists but often we don’t. (Journalist, New Zealand)

This chapter has focused on the analysis and findings of the interviews we undertook in the first stage of the Reporting Islam project. We now turn our attention to our conclusions and our framework for best practice in reporting news involving Muslims and Islam, including the practical solutions/​resources that have been developed since we began our project in the middle of 2014, informed by the research including the interview data set from which the above excerpts were extracted.

Conclusions Our interviews revealed the complexities and nuances that are associated with mainstream news media coverage of stories involving or about Muslims. A range of key themes emerged from these interviews that were reflected in the research findings into mainstream news media coverage of stories about or involving Muslims. While our interviewees identified a variety of approaches and attendant issues with mainstream news media coverage of stories about or involving Muslims, they also provided important insights into how journalists and news media might improve their approaches to reporting such stories. Our study participants acknowledged that a key factor in relation to journalists’ misreporting was their basic lack of knowledge about Islam and its adherents. Key amongst our study participants’ reflections were that specifically targeted resources and training would contribute to more inclusive news media coverage of Islam and Muslims, in the process helping diminish a key factor in the marginalization of Muslims in Australia and elsewhere in

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the world (Ewart et al. 2016). We also identified three international resources (Rupar 2012; Pintak and Franklin 2013; Greater London Authority 2007) that reinforced the need for the provision of resources and dedicated training to address problematic mainstream news media coverage of Muslims. The analysis of our interviews, the international body of literature and our case studies undertaken in the first stage of our project revealed a range of possible approaches that could be employed to address the problematic nature of some news media coverage. We have identified a range of key components of our Australian framework for best practice in reporting news involving Muslims and Islam, grounded in the literature and the 29 interviews reviewed above. Our best practice reporting framework is underpinned by some of the key elements of best practice and pedagogy identified by two major international studies and an edited primer for journalists which examined issues closely related to news coverage of Muslims and Islam (Rupar 2012; Pintak and Franklin 2013; Greater London Authority 2007). Our resources and training modules have identified and showcased illustrative examples of best practice and poor practice in reporting. The project resources have actively addressed concerns about ignorant and stereotypical coverage by including a range of basic information about Muslims and Islam showcasing the diversity of cultures, nationalities and practices. We have included a glossary of common terminologies associated with Islam that are frequently misused in the news media. In addition the resources and training modules include materials and training on the law and ethics of hate speech and discriminatory reporting. There is also a list of myths about Islam and Muslim people with explanatory notes which journalists and their sources might otherwise perpetuate. We have approached this project by encouraging news media organizations and journalism students to seek out opportunities for more positive and routine coverage of Islam and Muslim communities while also considering recruiting Muslims as journalists. Our approach to diversity focused on contextualizing news coverage of Muslims and Islam within the broader domain of inclusive reporting on race, religion and other matters of diversity. Part of this approach has involved ensuring the voices of Muslim people are included in our resources so that journalists and students can better understand the potential impacts of their reportage on social cohesion, the flow-​on effect of actual violence and harassment of Muslims, and the potential benefit to terrorist organizations like the so-​called Islamic State. The training modules developed for the project focus on breaking-​news scenarios involving Muslim people to help journalists ‘red flag’ the key ethical and cultural considerations to aid more informed reporting within deadline.

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The approach to training is to encourage ongoing dialogue between journalists and the diverse Muslim communities for routine news coverage and as sources for major stories. To that end we have designed our training modules to involve a Muslim trainer who discusses key aspects of the Islamic faith and the diversity of Australia’s Muslim population with training participants. In the second stage of our project we set about implementing this framework with our development of research-​based resources and training. In order to address the lack of knowledge some mainstream journalists have about Muslims and Islam, we developed a mobile device application (app), a website, a simple reporting handbook, audiovisual materials and two training packages based on common reporting scenarios that can created tension and conflict –​reporting a mosque proposal and reporting a terrorism arrest scenario. We have ensured our resources have included a strong digital and social media focus. During Stage Two of our project in 2015–​16 as well as developing these resources we also continued to refine them following training sessions with journalists, journalism students and journalism educators around Australia. At the time of writing this chapter we had rolled out our training packages and awareness of our resources to more than 200 journalists, journalism educators and journalism students in five Australian states and territories. Stage Three of the project in 2016–​17 was planned to refine and offer further and more extensive training of journalists, journalism students, journalism educators and a range of other people involved in storytelling around Australia. It is clear from our interviews in Stage One of the Reporting Islam project that some journalists are aware of their own lack of knowledge about Muslims and that there is a pressing need to address this issue. We believe our resources and training approach are unique within Australia and internationally. We were unable to identify any similar approaches to addressing the problems identified by the international body of research into news media coverage of Muslims and Islam. The next task is to analyse the data gathered in Stage Two of the project and report upon its outcomes in peer-​reviewed publications. The Reporting Islam project hopes to make an important contribution to social cohesion in Australia by providing training to journalists, journalism educators and journalism students so that they will be more informed when reporting on stories about Muslims. The range of resources produced in Stage Two of the project is designed to better equip the aforementioned groups to cover news about Muslims and their faith. Improvements in mainstream news media coverage of these issues should go some way towards improving social cohesion and reducing the feelings of isolation some Muslims experience when mistakes are made in mainstream news media reports.

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Acknowledgements This research was funded by the Commonwealth of Australia. Stage One of the Reporting Islam project was supported by a number of research assistants including Guy Healy.

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Chapter 9 CREATING MEDIA, CREATING BELONGING: YOUNG PEOPLE FROM REFUGEE BACKGROUNDS AND THE HOME LANDS PROJECT Raelene Wilding and Sandra Gifford

Introduction For young people from refugee backgrounds living in Australia, belonging is a complex and contentious issue. As permanent residents or citizens of Australia, they can lay claim to their formal right to belong to the nation. However, they also routinely encounter others within Australia who reject their claims to belong, usually because they look or sound ‘different’ (Fozdar and Hartley 2014). At the same time, they have been forcibly displaced from their countries of birth and are unlikely to be able to return, yet they remain connected to the people and places they left behind. Young people use a range of increasingly common communication technologies to keep in touch and engage with political events as well as with friends and family dispersed across the world (Wilding 2012; Gifford and Wilding 2013). This is a group for whom belonging is not produced through a simple convergence of geographic place, social group, national identity and sense of self. Rather, they live in one place while sustaining connections to other places, involving them in a complex process of creating what are necessarily contingent conditions of belonging. We designed the Home Lands project (2009–​13, supported by an ARC Linkage Project grant) with a team of partners (City of Melbourne, Cultural Development Network, Centre for Multicultural Youth, APC.au) in order to explore these processes of belonging. The central hypothesis that underpinned the project’s design was that young people from refugee backgrounds might have more positive settlement outcomes in Australia if they could be supported in their connections with ‘home’ outside of Australia. This approach explicitly challenges the prevailing assumptions underlying current models of successful

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settlement: that refugee settlement rests on building a new life in a new country (DIAC 2008; UNHCR 2012). The assumptions underpinning that approach do not deny the importance of maintaining ethnic and cultural ties and identities. However, they tend to articulate such identities as an important resource during early settlement that helps individuals adjust by acting as ‘a bridge between the old and the new’ (DIAC 2012, 4). In this respect, the prevailing model emphasizes the importance of settlers building their futures primarily by establishing ties and belongings to their new settlement country, simultaneously assuming a process of discarding the connections with past places of residence. The approach of the Home Lands project was based on an alternative assumption:  that the continuity of transnational family and community connections remains an important site of the exchange of intimacy, support and identities across distance, which persists long after migration (e.g. Baldassar et al. 2007; Wilding 2006). Moreover, the maintenance of ongoing ties with family and friends in home countries or refugee camps has been found to greatly assist with settlement in Australia (e.g. Gifford et al. 2009). Building on this knowledge, the model we adopted in Home Lands assumed that good settlement outcomes rest not so much on building a new life but rather enriching an existing life. We hypothesized that the process of coming to belong in Australia might be supported by the maintaining of existing ethnic and emotive ties in other places, albeit in new transnational forms. It is the emergence of new media and communication technologies that has rendered this possible. The mobile telephone, the Internet and a growing variety of social media and other platforms are providing people with unprecedented opportunities to sustain relationships that rely on only intermittent physical co-​presence (Baldassar et al. 2016). It is now possible for migrants and their non-​migrant kin and communities to sustain relationships through a range of synchronous and asynchronous social interactions, providing opportunities for complex relationships of support, conflict and identification across distance and national borders (e.g. Madianou and Miller 2012; Robertson et al. 2016). In what follows, we report on some of the key findings regarding belonging that emerged from the use of media to construct and convey identities and narratives in the Home Lands project. We begin by considering the meaning of ‘belonging’, before then discussing the Australian context of belonging for young people from refugee backgrounds. We then outline the Home Lands project, before presenting our findings on the transformations that resulted from the media production activities within the project. Our analysis of this data indicates that the youth participants were able to articulate more multifaceted claims of belonging after their participation in multimedia production and exhibition activities than was possible before.

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Belonging and the Nation The term ‘belonging’ is associated with experiences of ease and comfort in relation to a place and a social group, ‘a sense of accord with the various physical and social contexts in which our lives are lived out’ (Miller 2003, 220). We have this sense of belonging in places where and when we feel at ‘home’, the haven to which we routinely return and in which we feel most able to be ourselves (Goffman 1959). It is usually experienced as an unconscious part of our everyday lives, comprised of familiarity with our social and physical environment and an easy acceptance by those around us, signified in the facilitation of our everyday tasks and goals, and produced through our daily routines, practices and interactions (May 2013). While experienced as subjective affect, belonging is necessarily and inherently relational, a social status of acceptance that is most clearly felt in its absence, when our assumed right to occupy a particular place or to participate in a social context is challenged or rejected by others. National belonging is premised on a unity of place and society that provides the nation with its identity and form, its foundations of solidarity. However, recent transformations in both migration and new media have challenged this premise (Calhoun 2003; Vasta 2013). The contingency of belonging has been brought to the fore by mobile populations whose intersecting identities create complex arrangements of solidarity, conflict and dispersal that operate in transnational social fields and at the interstices of national societies (Basch et al. 1994; Ramji 2006; de Block and Buckingham 2007). The relationality of belonging is now quite clearly visible as a political process, in which some claims to belong are given greater legitimacy than others (Yuval-​Davis 2011). Settler societies such as Australia grapple with this process by asserting citizenship as the basis of national belonging. However, formal citizenship is not sufficient to prevent both migrants and the children of migrants having their claim to belong to the nation challenged in informal social interactions by a comment on their accent, appearance or name as being ‘not from here’, not part of the nation (Fozdar and Hartley 2014). Furthermore, even formal modes of belonging such as citizenship are also becoming increasingly contingent, with nations reserving the right to revoke citizenship under certain conditions, including when citizens have dual citizenship or have obtained citizenship after migration.

The Challenge of Belonging in the Australian Nation Australia’s immigration programme has historically assumed and expected new arrivals to settle and become a permanent part of the nation, to build a sense

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of belonging (Jupp 2007). This principle underpinned the White Australia Policy that dominated the first half of the twentieth century, which was based on the assumption that people who ‘looked’ alike would be more likely to be able to construct a shared national identity. It also underpinned the policies of assimilation, integration and multiculturalism, as increasingly diverse source countries comprised Australia’s immigration programme from the 1950s onwards. It has consistently provided the foundation of Australia’s capacity to rely on immigration for approximately half of its annual population growth (Jupp 2007). Upon entering the nation, it is assumed that migrants will make an effort to belong and thereby secure their place as citizens of Australia. For those arriving through the humanitarian settlement programme, a range of services are provided to support this process of integration, including English language classes, early settlement grants and assistance with housing and accessing health services, education and employment (DIAC 2011). Newly and recently arrived refugee background youth are a key group targeted by a range of programmes and services that aim to enable refugee settled to become independent and contribute to Australian society as soon as possible (CMY 2007, 2016; MYAN 2016). The success of Australia’s settlement strategies is evident in the high numbers of humanitarian entrants who apply for and are granted Australian citizenship. At the same time, the ‘gift’ of these services and of citizenship itself can also serve to reinforce the new arrival’s status as a ‘guest’, in contrast with those who assume ownership of the nation (Hage 1998, 2003). In return for the gift of a formal welcome and associated services, the new arrival is expected to offer expressions of gratitude, further reinforcing their status as guest and thus as subordinate to the giver of the gift (Pickering 2001). While the giver of the gift of settlement receives a reinforced sense of their own moral worthiness and right to belong (Yegenoglu 2003; Derrida 2000), the refugee settlers are limited to what Fozdar and Hartley (2014, 139) have termed ‘civic belonging’: Refugees tend to experience belonging in relation to their access to rights and services, implying that their relationship to the nation-​state is seen in civic or procedural terms. However there is also a strong desire to belong in a more emotional and culturally meaningful way, a desire which is blocked, according to the refugee participants’ accounts, by experiences of exclusion by the mainstream population and cultural differences. (Fozdar and Hartley 2014, 139)

Civic belonging is potentially inclusive, able to accommodate not only the native-​born but also new arrivals by emphasizing the formal claims to occupy a national space. However, it fails to provide the ontological security that

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comes from emotionally and culturally meaningful modes of belonging and social inclusion. Civic belonging remains subject to refusal by others whose claims to belong are based in histories that place particular ethnic, racial and other identities at the discursive core of the nation (Castles et al. 1988; Hage 1998, 2003). What is lacking from this form of belonging is a sense of recognition of the new arrival as being empowered to ‘worry’ about the nation or to assume their place within it as anything other than contingent (Hage 1998; Correa-​Velez et al. 2010; Shotter 1993). Those with access only to civic belonging must forever enact their belonging through the civic activities of daily life, continually responding to the capacity for others to reject their claims to belong. The associated requirement to demonstrate belonging is in distinct contrast with the assumed right to belong that migrants from refugee backgrounds are thought to have experienced in their country of birth prior to their forced migration. Fozdar and Hartley (2014) give this alternative mode of belonging, based on claims of shared ancestry and place of birth, the term ‘ethno belonging’. This term supports their argument that migrants and refugees are excluded from national belonging, because relying on common ancestral heritage as a requirement for belonging automatically discounts migrants from ever being able to access something other than civic belonging. Yet, what it suggests is that national belonging that exceeds ‘civic’ forms of belonging is necessarily and forever beyond the grasp of migrants and their children, including those from refugee backgrounds. This contradicts the evidence that people increasingly construct multiple, multiscalar and multifaceted modes of transnational belonging that span social groups and identities (e.g. Smith and Guarnizo 1998; Vertovec 2001; Levitt 2002; Salih 2003). In an age of migration, diversity and globalization, it is arguably necessary to imagine new ways of belonging and contributing to the nation that are not simply civic and that are more than a guest status, but without relying upon assumptions of shared ancestry as their foundation.

The Home Lands Project The Home Lands project commenced in 2009 as a collaboration between local government, non-​government organizations and researchers from two universities. The goal of the project was to use multimedia production and transnational collaborations to facilitate a mode of belonging to Australia that transcended national belonging by building on existing relations of belonging to places outside of Australia. Digital media were identified as necessary to this aim because of their key role in supporting transnational engagement:  they are accessible, affordable and enable people to attach to multiple places simultaneously. In addition, the young people participating

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in Home Lands were already engaged in mediated transnational social fields, using their smartphones and other devices to keep in touch through a range of platforms, including social media sites such as Facebook as well as email or text messages. The plan was to build on these existing competencies and practices to further develop their sense of belonging to Australia by facilitating their connections outside of Australia. Two groups of young participants from refugee backgrounds were recruited. In the first year, the project worked with 34 young Karen who had arrived from refugee camps on the Thai-​Burma border (see also Gifford and Wilding 2013). They participated in a community development process, which emphasized participation by all interested members of the community. Participants in this phase included Karen youth who were still at high school as well as some at university and others in the workforce. The young people were supported by a team of facilitators and media artists to create digital stories and a series of music videos, which were displayed online, distributed via a CD and DVD, and exhibited in a festival in the city, thereby accessing multiple audiences, including those residing in Australia, Thailand, Myanmar and elsewhere around the world. In the second year, a smaller group of eight young people from Hazara refugee backgrounds in Melbourne and three in Pakistan and Afghanistan were recruited to work with local Melbourne artists to create mini-​documentaries, photo essays and projections. The participants were slightly older than the Karen youth. Almost all attended university, and several were already making significant leadership contributions to the Hazara community in Melbourne. In this phase of the project, a cultural development process was adopted, which required a high level of commitment from participants and was aimed at building their artistic skills and competencies. Rather than a focus on open participation, this process instead emphasized improving the quality of the resulting work and encouraging participants to recognize themselves as practicing multimedia artists. Their resulting work was displayed in a film festival, during their own exhibition in a local youth arts space and in exhibitions hosted elsewhere in Melbourne and Sydney. (Videos, photographs and other materials produced in the both parts of the Home Lands project can be accessed at the following websites:  http://​bamiyarra.agarton.org/​category/​gallery/​videos/​; https://​homelandstv.wordpress.com/​; http://​www.culturaldevelopment.net. au/​projects/​home-​lands/​; https://​karentv.wordpress.com). The research methods relied on ethnographic observation of all stages of the project, including when the youth participants were provided with training in multimedia production, encouraged to collaborate with peers overseas and were exhibiting their work in Melbourne. Interviews were also conducted with the participants prior to their participation and again at the conclusion of

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each phase of the project. Interviews included questions about their sense of belonging in Australia, their thoughts about ‘home’ and ‘home lands’, their use of digital media for communication and their reflections on the future. In the discussion that follows, we draw primarily on the interview data to provide insight into the shifting perception of belonging and home over the course of the project. In particular, we explore how participants responded to interview questions about their sense of belonging in Australia and about where they felt ‘at home’, both before and after the media production process. We observed that a clear shift occurred over the course of the project, from assertions of a fairly limited sense of civic belonging towards modes of belonging that assumed a right to participate in the nation, but that also asserted a sense of belonging to transnational and global events, processes and identities.

Belonging and Home: Starting Points When we asked the young people about their sense of belonging at the start of the project, all participants were clear that they belonged in Australia and said that Australia was their home. They provided a range of explanations for this, all of which accorded with a sense of ‘civic belonging’. Some, for example, explained that Australia was the place where they belonged because it was the nation that had provided them with citizenship. As one young man explained, In terms of peace and education and opportunities, it is here in Australia […] and also because I am a citizen of Australia, obviously. (Hazara youth, male, #2)

Others emphasized that Australia was home because it was a safe haven, in stark contrast with the home that they and their families had fled. So, for example, one young man explained that he belonged in Australia because it was where he felt safe: This [Australia] I call home, I believe, you know, an individual calls home where he is safe, where he is mainly safe. (Karen youth, male, #15)

In statements such as these, Australia emerges as a default home –​the nation to belong to when no other nation is able or willing to offer safety. This does not mean that Australia is necessarily experienced as a familiar or even a homely space. It is a place that is ‘mainly safe’, rather than a place entirely without risk. Yet, it is at least safer than the place that has been abandoned because it became uninhabitable.

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For some participants, it was Australia’s capacity to offer a future that was significant in their sense of homely belonging. Education was particularly significant in providing the foundations of this sense of a future of possibilities. For example, one young woman replied, Australia is like a country that gives me hope, hope for me to study and become someone who can contribute to the world. (Hazara youth, female, #1)

For young people living in transit or in refugee camps, education is a rare and limited opportunity. In contrast, the young people who arrive in Australia find that their lives are structured by their participation in education. This provides them with an everyday space that envelopes them into routines and rhythms that become a familiar space of social engagement and support. Their sense of belonging in Australia is supported not only by an all-​encompassing involvement in the structures of education but also by a perception that the nation is investing in their capacities for future employment. For some participants, it was not so much their own opportunities or safety that provided the focus for their sense of belonging and home. Rather, they articulated their sense of belonging as being necessarily tied to the conditions and location of their family. As one young woman explained, Where your family is, that’s home, wherever your family is […] now my family is here [Australia], so I feel at home because my family is here. (Karen youth, female, #3)

The contingency of belonging is once again clear in this example. Anywhere could be home, as long as one’s family is located there. Family happens to be located in Australia, so Australia is home, but this could just as easily be any other place around the world. A  sense of belonging remains contingent on access to the family. Throughout these interviews, there is uniformly passive acceptance of Australia as a space to belong, at least for now. It is a place that offers safety, educational opportunities, peace, and it is where family are located. There is no strong affective claim to the nation as such. Rather, belonging remains contingent on the willingness of the Australian government to continue to offer these benefits and opportunities. There is no sense of a deeper connection to the place or its people, or an engagement with Australia as a unique place or society. Where this was articulated at all, it was in connection with places where the young people had lived in the past. The country of birth was remembered nostalgically as a space of a quiet and pleasurable childhood, for example. For some, it was the transit country that evoked a sense of loss, having provided

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an enjoyable social context in which others like them shared the highs and lows of a precarious life. For others, it was the daily rhythms of the refugee camp that provided the foundations of an embodied sense of belonging, as they recalled the ease with which visits could be made to family and friends. In these memories of belonging in another place, it was the relationality of everyday life that was emphasized rather than the contingency of belonging. The young people thus used these interviews to express two modes of belonging, each associated with a different part of their life story, and each positioned within a different place, society and nation. Their dual sense of belonging includes both a recognition of the formalities of belonging to Australia and an affective, embodied state of belonging that is linked more closely to the emotions, imagery, sights, sounds and smells of places that have been left behind, but that remain a significant part of their embodied experience. Their ‘being’ might be in Australia, but their ‘longing’ is elsewhere, located in an unattainable place of the past. There is a disjuncture between physical location and emotional attachment. This is quite unlike a transnational sense of belonging, in which it might be expected that people experience an affective connection to both places and potentially also to the spaces between. A transnational sense of belonging is not like that of a settled migrant, who ‘may be in one place, but long for another’ (Fozdar and Hartley 2014, 130). For transnational migrants, being in one place or the other is likely to be less significant, because the social field within which the self is maintained and constructed spans multiple places, the connection between places fusing the migrant’s disruption of being and longing back into a sense of belonging. One of the assumptions on which Home Lands was built was the notion that belonging ‘there’, to the places left behind, was likely to be felt more strongly than the sense of belonging ‘here’ in Australia. This was partly based on a sense that embodied ties to place, people and daily routines are difficult to shed, particularly when they are part of childhood socialization. It was also partly based on a sense of limited opportunities to create strong memories and connections to Australia. The young people had spent only a few years in Australia at the time of the interviews. In addition, many young people from refugee backgrounds face challenges in learning the language and attending school, and are likely to have limited opportunities to build friendship networks and social connections in Australia. But it was also partly the result of an assumption that belonging is more readily claimed by those who are ‘native-​ born’, who are able to lay claim to a common ancestry, culture, heritage and language that is taken for granted. This is in distinct contrast to the constant effort to understand, be understood and be accepted in a new nation soon after settlement. Through Home Lands, we invited the young people to engage in a

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programme of activities that sought to create stronger links between past and present, here and there, the familiar and the unfamiliar.

Making of Media, Making of Belonging The young people who participated in Home Lands described a diverse range of motivations for their participation. Some wanted to learn more about making movies; some were interested in making a link with the home country; others were following their friends or encouraged to join by family or their school. The motivations for their ongoing participation were linked to their sense that they had something to express, and that this was a means of expressing it. Through our ethnographic observations and our analysis of the media products they created, it became clear that the young people were using the project to grapple with their experience of coming to belong in a country that was not where they were born, or where their parents were born, yet was where they would be living for the foreseeable future. Interestingly, the young people in both phases of the project focused on the beach as an important site of belonging (see also Gifford and Wilding 2013; Lems et  al. 2015). The Karen youth created a music video called ‘See You at the Beach’, in which they created a romantic love narrative of two young men meeting and becoming friends with two young women while frolicking and lazing on a sandy beach. The Hazara youth created a micro-​documentary about the first Afghan lifesaver in Australia, the son of a man who had braved the seas to arrive in Australia by boat and had an ongoing terror of the water as a result. This short film suggested that the father’s terrors had created an opportunity for the son to embrace the ocean as a space of belonging to Australian beach culture. The beach has long been recognized as occupying a special place in the Australian imaginary, and the young people were clearly picking up on this theme (Lems et al. 2015; Morris 1992; Hartley and Green 2006; Moreton-​ Robinson and Nicoll 2006; Johns 2008; Perera 2009a, 2009b). Yet, they also appropriated this imaginary in their own image, reimagining the beach as a space in which they, too, belonged and had presence. In the Karen music video, the young people position non-​Anglo faces and bodies on the shoreline, reinforced by a Karen language pop song and a martial arts-​style dance performed on the beach. In the Hazara micro-​doc, the Afghan life saver is accompanied on the beach by his family, his mother dressed in hijab, the family barbecuing skewers of meat rather than the standard Australian sausages or prawns. In both of these films, the young people express a longing to create a space to belong in Australia, and enact that longing through their narratives and visual representations. They actively position themselves in prime symbolic territory in Australia, occupying a space in the national imaginary.

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Other spaces, too, were occupied by the young people through their film-​ making and cultural productions (see also Gifford and Wilding 2013). Digital stories created by the Karen positioned the young women in the urban spaces of Melbourne. A micro-​doc produced by young Hazara challenged the anti-​ asylum seeker discourses that they encountered in the media on the daily basis, presenting instead a story that journeys from persecution in one nation to contribution to another. In some cases, young people used their films to make links between the local and the global. One group of young men, for example, tapped into a more aggressive rap genre of music videos in order to position themselves as part of a global youth culture rather than being either ‘Karen’ or ‘Australian’ alone. There were also efforts to tie together the past and the present. For example, one young man filmed a return visit to the Thai-​ Burma border and turned it into a nostalgic film about the links between here and there. Rather than reflecting on the camps as a place to be left behind as quickly as possible, this film is instead a touching tribute to the grief of having lost a home and a community in order to resettle in Australia. The camp is identified here as a place of family and as a site of home. It is also produced as a place that can be accessed from Australia, generating links between here and there that can be sustained over time and through media as well as visits.

Belonging beyond the Nation? In our interviews at the end of the Home Lands production activities, the responses the young people gave to our questions about belonging and home had shifted. The disjuncture between ‘being’ in Australia and ‘longing’ for the home country that tended to occupy them before the project had been replaced by a new emphasis. Now, belonging had become something more open, more diverse, more multilayered and more complex. For example, one young man commented, I think for my future I choose Australia, yeah, I choose Australia for a living, but I’m looking forward to go Europe, places like Canada, the UK, USA, you know, places like that, and Norway. Yeah, also it’s a dream if I open a business in menswear, so I’m really interested going to Thailand and Vietnam to look for product and open a business and sell it here. (Karen youth, male, #8).

The use of the term ‘choose’ is significant here. Prior to their engagement in the Home Lands programmes, the responses the young people provided indicated no sense of ‘choice’. Rather, their belonging was a factor produced by circumstances, contingent on the ongoing access to safety, education and family that the nation happened to be providing for the moment. In contrast,

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the responses we received at the end of the programme indicated a capacity to engage in and influence the course of the future. Also significant is the global positioning that this young man asserts in his response. Not only is he assuming his right to belong in Australia, but he is also asserting his right to participate on a global stage, refusing to limit his transnational belonging to just Australia and his home country. Instead, he is imagining himself as a global citizen, able to belong in any country and capable of stitching together connections between multiple diverse places. For others, the capacity to join multiple locations was important, but remained focused on the links between their previous and their current home countries. For example, one young woman said, My goal is to work for the [home] country, but not to work for that country only […] I hopefully would be concentrated on Afghanistan, Australia and Pakistan, because the community of Australia needs us as well. (Hazara youth, female, #4)

For this young woman, ‘home’ was necessarily dispersed across at least three nations  –​the nation where she currently lives, the nation in which she was born but also the nation in which she spent much of her childhood while waiting for an opportunity for resettlement. In her imagining of the future, these three places are necessarily interlinked as the focus of any contributions she might be able to make. Her loyalties are dispersed across the multiple places that are meaningful to her. Also significant in this comment is her capacity to transcend the notion of the migrant as the ‘guest’ in the host nation. Instead of receiving the gift of citizenship, she asserts her right and responsibility to contribute to the community of Australia, a community that ‘needs us as well’. In this way, she signifies that belonging to Australia is no longer limited to formal belonging. She asserts her right to worry about the nation and its future. In comments such as these, the young people are indicating that they are now able to imagine and create a sense of transnational or possibly global belonging. By participating in transnational collaboration, and displaying their work in a global context, they are able to imagine themselves as belonging to something larger than the nation, without necessarily discarding their sense of belonging to (at least one) nation. It is possible that the young people might have developed this sense of transnational belonging as a result of spending an additional year in Australia, even without participation in Home Lands. However, when asked to reflect on their involvement in Home Lands, they all commented that it had empowered them in a range of ways. The participants in the second phase, the cultural development programme, were particularly clear that Home Lands had provided them with a new capacity to better understand and tell stories. It was

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this capacity for storytelling that they identified as the most important part of their involvement. As one young woman said, All the lessons you learnt, all the filming skills that we’ve learnt, and how to tell a story, I mean that always stays in your head, yeah. Even if you just want to tell a story to someone else verbally you probably could use those storytelling skills, especially if they’re not from your background. (Hazara youth, female, #5).

For some, this capacity to ‘speak’ and to enjoy the prospect of being ‘heard’ was particularly liberating (Dreher 2009). As one young man said, I was very secretive, not sharing a lot of information with everyone, then when I did the program and everything, I said to myself, ‘for how long you will be silent? How long you will just be keeping things to yourself ? If you have something, you’ve got to say it. (Hazara youth, male, #6)

One of the aspects of Home Lands that seemed particularly important in achieving this enhanced sense of being able to tell stories and be heard was the participation in public exhibitions in central Melbourne city locations. As one young man explained, Maybe because of the location, when you go there you just feel like this place belongs to you, and you feel more comfortable and close to the city, close to the train station […] it was the people, also the place. We were working there and there was a lot of audience, a lot of people, just random people just walk there and they look, they hear, they see our work, they come and talk. And that’s very amazing. (Hazara youth, male, # 2)

By having their stories heard and seen, the young people felt that they were able to take ownership of not just their narratives but also of the physical places and social contexts in which those stories were being displayed. The comment ‘you just feel like this place belongs to you’ points to a new form of belonging that exceeds the limits evident in the comments at the start of the project, where belonging was about simply ‘being’ in a place. Instead, this young man, and other participants like him, felt a new sense of comfort, familiarity and right to belong in inhabiting a city that had now become theirs. The audience were clearly important to this process, not just tolerating the presence of the young people and their exhibition but also engaging with them, looking at their stories and talking to them about their work. As Dreher (2010, 2012) has argued, belonging relies not just on the capacity to speak but also on the perception of having been heard. The combination of mass online

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distribution of their media products, as well as the public exhibitions in the city provided these young people with that perception of being listened to.

Conclusion Belonging operates on a number of levels, ranging from the formalized mode of civic belonging, to a more deeply embodied, naturalized mode of belonging that assumes the right to participate and be recognized as part of a place or a social group. This latter form of belonging has been described as ‘ethno belonging’ (Fozdar and Hartley 2014). However, ascribing more valued modes of belonging to an ethnic identity risks overlooking the possibility that belonging might be produced as affective and embodied over time, even in places where one is not ‘native born’ and in societies in which ethnic, cultural and linguistic backgrounds are diverse. It is necessary to make sense of the factors and conditions that provide the capacity to develop such a sense of belonging, particularly in a global context of increased migration and mobilities that require greater attention to alternative means of producing social solidarity that transcend the limitations of ethnic similarity. It is also necessary to acknowledge the new role that media are increasingly able to play in supporting new forms of belonging, not least because they are a highly accessible tool of both social interactions and public representations of self. The ability to use new media and the Internet in order to not only ‘speak’ but also to be ‘heard’ is particularly significant (Dreher 2012). The Home Lands project provided opportunities for young people to use media to tell stories, create songs and produce images that stitched together here and there, past and present, into a more unified space of belonging that was displayed on a public stage, both within and beyond their national homes. Importantly, digital media provided a platform to communicate these stories, songs and images to not only local and national but also transnational audiences. It was this access to an audience that helped downplay the contingency of belonging, while replacing it with a sense of relational belonging produced through artistic activities. The sense of belonging thus produced did not rely on a particular geographic place but rather mobilized media in producing an imaginary in which geographically and temporally dispersed experiences could be brought back into dialogue with each other. At the end of their participation in the project, the young people expressed a sense of belonging that was increasingly multifaceted. Their uses of digital media to speak multiple stories to diverse audiences reinforced their dispersal as a common experience from which new stories and new modes of belonging might emerge. The capacity to ‘speak’ is clearly an important component of this, and is something that is readily achieved by a community development

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process that encourages production of digital stories and other creative expressions. However, the capacity to speak is only part of the picture –​the sense of being heard is perhaps an even more crucial component of this process of establishing diverse modes of belonging (Dreher 2009, 2010, 2012). It is the sense of having a voice in public space that is critical to the transformative experience in which belonging is secured. Interestingly, the transnational practices of media production were less important to this process than anticipated. While the transnational collaborations did provide some interesting opportunities and challenges, the young people mostly saw them as inconvenient and overly complicated. At the same time, local, transnational and international audiences were clearly very important in enabling the youth participants to expand beyond the programmes themselves in order to engage with other audiences while they were testing out modes of identification that moved beyond assertions of the ‘good refugee’ or the good guest in the nation. In that respect, digital media were essential in providing opportunities for the music videos and nostalgic visions of home to be expressed in contexts where they would not undermine local acceptable representations of identity. Belonging was able to become diversified, targeted towards different audiences for different purposes. Belonging, whether formal or informal, subjective or objective, experienced at the micro level of everyday life or at the macro level of the nation and the world, is always layered and in flux. Although a difficult concept to neatly pin down, it is nonetheless vital to human well-​being, so fundamental that one of the ancient and enduring punishments is to be banished, thrown out, to not belong to anyone or anywhere, to be exiled. Yet, the context within which we live is always subject to change. Thus, for example, a natural disaster such as an earthquake or a cyclone can transform a homely space of belonging into something alien and uninhabitable. Similarly, the social or political foundations on which our right to belong is based might be wrenched away. This is clear in the example of civil war or genocide that renders national subjects into aliens, or in the laws that enable a state to withdraw citizenship and revoke passports for some who were previously members of the nation. This points to the fact that, even when an individual has long enjoyed a sense of belonging as an unquestioned, embodied and taken-​for-​granted immersion in their social world, the conditions of belonging remain contingent. Those from a migrant background are regularly reminded of this fact by others around them. Yet, these qualities of contingency and relationality that are at the heart of experiences of belonging are also a space of hope for the production of belonging in diverse societies of the future. By creating opportunities for relationality to flourish, and for multiple modes of belonging to coexist,

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the contingency of belonging arguably becomes less of a risk and more of an opportunity to create new modes of solidarity and new forms of home.

Acknowledgements This research was funded by a Linkage Project grant (LP0989149) from the Australian Research Council in partnership with the City of Melbourne and the Cultural Development Network, and in association with the Centre for Multicultural Youth and APC.au. We are grateful to the Karen and Hazara youth for their generous contributions to this research.

References Baldassar, L., C. Baldock and R. Wilding, R. 2007. Families Caring across Borders: Migration, Ageing and Transnational Caregiving. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Baldassar, L., M. Nedelcu, L. Merla and R. Wilding. 2016 ‘ICT-​Based Co-​presence in Transnational Families and Communities:  Challenging the Premise of Face-​to-​Face Proximity in Sustaining Relationships’. Global Networks 16, no. 2: 133–​44. Basch, L., N. Glick Schiller and C. Szanton Blanc. 1994. Nations Unbound. New York: Gordon and Breach. Calhoun, C. 2003. ‘ “Belonging” in the Cosmopolitan Imaginary’. Ethnicities 3, no. 4: 531–​68. Castles, S., B. Cope, M. Kalantzis and M. Morrissey. 1988. Mistaken Identity: Multiculturalism and the Demise of Nationalism in Australia. Sydney: Pluto Press. CMY (Centre for Multicultural Youth). 2007. Refugee Young People in Australia’s Settlement System. Report available at:  http://​www.cmy.net.au/​publications/​refugee-​young-​ people-​australias-​settlement-​system. Accessed 24 November 2016 —​—​—​. 2016. The People They Make Us Welcome: A Sense of Belonging for Newly Arrived Young People. Report available at: http://​www.cmy.net.au/​publications/​people-​they-​make-​us-​ welcome’. Accessed 24 November 2016. Correa-​Velez, I., S. Gifford and A. Barnett. 2010. ‘Longing to Belong:  Social Inclusion and Wellbeing among Youth with Refugee Backgrounds in the First Three Years in Melbourne, Australia’. Social Science and Medicine 71, no. 8: 1399–​1408. De Block, L., and D. Buckingham. 2007 Global Children, Global Media. Basingstroke: Palgrave Macmillan. Derrida, J. 2000. ‘Hostipitality’. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 5, no. 3: 3–​16. DIAC (Department of Immigration and Citizenship). 2008. New Beginnings: Supporting New Arrivals on Their Settlement Journey  –​2006–​07. Canberra:  Department of Immigration and Citizenship. —​—​—​. 2011. Humanitarian Settlement Services. Onshore Orientation Program. Canberra: Department of Immigration and Citizenship. —​—​—​. 2012. The Settlement Journey:  Strengthening Australia through Migration. Canberra: Department of Immigration and Citizenship. Dreher, T. 2009. ‘Listening across Difference:  Media and Multiculturalism beyond the Politics of Voice’. Continuum 23, no. 4: 445–​58.

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—​—​—​. 2010. ‘Speaking up or Being Heard? Community Media Interventions and the Politics of Listening’. Media, Culture and Society 32, no. 1: 1–​19 —​—​—​. 2012. ‘A Partial Promise of Voice? Digital Storytelling and the Limits of Listening’. Media International Australia February, 157–​66. Fozdar, F., and L. Hartley. 2014. ‘Civic and Ethno Belonging among Recent Refugees to Australia’. Journal of Refugee Studies 27, no. 1: 126–​44. Gifford, S., and R. Wilding. 2013. ‘Digital Escapes? ICTs, Settlement and Belonging among Karen Youth in Melbourne, Australia’. Journal of Refugee Studies 26, no. 4: 558–​75. Gifford, S., I. Correa-​Velez and R. Sampson, R. 2009. Good Starts for Recently Arrived Youth with Refugee Backgrounds: Promoting Wellbeing in the First Three Years of Settlement in Melbourne, Australia. Melbourne: La Trobe Refugee Research Centre, La Trobe University. Goffman, E. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Garden City. Hage, G. 1998. White Nation:  Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Annandale: Pluto Press. —​—​—​ . 2003. Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society. Annandale NSW: Pluto Press. Hartley, J., and J. Green. 2006. ‘The Public Sphere on the Beach.’ European Journal of Cultural Studies 9, no. 3: 341–​62. Johns, A. 2008. ‘White Tribe: Echoes of the Anzac Myth in Cronulla.’ Continuum 22, no. 1: 3–​16. Jupp, J. 2007. From White Australia to Woomera:  The Story of Australian Immigration. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lems, A., S. Gifford and R. Wilding. 2015. ‘New Myths of Oz: The Australian Beach and the Negotiation of National Belonging by Refugee Background Youth’. Continuum 30, no. 1: 32–​44. Levitt, P. 2002. ‘Variations in Transnational Belonging:  Lessons from Brazil and the Dominican Republic’. In Dual Nationality, Social Rights and Federal Citizenship in the US and Europe, edited by R. Hansen and P. Weil, 264–​92. New York: Berghahn Books. Madianou, M., and D.  Miller. 2012. Migration and New Media:  Transnational Families and Polymedia. London: Routledge. May, V. 2013. Connecting Self to Society: Belonging in a Changing World. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Miller, L. 2003. ‘Belonging to Country: A Philosophical Anthropology’. Journal of Australian Studies 27, no. 76: 215–​23. Moreton-​Robinson, A. and F. Nicoll. 2006. ‘We Shall Fight Them on the Beaches: Protesting Cultures of White Possession.’ Journal of Australian Studies 30, no. 89: 149–​60. Morris, Meaghan. 1992. ‘On the Beach’. In Cultural Studies, edited by L. Grossberg, C. Nelson and P. Treichler, 450–​78. New York: Routledge. MYAN (Multicultural Youth Advocacy Network). 2016. National Youth Settlement Framework: A National Framework for Supporting the Settlement of Young People from Refugee and Migrant Backgrounds in Australia. Centre for Multicultural Youth. http://​www.cmy.net.au/​ news-​media/​news/​australias-​first-​national-​youth-​settlement-​framework. Accessed 24 November 2016. Perera, S. 2009a. Australia and the Insular Imagination:  Beaches, Borders, Boats, and Bodies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. —​—​—​. 2009b. ‘White Shores of Longing:  “Impossible Subjects” and the Frontiers of Citizenship.’ Continuum 23, no. 5: 647–​62. Pickering, S. 2001. ‘Common Sense and Original Deviancy: News Discourses and Asylum Seekers in Australia.’ Journal of Refugee Studies 14, no. 2: 169–​86.

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Ramji, H. 2006. ‘British Indians “Returning Home”:  An Exploration of Transnational Belongings’. Sociology 40, no. 4: 645–​62. Robertson, Z., R. Wilding and A. Gifford. 2016. ‘Mediating the Family Imaginary: Young People Negotiating Absence in Transnational Refugee Families’. Global Networks 16, no. 2: 219–​36. Salih, R. 2003. Gender in Transnationalism: Home, Longing and Belonging Among Moroccan Migrant Women. London: Routledge. Shotter, J. 1993. Cultural Politics of Everyday Life: Social Constructionism, Rhetoric and Knowing of the Third Kind. Buckingham: Open University Press. Smith, M. P., and L. E. Guarnizo, eds. 1998. Transnationalism from Below. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers. UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). 2012. UNHCR Projected Global Resettlement Needs. 18th tripartite consultations on resettlement (Geneva 9–​11 July 2012). Geneva: UNHCR Resettlement Service Division of International Protection. Vasta, E. 2013. ‘Do We Need Social Cohesion in the 21st Century? Multiple Languages of Belonging in the Metropolis’. Journal of Intercultural Studies 34, no. 2: 196–​213. Vertovec, S. 2001. ‘Transnationalism and Identity’. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 27, no. 4: 573–​82. Wilding, R. 2006. ‘ “Virtual” Intimacies? Families Communicating across Transnational Contexts’. Global Networks 6, no. 2: 125–​42. —​—​—​. 2012. ‘Mediating Culture in Transnational Spaces: An Example of Young People from Refugee Backgrounds’. Continuum 26, no. 3: 501–​11. Yegenoglu, M. 2003. ‘Liberal Multiculturalism and the Ethics of Hospitality in the Age of Globalization’. Postmodern Culture 13, no. 2. http://​pmc.iath.virginia.edu/​issue.103/​ 13.2yegenoglu.html. Yuval-​Davis, N. 2011. The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations. London: Sage.

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Chapter 10 CREATING BELONGING: THE POSSIBILITIES AND LIMITATIONS OF AN ORGANIZATIONAL NEWS MEDIA INTERVENTION Timothy Marjoribanks, Denis Muller and Michael Gawenda

Introduction Media interventions aim to disrupt and reshape power relations between the media industry, including professional journalists, and other participants in society.1 The intervention that is the focus of this chapter, the AuSud media intervention, was designed to engage mainstream media and to influence the ways in which Sudanese Australian people are portrayed by the Australian media. As part of this process, the intervention’s objective was to enable Sudanese Australians to put forward their own voice in the media and to provide them with a means of being heard. It sought to do this by training Sudanese Australians in journalism, by helping them to create a website through which to disseminate their journalistic work and by providing them with connections into Australian institutions such as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and Victoria Police. In addition, by recruiting journalists from established and mainstream media institutions to help realize these objectives, the intervention aimed to transform mainstream media journalists’ perceptions and stereotypes of the Sudanese Australian community. The media intervention that is the focus of this chapter had two distinctive features. First, it aimed to provide professional journalistic training to members of a newly arrived community who were being harassed by institutions of power, notably the police, parliamentarians and the established media, in order to give them a voice. Second, it gave them direct links into those institutions that were doing them the most harm, the police and the media, to allow the community to be heard directly.

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Within this context, this chapter asks two main questions: What were the defining features and outcomes of the AuSud media intervention, and what challenges did the intervention face? What are the lessons of the AuSud media intervention for other interventions? This chapter argues that the AuSud media intervention engaged successfully to some extent with questions of voice and listening, but that it faced profound challenges around ownership and sustainability. These outcomes reveal the importance of analysing media interventions as sites of power and as processes that unfold over time.

Analysing Media Interventions In analysing the AuSud intervention, we adopt Kevin Howley’s definition of a media intervention as ‘activities and projects that secure, exercise, challenge, or acquire media power for tactical and strategic action’ (2013b, 5). Building on this, Nick Couldry argues, Studying ‘media intervention’ enriches our agendas of media research […] by offering a wider-​angled lens through which to see the important and, for so long, neglected attempts of people outside mainstream media to challenge these institutions’ power and develop media of their own. (2013, 398)

These ideas provide the conceptual starting point for this chapter, identifying that media interventions are specific and strategic activities that engage with media power (Howley, 2013a, 2013b; Dreher, 2010). They also seek ‘to expand, diversify or contest the range and types of representations available’ (Dreher, 2010, 87). Depending on their specific objectives, such interventions may be more or less disruptive of dominant media practices and may engage with issues ranging from media content and platforms through to content creation and production practices. They are underpinned by a perspective that current dominant media practices are problematic in some regard, and that there is a need for action, or intervention, to seek to influence or transform those practices. As Howley notes, such interventions can arise across the political spectrum, and while they will engage with content and technologies, they can also engage ‘with the rules and regulations, norms and practices that shape and define contemporary media culture’ (2013b, 9). In other words, media interventions have the potential to have far-​reaching and profound impacts on the media industry and media practice. At the same time, research has shown that media interventions face a range of challenges (Howley, 2013a). For this chapter, three such challenges are of particular importance. First, there is growing recognition that an intervention that provides an opportunity only for voice is inadequate. There is also a need

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to consider ways of promoting listening, to address what Tanja Dreher refers to as the ‘dilemma of inclusion’ (Dreher, 2010, 96). Writing in the context of community media interventions, Dreher makes a point which can be applied to media more broadly, namely that ‘the difficulty of producing media change […] is an inability or a refusal to listen on the part of both media producers and their assumed audiences’ (2010, 97). Crucially, a shift from a politics of voice to a politics of listening requires that dominant groups take responsibility for learning how to listen (Dreher, 2010, 99). As Penny O’Donnell, Justine Lloyd and Dreher argue (2009, 423), ‘attention to the politics of listening provides a means of moving beyond questions of speaking and voice to canvass issues of dialogue and meaningful interaction across difference and inequality’ (see also, O’Donnell, 2009). Second, questions arise around ownership and power within the context of the intervention itself. While interventions may seek to challenge power relations, they also have their own organizational power dynamics, and how these are managed and negotiated over time is critical to the overall outcome. As Howley writes (2013b, 10), ‘the concept of media intervention identifies and analyses the strategies and tactics of artists, political dissidents, minority groups, and “non-​professionals,” as well as those employed by dominant groups, such as commercial interests and the state’. In this context, the strategies and tactics adopted by media intervention initiatives engage with, and go on to produce, power relations, thereby either enabling or constraining the success of these initiatives. Third, significant challenges arise around how to sustain the impact and effects of an intervention over time, where resources including people, finances and infrastructure may be scarce (Howley, 2013a). The question of sustainability has been discussed in relation to a range of alternative and new media initiatives in the current period of media transformation (Coates Nee, 2013; Wall, 2015). This question is also of relevance for media interventions, which in many cases will have limited resources available. Questions of sustainability mean that media interventions need to consider operational and business models for the long term, questions which may not initially be of direct interest or within the skill set of participants who are more directly concerned with media content. Such issues point to the importance of planning around the need for such capabilities from the beginning of the intervention process.

The AuSud Media Intervention The AuSud media intervention, so named for meaning ‘lion’ in Arabic and for bringing together the words ‘Australian’ and ‘Sudanese’ (Marjoribanks et al., 2013, 61), was part of a research project that had four central goals:

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1. analyse media representations of Sudanese people in Australia over the period 2000–​2012 2. increase understandings of how media representations affect the everyday lives and experiences of Sudanese communities, including consideration of the communication needs of these communities, and the degree to which these communication needs are effectively met 3. develop media training and web-​based journalism produced by Sudanese people, in consultation with Sudanese people and with the involvement of industry partners and journalists 4. analyse the processes through which the training initiative was developed and implemented, its successes, challenges and overall outcomes. (Nolan et al., 2014, 11) While all of these objectives were vital, and have been discussed to varying extents elsewhere (Marjoribanks, Farquharson, Nolan and Gawenda, 2013; Nolan, Burgin, Farquharson and Marjoribanks, 2016; Nolan, Farquharson, Marjoribanks and Muller, 2014; Nolan, Farquharson, Politoff and Marjoribanks, 2011; Farquharson and Nolan, this volume; Muller et  al., this volume), the focus of this chapter is on goals three and four, the central components of the media intervention. The impetus for the development of the intervention was the observation that mainstream media coverage in Australia of the Sudanese Australian population dealt in negative stereotypes and unsupported assumptions, reproducing racist discourses, and marginalizing the voices of Sudanese Australian people. This resulted in the exclusion of Sudanese Australians and made it challenging for them to develop a sense of belonging (Due 2008; Marjoribanks et al., 2013; Nunn 2010). As discussed elsewhere in this volume, belonging is ‘about experiences of being part of the social fabric’ (Anthias, 2008, 8; see also Yuval-​Davis, 2011), with research on belonging focusing on describing forms of belonging, and on exploring the factors that promote or restrict belonging. In this regard, media are key sites for contests around belonging. While an ideal concerning media is that they will promote belonging, by providing a voice for all and a space for listening, in practice what they do is often more about exclusion and about denying belonging. This results in social exclusion. This was clearly the case for Sudanese Australian people living in Melbourne in the first two decades of the twenty-​first century, as the findings from the wider AuSud research project show (Nolan et  al., 2016; Farquharson and Nolan, this volume; Muller et al., this volume). The project, the media intervention and the associated research involved researchers in media, sociology and business from three universities in Melbourne, Australia, namely, The University of Melbourne, Swinburne

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University of Technology and La Trobe University, and two industry partners, ABC and AMES. The project participants were volunteers drawn from the Sudanese Australian community in Melbourne, while journalists and other professionals took on roles of educators and mentors. The material presented in this chapter is based on data including interviews with key informants, namely, program participants, program deliverers, project partners, training staff, mentors and researchers. These informants were asked to discuss issues relating to the goals of the intervention, its implementation and challenges. In addition, throughout the project, a participant-​observation study of the journalism training, and of the development of the website, was undertaken by the research team. This focused on how the training process developed over time, how the website was developed and used, how trainees and journalists interacted over time, and whether and how journalists’ involvement in the process influenced their professional work.

Implementing the Media Intervention The intervention, based on a training program that ran for three years, emerged from a pilot program that was run by the research team (Marjoribanks et al., 2013). The intervention was developed by the research team, in collaboration with industry partners, media professionals and members of the Sudanese Australian community, through a variety of means including a steering committee, workshops and through modifications based on learnings as the program developed over time (Marjoribanks et al., 2013). One of the central aims of the intervention was to have those who completed the training become contributors to Australia’s media by running and maintaining a Sudanese news website, ultimately named The Gazelle. It was envisaged that this process would emerge over three phases. Phase One would involve the creation of a private student training blog. Phase Two would involve the creation of a public AuSud Media Project blog, where students published their best work. Phase Three was to involve the development of the sustainable and public Sudanese-​run news website, The Gazelle. 2011: Cohort one2 The first cohort of participants in the training program consisted of 15 Sudanese Australians, made up of one person from North Sudan, two people from Darfur, and twelve people from South Sudan. Sixteen professional journalists from media in Melbourne volunteered as mentors. The 12-​week training program ran from September 2011 to November 2011, and was delivered by senior journalists. Program content included

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an analysis of news and the Australian media industry, and lessons were also delivered on news and feature writing, working with sources, media law and ethics, and editing and moderating. A learner guide was prepared for the trainees. All sessions were of four hours’ duration, except the last, which went for a full day. Lectures ran for two hours, and participants were then given assignments to complete, enabling them to put the lessons into practice. Participants then had a one-​hour period in which to write, with assistance from the research and training team and from the guest lecturers. A trainer guide was prepared to provide trainers with details of the scope of each topic. The trainer guide identified the key goal of the project: ‘Ultimately, our aim is to develop the students’ journalism to the point where they can run and manage their own quality group blog, and eventually a news website.’ On completion of the first training program, the training manager reviewed the program. He wrote, We previously discussed having, in the final session, the students work out a strategy for the future of the AuSud blog –​with an eye on the future goal of a website. I think we should still include this –​particularly as this group could (after completing the training) develop an editorial structure and self-​manage the current public AuSud blog. A Sudanese-​run and managed news website is the key aim of this project. (Training manager)

The objective was that these developments would take shape over the next two years of the intervention. 2012: Cohort two The second intake in 2012 consisted initially of 16 participants, one of whom had been in the first cohort. Of the thirteen trainees who ultimately completed the course, six came from South Sudan, three from Eritrea and Sudan, two from North Sudan, one from Darfur and one for whom no place of origin was recorded. Eighteen mentors, working journalists, also participated. A further 13 people, including journalists and AMES volunteers, made themselves available as English as a Second Language (ESL) tutors. Each trainee was assigned a tutor. There were 14 trainers, including all who had provided training in 2011, representing an important form of continuity. As with the first delivery of the course, the second delivery of the course occurred over a 12-​week semester, from February to May 2012. The sessions, which again lasted four hours, covered largely the same topics as in 2011, while also taking on board feedback from the previous delivery, and including

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the addition of a class on managing and editing the AuSud blog. Through this delivery of the course, the Sudanese news website was in development, while the blog was being used as a training platform. Curriculum was also developed for four master classes on the topics of television interviewing, radio interviewing, online moderation, and editorial policy and practice. The three-​hour master classes were open to all students who had attended either delivery of the training course. Ultimately, it was decided that the television training was too difficult and costly to implement, and that online moderation was covered to an adequate degree in the basic course. Three radio training sessions were held at a local community radio station. A private training blog was also set up to enable trainees to write their material. Each student had a dedicated area in the blog to post their articles, which could be viewed by other students, trainers, mentors and ESL tutors. Study tours of three local media organizations were also arranged, although only two proceeded. Seventy-​eight articles written by trainees were published on the private blog over the course of this second delivery session. Mentoring created a network for each trainee beyond the program into the media, creating potential opportunities for employment. Some students continued to meet with their mentor after the training had finished, but in other cases the mentor-​mentee relationship did not develop to any great extent, in part because some trainees did not want to impose on the mentor’s time and in part because some mentors were more proactive in encouraging contact. An ESL tutor was assigned to each student. As with the mentoring, in some cases, productive tutoring arrangements developed, but in other cases, it was less satisfying for the participants. 2013: Cohort three The third cohort, which participated in 2013, was made up of 21 participants, with 3 being new to the training program. In total, 32 individuals participated in the training across the three years. There was a shift in focus for this cohort to a newsroom format, with the goal of developing The Gazelle website, and with the related objective that project ownership would be transferred to the participants. Those who volunteered for membership of the steering committee that was established in 2013, as the self-​governing body for the management of The Gazelle website, consisted primarily of those who had participated over two or three deliveries. Eighteen mentors and four ESL tutors participated. The training program was again delivered over a 12-​week semester, from August to November 2013. The content for cohort three changed, with the focus shifting from journalism skills to a mixture of journalism, design, editing and moderating skills, and an introduction to management skills. This reflected

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the recognition among the research team and the training manager that, if the trainees were to take on ownership and management of The Gazelle, then a broader set of media and organizational skills was required. The refocusing of emphasis away from journalism to management created concern among participants. Many participants found the shift challenging because it required them to engage with issues with which they had little experience, and in some cases little interest, including fundraising, finances, organizational structuring and processes, and governance. This shift also created extra time demands, as there was much material to cover and new skills to begin to develop. As a result, the level of participation in the training sessions fell away, leaving a core group of eight participants. These participants showed determination to develop and maintain The Gazelle website and to make the most of the skills they had developed. However, with significant competing demands on their time, including paid employment, other studies and family obligations, participants found it increasingly difficult to commit to The Gazelle project the effort needed to sustain it without external support.

Challenges for the Intervention Four critical challenges for the intervention emerged over the three years of the program. Objectives and ownership A central objective of the project was to develop, in consultation with Sudanese people and with the involvement of industry partners and journalists, media training and web-​based journalism produced by Sudanese people to help meet their communication needs. Preliminary consultation occurred through round-​table discussions at which Sudanese Australians were invited to identify their objectives in participating in the project. Members of the media and of community-​based organizations, as well as researchers, also participated in the workshops. A senior media manager attended the first round table, held in April 2010. She recalled, The overwhelming message was that people wanted to vent their frustration at the way the media portrayed Sudanese Australians, the coverage of issues in Dandenong [a suburb of Melbourne] and the police. They wanted to talk about how to make that happen less. They wanted the media to have access to different stories that were more true to that culture and that group. And they saw this as a way to start that conversation rather than becoming their own website or channel. (Senior manager)

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Based on such insights, as well as on findings from their research about media coverage, the research team, having consulted the Sudanese community, developed a training program seeking to engage proactively with the communication needs of the Sudanese community. The research team considered that this would involve training the participants in the skills and methods of journalism, with a particular focus on news journalism. The training manager reflected, The project was to train people basically in print journalism, to give them the tools by which they could stake their position in Australia and understand the broader media and make contact with them through the mentoring program. It was primarily to give them the tools to enable them to speak on their own behalf. (Training manager)

This journalism training was to be supplemented by the development of a blog and then a website for distribution of content, with the objective that the website would become an ongoing and lively location for Sudanese Australian voices. While the research team had financial and human resources to invest in the development and implementation of the news site, it was anticipated that the Sudanese participants would take on ownership and management of the website over time. Ultimately, this did not happen. In relation to ownership and management of the production process and the news site, while some participants were interested in this aspect of news, it was not of interest to a sufficiently critical mass. Even for participants who were interested, the time required to undertake these activities on a voluntary basis meant that this was an unrealistic expectation. Related to this, the project did not have the funds to pay the participants for undertaking this work. While both the Sudanese Australian participants and the research team shared the objective of enabling the Sudanese community to develop a voice, and of creating a context in which others would listen to that voice, there was a difference of perspective on how this could be achieved. As the providers of the training, and as the acknowledged experts in media, the research team’s understanding prevailed. Asked whose program it was, the training manager reflected, It was our [the researchers’] program. The parameters were set clearly by us, and they [the participants] understood that. They weren’t resentful. In the main they appreciated what was being done. A high level of appreciation. But ownership –​I don’t think they could think about ownership. I tried when I came in to talk to them about what did they want. But I still brought my understanding of what I thought they should need. Because it was on the level of ‘we need to

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train you in Western-​style journalism, then this is the way you do it’. No ifs or buts. So I did it that way. (Training manager)

The differences in understandings of the objectives of the intervention were significant to the overall outcomes of the project, raising questions about how to devise objectives, what objectives to devise and who is to be involved in such developments. Building relationships An important feature of the program was the involvement of professional journalists as mentors. Efforts were made to match mentors and mentees to maximize the chance of the relationship flourishing. However, the results were mixed, and the training manager reflected on this: I don’t think we got on top of it, and I don’t know quite why. Even though they had terrific mentors, some on the mentee side didn’t quite understand that they were the ones who had to drive the relationship. It was a big step to go off to [a major media organization]. Some made really strong connections. And even though I put out guidelines to mentors and mentees and had an introductory session at the start of each semester, I don’t think it got there. I don’t think there was enough structure so that people knew what the outcome would be. Some saw the mentor either as way of getting a job, or as another trainer, or not see the value in it at all. We did a survey afterwards, and the mentors were strongly supportive, but it needed much more attention and management. (Training manager)

At the same time, the mentoring system did create greater awareness among mainstream journalists about the Sudanese community. The training manger commented, The journalists who were mentors were heavily impacted by this group. They learnt a lot. They started to understand the community in a real sense for the first time. (Training manager)

A senior media manager commented similarly, reflecting that staff had willingly agreed to participate, based on a belief that they could make a difference through their involvement: People were very enthusiastic. They were interested in making contacts in that community, understanding the community more. That makes you a better

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journalist. If you’ve got good contacts, you might get a story that someone else might not get or see. But I  think it was also a genuinely altruistic view that they felt there was something they could do –​to give of their time. And often it was their time –​weekends and out of hours. Staff had two roles: delivering training sessions, and the mentoring, where students were paired with a journalism mentor. Those relations really varied. Some would send their stories through and they would be subbed and reviewed by the journos here at the [media organization]. Have discussions about story ideas and almost one-​on-​ one training. (Senior manager)

Trainees appreciated the mentoring dimensions of the program, valuing their relationships with their mentors both for the support they received and because it contributed to their sense of belonging in Australia (Bailey et al., 2014). This is reflected in the following comments from participants: We had mentors so we could meet with them outside the training hours. They’ve also got tutors as well for those who are struggling with their English and there was a variety of content. (Participant 3) The second point, enjoyable of the course, getting to know a lot of people, particularly the trainers and some of the people who helped out through the course. I think it’s a good thing for us to have that connection with friends and making new friends and a new way of understanding media. (Participant 6)

While the mentoring roles were initially set up as part of the training, they developed in some instances into more significant and mutually beneficial relationships, in which mentors and mentees learnt from each other. Professional relationships also developed in some instances between the Sudanese Australian participants and other members of the research and training team, again to the benefit of both. While this was an unanticipated outcome, the contribution of the programme to building relationships that had the potential to be sustained over time was a success of the intervention. Transition and sustainability A challenging period in the training project occurred in late 2012, when a new researcher replaced a retiring researcher on the research team as the individual responsible for training. The new researcher, with the agreement of the broader research team, attempted to guide the Sudanese leadership group into taking on responsibility for the project and to begin planning for its sustainability beyond 2013, when the research funding would run out. The new researcher tried to accelerate the transition from a training

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programme to a programme that would be self-​sustaining and owned by the Sudanese participants. A  senior media manager, observing this transition period, noted, When [the former researcher] left the program it was a little bit of a grey area. Things changed direction. Which was not necessarily a problem but it was less on journalism skills and more on trying to equip the community to drive it in the longer term. But that’s almost phase two of the project […] But the challenge was, when the students first came in, it was about journalism training, and then it changed to you being self-​sufficient. And the students weren’t ready for that. (Senior manager)

The new researcher agreed that this had been a disruptive time, reflecting that he probably pushed too hard too quickly: I attended the Saturday sessions too, after [the previous researcher] had left, and while I tried to encourage and steer their discussions, I wouldn’t make decisions for them. I think this led to a bit of drift. And then, after consulting the rest of the research team, I  decided that we should devote some of the Saturday training sessions to organizational issues to try to equip them to establish a viable structure for continuing the work, with a board, governance arrangements and fund-​raising. That’s when they really got anxious, and I think [the training manager] is right to say a lot of steam went out of it at that point. It needed to be done, and there wasn’t much time, but I  didn’t do enough groundwork with the leadership group to carry it through. I also think that that is when the original lack of Sudanese ownership and shared objectives came back to haunt us. (Researcher)

Connecting to questions of ownership, this transition period raised issues about sustainability and project leadership. One researcher commented, Being a voice for your community and providing a news platform is demanding and time-​consuming work. Our participants were a very talented group. Partly for that reason, they had many demands on their time, as well as fulfilling their responsibilities to their families and meeting their professional obligations. With the best will in the world, they could only give a certain amount of time and energy to this project. If I  were doing it again, I  would find someone in the community that had already made this kind of work their main professional function, and find out what support, assistance and training would most help them do the job better, or expand their operation. (Researcher)

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An important lesson that emerged from this intervention was that a bottom-​up approach, in which existing community leaders were identified and connections made into existing networks, may have led to a more sustainable intervention than did this top-​down intervention, which was designed and owned by the researchers. In particular, a community-​based approach may have created a stronger sense of ownership of the project among the participants. Contrasting outcomes While a number of important challenges emerged, the intervention did deliver positive outcomes. The training manager commented, I think the project had fantastic outcomes because it was so connected into industry. There was a lot of feedback that went back into the media that otherwise wouldn’t have happened, through the mentors and the trainers. That all worked well. (Training manager)

The researcher leading the training noted, This training gave 30-​odd people from a newly arrived minority, who were the target of sustained and institutional racism, basic skills in journalism and an understanding of how to interact constructively with the Australian media. It opened doors for them into some big institutions […] It probably gave at least some of the individual participants a sense of empowerment and may have hastened the development of their sense of belonging in Australia. There is some evidence that it educated and sensitized the journalists about the Sudanese community and to that extent built a bridge between the community and mainstream media. And friendships were made between us and the Sudanese participants. We all learnt something about one another. (Researcher)

In addition, stories written by participants were picked up by mainstream media, and this content was reused and the authors were contacted by mainstream journalists for comment. This was an important outcome for an intervention seeking to promote both voice and listening. At the same time, a senior media manager reflected on limitations with how far this went: I felt some frustration that we didn’t deliver on stage two [moving from journalism skills to sustainable self-​managed organization]. We wanted to walk away with an empowered community with a voice, and I don’t think we delivered on that. (Senior manager)

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For the Sudanese participants, the outcomes were mixed. On the one hand, one participant said, From the training I learnt a lot of things. The best thing I learnt from them, I  can publish whatever I  want from my stories, I  can learn how to write the stories, how to make an interview with others, how to apply for the job, and how to deal with the others. (Participant 1)

On the other hand, another participant commented, Actually the AuSud program was good, but the only problem we can see, it’s not productive to us in a way. It wouldn’t help us in a way that we have seen, particularly to myself. We were issued with certificates and that certificate that is written underneath ‘not allowed for a person to work or to do anything.’ It meant for us that we have done maybe a job, something that we cannot give us at least something to experience. We, from there, there’s not any kind of, we, people who have done the training, to be involved in certain activities that you have to do this and this and this is all, we are stopped like that, yes. (Participant 2)

Comments such as this, which were mirrored by other participants, indicate that the expectations of the participants did not align with those of the researchers. While participants recognized that the skills they developed in the program were valuable, and that participation had increased their understanding of the Australian media, they were concerned that the program did not result in any formal qualification or in employment placements. While the research team had been clear from the beginning that these would not be outcomes, the lack of capacity to deliver such outcomes was a limitation of the intervention. It meant that the participants were not provided with a direct pathway to employment through participation in the course. In a context of uncertain future opportunities, competing demands and resource constraints, this was significant.

Conclusions The challenges identified in this chapter provide insights into this media intervention, with potential implications for other interventions as well as for the media intervention literature. The intervention provided a means for developing a new voice on news about the Sudanese Australian community in Melbourne. It did this in three main ways. First, by creating a website that provided a space for Sudanese Australian voices to be presented, and by providing training that enabled participants to develop journalism skills to

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facilitate their communication capacity. Second, by establishing professional relationships between members of the Sudanese community, mainstream media journalists and organizations in Melbourne. Third, by enabling forms of listening, even if limited, as evidenced by some stories being picked up by mainstream media, and by mainstream media journalists seeking to speak with participants. In this regard, the AuSud intervention engaged with some of the critical issues confronting interventions in general (Dreher, 2010; Howley, 2013a). In particular, the intervention sought to go beyond providing a space for voice to providing a means for creating forms of listening. It succeeded in creating a context in which members of dominant groups were taking some responsibility for listening, and not simply expecting members of the subordinated group to carry the full responsibility (Dreher, 2010; O’Donnell et al., 2009). At the same time, the outcomes of the project highlighted critical challenges that interventions confront, again as identified in the literature. In particular, questions of ownership and sustainability emerged as vital challenges, ultimately calling into question the overall impact of the intervention. The goal of having the blog and then the website as ongoing entities raised questions around how their management and ownership would be sustained over time, in particular once funding ceased. If the participants were to make The Gazelle project sustainable, they needed not just exposure to the skills of journalism but also to the management, leadership and business skills needed to create an effective organizational structure with governance procedures and the capacity to raise funds. These are demanding requirements, and while the program provided some training in these areas, it was not enough to create a sustainable base. These are important lessons from this project, in that there needs to be clarity about the form of training being provided, and there also needs to be an investment of resources in the organizational dimension of media production if the process is to be sustainable over time (Coates Nee, 2015; Wall, 2013). From a practical perspective, this may require connecting into other forms of organization already available in a context of scarce resources where developing a sustainable business model is a challenge. At the societal level, whether the intervention made a contribution to belonging is questionable, in particular in terms of the sustainability of outcomes. The website project was unlikely to be sustained without continuing support from an external funding source, and this was not found in this project. At the level of individual participants, however, the project did have important outcomes, which can be interpreted as contributing to forms of belonging (Anthias, 2008; Yuval-​Davis, 2011). The training program provided participants with enhanced communication and journalism skills; some connections with, and insights into, the institutional and media life of

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their new society; and the opportunity to develop a media platform. These contributed to enhanced connections with the broader Australian society. In the context of everyday lived experiences of exclusion and racism, these are important outcomes. At the least, this intervention provided lessons that future media interventions can consider at the planning and implementation stage, lessons that may enhance the capacity of future intervention projects to achieve greater and sustained success.

Acknowledgements Thank you first and foremost to the Sudanese and South Sudanese participants in this media intervention. Thank you also to the journalists who volunteered their time to act as mentors and trainers for the project participants, and to the AMES volunteers and other colleagues who participated in various ways in the project. Thank you to Violeta Politoff and Alice Burgin for organizing the training sessions. Violeta was a key research administrator during the first part of this project, and her contributions are particularly appreciated. Thanks to Aisling Bailey for research assistance in the form of interviews with previous project participants. This project was supported by ARC Linkage Project Grant LP 110100063. The Linkage partners were the ABC and Adult Multicultural Education Services (AMES). We are grateful to them for their support of the project.

Notes 1 Parts of this chapter have appeared previously in a final project report, D.  Nolan, K. Farquharson, T. Marjoribanks and D. Muller, The AuSud Media Project, 2011–​2013, Final Report, The University of Melbourne. November 2014. http://​arts.unimelb. edu.au/​caj/​research/​research-​projects#ausud-​media-​project. 2 Parts of this section of the chapter have appeared previously in a final project report, D.  Nolan, K.  Farquharson, T.  Marjoribanks and D.  Muller, The AuSud Media Project, 2011–​2013, Final Report, November 2014. http://​arts.unimelb.edu.au/​caj/​research/​ research-​projects#ausud-​media-​project.

References Anthias, F. 2008 ‘Thinking through the Lens of Translocational Positionality:  An Intersectionality Frame for Understanding Identity and Belonging’. Translocations: Migration and Social Change, 4, no. 1: 5–​20. Bailey, A., K. Farquharson, T. Marjoribanks and D. Nolan. 2014. ‘Being Heard: Mentoring as Part of a Community Media Intervention’. Communication, Politics and Culture 47, no. 2: 1–​16.

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Coates Nee, R. 2013. ‘Creative Destruction: An Exploratory Study of How Digitally Native News Nonprofits Are Innovating Online Journalism Practices’. International Journal on Media Management 15 no. 1: 3–​22. Couldry, N. 2013. Afterword to Media Interventions, edited by K. Howley, 397–​ 404. New York: Peter Lang. Dreher, T. 2010. ‘Speaking Up Or Being Heard? Community Media Interventions and the Politics of Listening’. Media, Culture and Society 32 no. 1: 1–​19. Due, C. 2008. ‘ “Who Are Strangers?”:  “Absorbing” Sudanese Refugees into a White Australia’. Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association Journal 4 no. 1: 1–​13. Howley, K. ed. 2013a. Media Interventions. New York: Peter Lang. —​—​—​, 2013b. Introduction to Media Interventions, edited by K. Howley, 1–​ 34. New York: Peter Lang. Marjoribanks, T., K. Farquharson, D. Nolan and M. Gawenda. 2013. ‘Resources of Belonging: Assessing the Consequences of Media Interventions’. in Media Interventions, edited by K. Howley, 55–​72. New York: Peter Lang. Nolan, D., A. Burgin, K. Farquharson and T. Marjoribanks. 2016. ‘Media and the Politics of Belonging: Sudanese Australians, Letters to the Editor and the New Integrationism’. Patterns of Prejudice 50 no. 3: 253–​75. Nolan, D., K. Farquharson, T. Marjoribanks and D. Muller. 2014. ‘The AuSud Media Project 2011–​2013 Final Report’. http://​arts.unimelb.edu.au/​caj/​research/​research-​ projects#ausud-​media-​project. Accessed January 2018. Nolan, D., K. Farquharson, V. Politoff and T. Marjoribanks. 2011. ‘Mediated Multiculturalism:  Newspaper Representations of Sudanese Migrants in Australia’. Journal of Intercultural Studies 32 no. 6: 655–​71. Nunn, C. 2010. ‘Spaces to Speak: Challenging Representations of Sudanese Australians’. Journal of Intercultural Studies 32 no. 2: 183–​98. O’Donnell, P. 2009. ‘Journalism, Change and Listening Practices’. Continuum 23 no. 4: 503–​17. O’Donnell, P., J. Lloyd and T. Dreher. 2009. ‘Listening, Pathbuilding And Continuations: A Research Agenda for the Analysis of Listening’. Continuum 23 no. 4: 423–​39. Wall, M. 2015. ‘Citizen Journalism: A Retrospective on What We Know, an Agenda for What We Don’t’. Digital Journalism 3 no. 6: 797–​813. Yuval-​Davis, N. 2011. The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations, London: Sage.

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CONTRIBUTORS Paola Bilbrough is a documentary practitioner, widely published poet and early career researcher. Her critical media and cultural studies research is informed by many years of working in a community development context on anti-​racism and advocacy projects. To date Paola’s research has focused on representational issues in screen media, particularly the tensions between ethics and aesthetics and the relationship between documentary practitioner and participant(s) in cross-​cultural contexts. Her research been published in the Journal of Auto/​Biography Studies and Departures in Critical Qualitative Research. Paola is a lecturer in international/​community development and academic literacy at Victoria University, Melbourne. Val Colic-​Peisker is an associate professor of sociology in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies (GUSS) at RMIT University. Before becoming an academic, Val worked as journalist, freelance author and radio producer and presenter. Her research focuses on global migration, ethnic relations and settlement (particularly employment, community and identity) of non-​Engish-​speaking-​background migrants in Australia. In recent years Val has also researched cosmopolitanism, urban diversity, global city, housing and sociocultural aspects of homeownership in Australia. Her academic publications comprise five books and numerous refereed articles, chapters, encyclopaedia entries, book reviews and research reports. Val’s articles have appeared in Sociology, Journal of Sociology, Urban Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Australian Journal of Social Issues, International Migration Review, Journal of Refugee Studies, Discourse and Society and elsewhere. Since January 2009, she has convened the inter-​university Migration and Mobility Research Network. Tanja Dreher is an ARC Future Fellow, Scientia Fellow and associate professor in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales. Her research focuses on the politics of listening in the context of media and multiculturalism, Indigenous sovereignties, feminisms and

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anti-​racism. Tanja’s current fellowship, funded by the Australian Research Council (FT140100515), analyses the political listening practices necessary to support the potential for voice in a changing media environment characterized by the proliferation of community and alternative media in the digital age. Jacqui Ewart is professor in journalism and media studies at Griffith University. She was a journalist and media manager for more than a decade. Jacqui’s research interests include communication and disasters, media representations of terrorism, media representations of Islam and Muslims, and talkback radio audiences. She is the author of Haneef: A Question of Character (2009) and a co-​editor of Islam and the Australian News Media (2010). Jacqui is a co-​author of Media Framing of the Muslim World (2014), and of Reporting Islam: International Best Practice for Journalists (2018). Karen Farquharson is professor of sociology and head of the School of Social and Political Sciences at The University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on the sociology of racism, migration, media and sport. Karen’s most recent books are Qualitative Social Research: Contemporary Methods for the Digital Age (2016, with Vivienne Waller and Deborah Dempsey) and Sport and Society in the Global Age (2012, with Timothy Marjoribanks). Michael Gawenda is one of Australia’s best-​known journalists and authors. In a journalism career spanning three decades, he has been a political reporter, a foreign correspondent based in London and in Washington, a columnist, a feature writer, a senior editor at the Time magazine and the editor-​in-​chief of The Age in Melbourne from 1997 to 2004. Michael has won numerous journalism awards including three Walkley awards for his work. He was the inaugural director of the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne. In June 2014, Michael was appointed as a Member of the Order of Australia for his service to the print media industry and his work to advance professional education and development. Sandra Gifford is professor of anthropology and refugee studies at Swinburne University of Technology. Her background is in medical anthropology, and her research has addressed forced displacement, mobility, and formal and informal settlement with a particular focus on young people. Sandra has expertise in ethnographic longitudinal studies using a mix of methods from standardized surveys and in-​depth interviewing to digital media, film and participatory art-​based methods.

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Scott Hanson-​Easey is a social psychologist and research fellow in the School of Public Health at the University of Adelaide. His previous research, employing discourse analysis and social representations theory, has addressed intergroup relations and the language of political and lay racism in the media. Scott’s current research explores how emergency and disaster information can be fashioned to meet the specific needs of culturally and linguistically diverse communities in Australia. He has published in journals including Discourse and Society, Journal of Sociolinguistics, Science Communication, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction and Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology. Timothy Marjoribanks is associate dean (research and development), Faculty of Business and Law, and professor of management, at Swinburne University of Technology. His media research engages with issues including organizational innovation and leadership, workplace practice and media representations. Timothy is author of News Corporation, Technology and the Workplace: Global Strategies, Local Change (2000), Sport and Society in the Global Age (2012, with Karen Farquharson) and Democracy, Media and Law in Malaysia and Singapore:  A Space for Speech (2014, co-edited with Andrew Kenyon and Amanda Whiting). Denis Muller is senior lecturer and honorary fellow at the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne. He is a leading expert on media ethics and has worked as a journalist for 27 years including as assistant editor at the Sydney Morning Herald and associate editor at The Age. Since 1995 Denis has conducted independent social and policy research across education, health, environment and media fields. He is the author of Media Ethics and Disasters (2011) and Journalism Ethics for the Digital Age (2014). David Nolan is senior lecturer in media and communications and deputy director of the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne. His research focuses on the role of shifting media discourses, environments and practices in contemporary social politics, and the problem of understanding historical and contemporary transformations in journalism. David’s work has been published in numerous international journals including Patterns of Prejudice, Media, Culture and Society, Journal of Intercultural Studies, Journalism and Journalism Studies. Mark Pearson is professor of journalism and social media at Griffith University in Queensland and is a journalist, academic, blogger and author. He has written and edited for The Australian, and has been published in a range of publications including the Wall Street Journal and the Far Eastern Economic Review. Mark is co-​author of The Journalist’s Guide to Media Law (5th ed., 2015),

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co-​editor of Mindful Journalism and News Ethics in the Digital Era:  A Buddhist Approach (2015), author of Blogging and Tweeting without Getting Sued (2012), co-​ editor of Sources of News and Current Affairs (2001) and co-​editor of Courts and the Media: Challenges in the Era of Digital and Social Media (2012). Raelene Wilding is associate professor of sociology at La Trobe University, Melbourne. Her research applies a range of qualitative methods to examining the impact of transnational migration on families, relationships and identities. Raelene works with young people from refugee backgrounds and older people from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds as well as Australian-​ born non-​migrants affected by the migrations of others. Her work has been published in numerous books and journals, including Families Caring across Borders (2007, with Baldassar and Baldock).

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INDEX Abbott, Tony 29 Aboriginal people 34n. 9, 123 Adult Multicultural Education Services (AMES) x, 93 Adut, Deng 121–​22, 127, 133. See also ‘Deng Thiak Adut Unlimited’ advertisements 3–​4, 121–​22, 124, 126 African Australians 70, 71–​72, 88, 105, 129. See also Sudanese migrants and refugees; South Sudanese migrants and refugees complaints about police harassment and brutality 109–​10 humanitarian program. See Australian Humanitarian Program media attention 105 over-​policing 13 racial profiling 14 African migrants and refugees. See African Australians age of capital 20 Age, The 93, 106 Allport, Gordon 75–​76 Althusser, L. 25 Aly, Anne 41 ancestry 21, 24, 76, 77, 163 Andrews, Kevin 68–​69, 70–​75, 90–​91, 115–​16 Anglo-​Australians 28, 30, 66 Anglo-​Celtic identity 8 Arab Australians 43, 44, 46, 47, 53 Arab Film Festival Australia 47 Arab Other 40 Arnold Bloch Leibler 109, 112 Asian migrants 11, 21 assimilation 77, 78, 79, 162 asylum seekers 11, 21, 22, 29, 39, 40, 68, 116, 122, 129

Muslims 22. See also Muslims and Islam Augoustinos, Martha 91 Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) x, 73, 93, 177, 181 Australian Humanitarian Program 13, 63, 66, 67–​68, 70, 72, 85, 88, 97, 115, 116, 162 Australian values 9, 10, 77–​78, 89 Australian, The 94, 99 Australia-​politics-​discourse triad 11, 28–​29, 32 AuSud media intervention 16, 93, 177, 179–​81, 190–​92 first cohort (2011) 181–​82 implementation 181 objectives and ownership 183–​84 outcomes 189–​90 relationships building 186–​87 second cohort (2012) 182–​83 third cohort (2013) 182–​83 transition and sustainability 187–​89 Awak, Daniel 69 Bakri, Saleh 47 Bankstown 38, 39, 51 Bankstown City Council 42 Bankstown Youth Development Services 42, 50 Barker, Martin 71, 75 Bashford, A. 20 being heard, perceptions of 16, 38, 47, 48–​49, 51, 173, 177 Bell, Philip 91 belonging, definition of 4, 7 belonging-​identity-​community triad 22–​25, 31 Berger, P. L. 30 Bilbrough, Paola 14

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Billig, Michael 80 biological determinism, racial categorisation based on 87 boat people 21–​22, 67 Bob Francis Show, The 69, 76 breathing space 130, 133 Butcher, Melissa 52, 53 Butler, Judith 8 Cabramatta 38, 39, 41, 42 Cabramatta Community Centre 42 Cartwright, Tim 106, 107, 108 Centre for Multicultural Youth (CMY) 123, 130 Chinese immigration, restrictions on 19 citizenship 6, 7, 8, 9–​10, 161, 162. See also cultural citizenship civic belonging 162–​63, 165, 172 civil peace 116 class 39, 51, 52, 53, 92, 107 Colic-​Peisker, Val 11 Collins, Jock 91, 92 colonialism 8, 19 common culture 9 Commonwealth Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 20 communication 45, 64, 184, 191. See also discourses intergenerational 46 media-​communication-​representation triad 11, 25–​28, 31–​32 mediated communication 30 community 11, 22–​25, 31 diversity in western Sydney 41–​43 community affirmation 12, 45, 54 community radio stations 43 community-​belonging-​identity triad 11 Couldry, Nick 178 counter-​publics, voices and stories 12, 54 creative industries 38, 43, 46, 47, 51–​54 Cronulla riots 66, 107 cross-​community listening 12, 45, 46, 48, 54 cultural citizenship 12, 41, 54. See also citizenship cultural otherness 88, 89, 92, 101 cultural pluralism 8, 89. See also multiculturalism cultural protectionism 87

cultural tourism 42 culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) person 24 culture 75–​79, 87 Culture Goes West 50, 51 Cuneen, Chris 113 Curtin, John 20 Daw, Majak 96 Dell, Agot 130–​34. See alsoThis is Me: Agot Dell ‘Deng Thiak Adut Unlimited’ 121–​22, 123, 124, 125–​30, 133 Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP) 33n. 5 digital storytelling 43, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49 discourses 11, 13, 25, 28–​29, 30, 32, 39, 63–​64, 65, 68, 70, 71, 72, 77, 91, 92, 93, 107, 116, 126, 130 discrimination 11, 65, 69, 86, 101, 110, 115, 122, 128 disharmony 9, 89 displaced persons 20, 67 dividing practice 9–​10 Dreher, Tanja 11, 171, 179 Due, Clemence 123 Dunn, Kevin 8, 40, 41, 89 Dutton, Peter 9 economic security 5, 11, 90 economy 8, 21, 51 education, and belonging 72–​73, 74, 90, 166, 181 Entman, Robert M. 123 essentialism 12, 13, 40, 71, 75–​76, 77, 78–​79, 87, 89. See also psychological essentialism ethnic ancestry 24. See also ancestry ethnic communities 92. See also community ethnic crime 37, 38, 39, 91, 92, 100 ethnic gangs 40, 92, 93 ethnic minorities 40–​41, 89, 90, 100 ethnic othering 86 ethno belonging 163, 172 ethnocinema 131 ethno-​cultural diversity 19 Ewart, Jacqui 14 exclusions 5, 10, 11, 12, 22, 25, 29, 38, 40, 41, 52, 53, 75, 180

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Index Facebook 26, 164 Fairfield City Council 42, 49 Fairfield Community Resource Centre 42 Fairfield-​Cabramatta area 38, 42 fake news 11, 27, 32 Farquharson, Karen 13 Fernandez, Ramesh 125 Flemington 13, 108, 109, 110, 112, 113 Flemington & Kensington Community Legal Centre 108, 109, 111 Florida, Richard 52 Fozdar, Farida 162, 163 framing 10, 40, 51, 91, 92, 93, 95, 97, 101, 106, 107, 123–​24, 128, 130, 133 Franklin, S. 142 Fraser, Malcolm 67 gangs 37, 91, 92 Asian gangs 38 criminal gangs 92 ethnic gangs 40, 92 Lebanese 38, 92, 107 race-​based 73–​74 Sudanese 92, 115, 122, 133 Gawenda, Michael 16 Gazelle, The 181, 182–​83, 191 Getting the facts right: Reporting ethnicity and religion 141 Gifford, Sandra 15 Go Back to Where You Came From (SBS realty TV program) 51, 125 Goldsmith, Andrew 113 Gony, Liep 90, 115, 122, 128 Grindstaff, Laura 121 Grossman, M. 141 Guardian, The 50 Gulf War 78 Hackney, London 52–​53 Hage, Ghassan 7, 77, 130 Haile-​Michael, Daniel 111–​12 Hall, Stuart 91 Hamad, Ruby 122, 125, 131, 134 Hanson, Pauline 21, 78–​79 Hanson-​Easey, Scott 12, 91 harmony 8, 89 Harris, Anita 131 Hartley, L. 162, 163 Hatoss, Aniko 132

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Henstridge, John 112 Herald Sun 93, 97, 113 hereditary others 25 heroic others 14, 122 television representations 124–​25 unlimited refugee 125–​30 Hidden Heritage 42 Ho, Christina 49, 50 Hobsbawm, Eric 20 Home Lands project 15, 159–​60, 163–​65, 172 beyond national belonging 169–​72 motivations and participations 168–​69 starting points 165–​68 home, and belonging 165–​68 home-​grown terrorism 51 Housos (SBS reality TV) 51 Howard, John 29, 77, 89, 90 Howley, Kevin 178, 179 Hughes, Billy 20 Human Rights Commission 110 humanitarian refugee. See Australian Humanitarian Program Huntington, S. P. 21 ICE (Information & Cultural Exchange) 12, 38, 43–​44, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 54 listening modes 44–​47 Pop Series project. See POP Series project identity 29, 31 Anglo-​Celtic identity 8, 63, 77, 79 belonging-​identity-​community triad 22–​25, 31 categorization 86 community-​belonging-​identity triad 11 national identity 8, 23, 24, 77, 78, 80, 89, 159, 162 ‘Identity’ exhibition 22–​24 Idriss, Sherene 53 immigration 14, 20, 39, 79 debates 37, 77, 80 European displaced persons 20 ‘Immigration’. See Living with the Enemy: Episode 3: Immigration legislation 19, 20, 67, 87 points tests 20 race-​based policy 67, 87 restrictions on Muslims 21, 78–​79

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Indigenous populations 4, 19, 45, 46, 87, 90 integrationism 101, 162. See also new integrationism inter-​generational listening 12, 45, 46, 48, 54 Islam for Journalists; A Primer on Covering Muslim Communities in America 142 Islamic State 151 Islamophobia 37 Jewish Australians 90 Jones, Alan 66 Jones, Ken 99 journalism training 93, 181 media intervention program 185 mentoring 187 about religion 151 journalists critical thinking skills for 151 face-​to-​face training 152 knowledge about religion 151 mindset about the cultural diversity 152 resources 152–​53 Koori Youth Yarn Up project 45–​46 Kraszewski, Jon 125 La Trobe University 181 Lakemba 38, 39, 51, 52 language 12–​13, 63, 64, 81, 92. See also discourses news reporting of Islam 146–​47 of ‘Othering’ 64, 65, 68, 78, 80 and racism 80, 128 related to nationalism 80 Lay, Ken 109, 113, 114 Lebanese youth gangs 38, 92, 107 listening 12, 37 across communities 46 between members within a community 46 community affirmation 45–​46 counter-​public 47 cross-​community listening 12, 45, 46, 48, 54 in competition and critique mode 46–​47 inter-​generational listening 12, 45, 46, 48, 54

spaces 44–​47 speaking up and talking back projects 47–​54 in western Sydney 44–​47 Living with the Enemy: Episode 3: Immigration 123, 125–​30, 133 Living with the Enemy: Episode 3: Immigration (SBS reality TV) 122 Lloyd, Justine 43, 179 Lorde, Audre 130 ‘Lost Boys of Sudan’ 122 Luckmann, T. 30 Lutherans 66 Lyons, Joseph 67 MacDougall, David 131 Mapping Frictions project 42 marginalization 10, 38, 52, 53, 54, 149, 153 Marjoribanks, Timothy 16 Markus, Andrew 87 Marshall, Shane 114 media 5, 6, 11, 13, 17, 31–​32, 37–​38, 90–​91, 105, 106, 116–​17 alternative media 26, 38, 41, 179 democratic practice 27–​28, 32 denial of racism in 93 diversity, PwC report 53 and exclusions 41 fake news 11, 27, 32 initiatives 15, 179 mainstream media 12, 15, 16, 26, 28, 32, 37, 38, 41, 44, 49, 50, 53, 54, 65, 123, 130, 177, 180, 189, 191 negative coverage by 122 and politics of belonging 10–​17, 54–​55 populism 27, 29, 32, 65, 91, 150 portrayal of immigrants and ethnic minorities 40 media interventions 42, 43, 44, 54, 177–​78, 190–​92 analysis 178–​79 AuSud. See AuSud media intervention Media Monitors 69 media-​communication-​representation triad 11, 25–​28, 31–​32 mediated communication 30 mentoring, in journalism 187

203

Index minorities 11, 22, 25, 80. See also Muslims and Islam ethnic minorities 40–​41, 89, 90, 100 media coverage 26 Othering of 11 racialized minorities 91 rights 8, 9, 89 stereotyping 28, 32 modern racism 122, 125, 128 moral panic 25, 92 Morgan, George 52 Mount Druitt 52 MTV 125 Muller, Denis 13, 16 multiculturalism 4, 8–​9, 11, 21, 24, 29, 39, 50, 78, 88, 89, 162. See also cultural pluralism debates 77, 80 racial politics 88 shifting perceptions 49 Muslims and Islam 14–​15, 21, 39, 40, 41, 44, 141–​43 alternative approaches to reporting 151–​53 demonization of 149 fundamentalism 51 news media coverage 153–​55 current journalistic approaches to 147–​48 outcomes and impacts 148–​51 problems and pitfalls 144–​47 Reporting Islam project. See Reporting Islam project naming 40 nation building 22, 25, 29 national belonging 4, 7, 8, 15, 24, 31, 41, 65, 161, 163 challenges of 161–​63 shift in perspective 169–​72 national family 3, 4 national identity 8, 23, 24, 77, 78, 80, 89, 159, 162 national interest 80 national security 11, 90, 116 nation-​states 23, 41, 87 neo-​racism 87 New Image, The 42

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new integrationism 9, 11, 88. See also integrationism new Others 40 new racism 87 news media coverage current journalistic approaches to 147–​48 language use 146–​47 problems and pitfalls 144–​47 newsroom cultures 147, 148 No One Eats Alone (Bilbrough) 132 Noble, Greg 4, 92 Nolan, David 13, 93 non-​Anglo-​Celtic groups 64, 67 Nouk, Abraham 122, 133 Nunn, Caitlin 100, 124 O’Donnell, Penny 179 Oakley, Anne 131 Olympic Games 2016, advertisements during 3–​4 Omi, Michael 86 ontological security 4, 5, 7, 162 Operation Molto 108–​09, 113 Operation Square 109 opportunities, and belonging 9, 52, 166, 183 orientalism 123, 126, 133 other/​othering 10, 21–​22, 37, 41, 65, 86, 89, 123 Arab Other 40 asylum seekers 29 cultural otherness 88, 89, 92, 101 and culture 75–​79 ethnic othering 86 hereditary others 25 heroic others 14, 122, 124–​30 language of 64, 65, 68, 78, 80 in media 79 minorities 11. See also minorities Muslim Other 22, 38, 41. See also Muslims and Islam new Others 40 radicalized 93 serial Others 25, 31 voice 29 xenophobic 21 over-​policing 13 ownership, belonging as 4

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Paradies, Yin 115 Parramatta 43, 50, 51, 52 Pearson, Mark 14 perceptions 30–​31, 32 Perry, Barbara 66 personal well-​being 5 Pesic, M. 141 physical security 11, 90 Pintak, L. 142 Plato 34n. 11 policing 91, 105–​06 Cronullas riots 106–​08 over-​policing 13, 14 and racial profiling 13, 109, 110, 112, 114–​15, 116–​17 Sudanese and South Sudanese migrants 108–​15 politics of belonging 5, 6, 7–​10, 19, 47, 50 and race 86. See also racism and western Sydney 38–​41 belonging-​identity-​community triad 22–​25 and media 10–​17, 31, 37, 41, 54–​55. See also media media interventions. See media interventions media-​communication-​representation triad 25–​28 mediated 38–​41, 43 Muslims. See Muslims and Islam reality-​construction-​perception 30–​31 POP Series project 46–​47, 53 Powell, Colin 88 Poynting, Scott 92 PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) report 53 psychological essentialism 75–​76. See also essentialism public discourses 21, 22, 26, 28–​29, 30, 32. See also discourses public events and listening spaces, in western Sydney 44–​47 Qantas campaign 3, 4, 5 Racial Discrimination Act 110 Racial Equality Action Lobby 42 racial formation 13, 85–​88, 101

in Australia 88–​93 racial profiling 14, 46 Operation Molto 113 and policing 13, 109, 110, 112, 114–​15, 116–​17 Sudanese and South Sudanese migrants 116–​17 racialisation 85–​88 and ethnic othering 86 racialised news reporting 38, 40 racialized minorities 91 racism 73–​74, 80 and individuals 125 modern racism 122, 125, 128 neo-​racism 87 rural conservatives 125 systemic racism 125, 128, 129 radio talk shows 12 Rapke, Jeremy 114 Real Useful Media Kit 42 reality construction 69–​75 reality TV programs 14, 39, 51, 121, 122, 124–​25 ‘Immigration’. See Living with the Enemy: Episode 3: Immigration reality-​construction-​perception triad 11, 19, 30–​31, 32 refugees 13, 44, 116, 123, 162 and ancestry 77 forward selection 67 offering refuge 66–​68 Sudanese. See Sudanese migrants and refugees; South Sudanese migrants and refugees Vietnamese refugees 67–​68 Reporting Islam project 14, 142, 153–​55 alternative approaches to reporting 151–​53 methodology 143–​44 news media coverage current journalistic approaches to 147–​48 language usage 146–​47 outcomes and impacts 148–​51 problems and pitfalls 144–​47 representations 25–​28, 31–​32 Rouch, Jean 131 Rupar, V. 141

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Index safety, and belonging 45, 165, 166, 169 Salazar 43, 44, 48 SBS TV 50, 124, 126 Go Back to Where You Came From 51, 125 Housos 51 Living with the Enemy: Episode 3: Immigration 122 reality TV programs 14, 51 Struggle Street 51 Schroeder, Elizabeth R 125 Search for Common Ground, The: Muslims, non-​Muslims and the UK media 141 serial Others 25, 31 settled feelings 4, 7 settlements 4, 19, 161, 162 shared ancestry 163 shared values 8, 9 Shelpers 3, 4 shifting perceptions 49–​51 Sikhs 150 social boundaries 7 social cohesion 8, 89, 142, 154, 155 social constructionism 64, 80 social media 26–​28, 32, 143, 155, 160, 164 social networks 5 and creative industries 53 social reality 26, 30–​31, 32 South Australia 66 restriction on Chinese immigration 19 South Sudanese migrants and refugees 13, 85 media coverage 106–​08 policing 108–​15, 116–​17 and politics 115–​16 racial profiling 116–​17 Struggle Street (SBS TV program) 51 Sudan civil war 88, 126 Sudanese migrants and refugees 13, 14, 72, 85, 90, 100–​01, 105, 123 and crime 96–​100 as ‘ethnic suspects’ 101 framing as gangs 92 ‘Immigration’ 125–​30 media coverage 106–​08 media intervention project. See media intervention police reporting 106–​08

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policing 108–​15, 116–​17 and politics 115–​16 racial profiling 116–​17 as racialized ‘others’ 93 representation as potential threatening ‘other’ 90 Sudanese culture as a ‘violent other’ 93 ‘Unlimited’ 125–​30 Swinburne University of Technology 181 Sydney 37 Mount Druitt 39 western suburbs. See western Sydney Sydney Siege 21 systemic racism 125, 128, 129 Tabar, Paul 92 Tahiri, H. 141 talkback radio 64, 65–​66 and politicians 66 culture in 75–​79 essentialist reasoning 76 impact on migrants 66 political interviews 65 sampling methodology 68–​69 ‘shock-​jock’ 65 socio-​political background 68–​69 Tampa affair 21 Tampa election 29 terra nullius 4, 123 terrorism 15, 38, 51, 144, 155 home-​grown terrorism 38, 51 Islamic terrorism 41 9/​11 attack, US 21, 78 This is Me: Agot Dell 14, 123, 130–​34 Trinh T. Minh-​ha 123, 127 Turnbull, Malcolm 9, 29 Turner, Graeme 41, 66 United Kingdom racial violence in 80 riots 107 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees of 1951 67 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 68 University of Melbourne 180 University of Western Sydney 42 Urban Theatre Projects 50

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van Dijk, Teun A. 93, 122, 125 Vanni, Ilaria 48 Varda, Agnes 132 Victoria restriction on Chinese immigration 19 Victoria Police 106, 108, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 177 Victorian Crimes Act 112 Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission 110 Vietnamese refugees 67–​68 ‘Vietnamese Storyexchange’ 46 Villawood Immigration Detention Centre 38 voice 11, 12, 27, 28, 29, 32, 37, 38, 44, 45, 46, 49, 54, 65, 127, 180, 185, 190 Wadsley, Mandy 52, 53 war on terror 37, 39, 40 way of life, Australian 13, 68, 75, 77, 85, 97, 99, 101, 116 western Sydney being heard, perceptions of 48–​49 creative industries 51–​54 diverse communities 41–​43 ICE (Information & Cultural Exchange) 43–​44

media and politics of belonging 54–​55 and mediated politics of belonging 38–​41 news reporting in 40 public events and listening spaces 44–​47 radicalised news reporting 40 refugee communities in 38 shifting perceptions of 49–​51 speaking up and talking back in 47–​54 Western Sydney Arts Strategy, NSW 44 Western Sydney University 14, 121–​22 Westies 38, 39, 51 white Australia 8, 11, 19, 20, 24, 79, 87, 116, 127, 133, 162 White imaginary 124–​25 Wilding, Raelene 15 Winant, Howard 86 Windle, Joel 92 xenophobia 21, 77 ‘Yallah/​Pacific Specific’ 46 Youth Digital Cultures projects 45, 46 Yuval-​Davis, Nira 7, 9 Yzerbyt, Vincent 76