For many migrants it is the memory of the place they left, reconfigured by other temporal aspects of their experiences, that gives contours to what they often call home. Reflecting on life narratives created by those who identify themselves with a region through the memory of it enhances our appreciation of individual and collective experiences, but also meaningfully contributes to developing a more nuanced understanding of a place as a temporal reality and migration - commonly viewed in spatial terms - as a temporal experience. It also invites us to engage with the idea of border as a temporal device. This article explores temporal borders of home and multiple ways in which migrants of East Central European background, who came to Australia following the Second World War, attempt to (re)define Europe as home and themselves in the context of post-war displacement.
Immigrant integration is often conceptualised through frameworks of belonging that emphasise individual feelings or perceived acceptance within a community. This paper complicates such linear models and human-centred interactions by foregrounding processes of belonging emerging through relational practices spanning more-than-human worlds at a community urban farm. Drawing on rhizomatic assemblages and Indigenous epistemologies that situate Land as agentive, we use ethnographic and participatory methods to highlight how growers' relationships with crops manifest agency and dynamic socio-ecological adaptations. In conclusion, we argue that processes of belonging and settlement are active negotiations that occur through placemaking relationships with the land and the immediate multispecies community. Attending to these processes provides newer possibilities for recognising the interactions between more-than-human actors and human agency to belong.
This article employs Daoism to look into the nature of 'race' in the context of global citizenship education (GCE). Because different understandings of 'race' engender different forms of racism and strategies for anti-racism, it is essential to critically reflect on the nature of 'race'. Daoism, although underappreciated in this area, is well suited to this task as it has much to say about interconnectedness, equality and diversity - all of which are highly relevant to the general goals of GCE. This article begins with an introduction to the existing debate on the nature of 'race' and anti-racism. This is followed by a discussion of Daoist account of the inherent equality underlying external differences (both physical and cultural) and the significance of demonstrating our inner dao-like humanity. These ideas are then applied to 'race' and anti-racism, such that racial differences are to be respected unconditionally in light of the underlying equality. In particular, it is argued that the over-evaluation of 'race' or the reduction of a person to their 'race' can undermine our engagement with the particularities of a person, or social issues and their context. Lastly, some pedagogical implications for GCE are discussed in reference to the critical racial literacy.
This study evaluated the Deadly Indigenous Research Internship, a program designed to immerse Indigenous Australian undergraduate students in research, foster academic and research skills, strengthen cultural pride and promote aspirations for further education. A total of 10 interns completed a structured survey, and seven participated in in-depth interviews to examine their motivations for joining, experiences within the program, and perceived impacts on their self-concept and academic pathways. Results indicated that the program had a significant positive influence on research self-concept, development of skills, academic motivation and cultural identity. These findings underscore the importance of culturally grounded, community-engaged internship programs for Indigenous university students.
This study explores the perspectives of the Tiwi people, an Indigenous Australian community living on the Tiwi Islands, on what contributes to a good quality of life. By prioritising community voices and cultural perspectives, the research aims to inform policies and programs that better align with Tiwi aspirations. The primary research question examines the factors that, according to the Tiwi community, contribute to an improved quality of life both economically and socially. Utilising qualitative methods, the study employs semi-structured interviews and ethnographic observations to gather comprehensive data. Stratified sampling ensures representation from diverse Tiwi groups, integrating cultural sensitivity and community leadership in participant selection. The data analysis identified six key themes central to Tiwi aspirations: education, language, culture, humbug, health and wellbeing, and Tiwi Way vs. Western Way. This study uses the theoretical framework developed by the Tiwi researchers as a cultural compass, reflecting Tiwi values and the concept of working together collaboratively. The Tiwi community expressed a strong desire for leadership that upholds their cultural identity while fostering collaboration with non-Aboriginal individuals. Despite study limitations, the findings highlight the need for culturally informed policies that address the community's aspirations and challenges for a better future.
Australia's welfare systems underwent dramatic changes from the 1970s. This included a move from assimilationist approaches to more pluralist ones, in delayed recognition of Australia's multiethnic populace. This paper explores the perspectives of three migrant-background women, self-identified ethnic welfare workers, who worked within a developing multicultural welfare system in the Australian state of New South Wales from the 1970s and 1980s. Their oral history testimony is analysed in conjunction with contemporaneous papers by ethnic welfare workers and academics debating the practice and philosophy of migrant welfare. Ethnic welfare workers were both witnesses to and active participants in the practical and philosophical changes to welfare and social service delivery in NSW since the 1970s. These oral histories provide the historical account with subjective perspectives on both the day-to-day realities and broader ideological implications of legislative changes to community welfare practices. The three women demonstrate the complex and non-linear relationship that ethnic welfare workers have to the social work profession and to the idea of professionalisation from the 1970s.
This paper examines how, during the COVID-19 pandemic, international students used the resources embedded within the transnational spaces they occupied to secure the affective support they needed. Based on 33 interviews and 23 follow-up interviews with international master's degree students in Finland, this paper shows how digital connectivity became fundamental to the ways in which international students navigated the COVID-19 pandemic, how they made sense of their transnationality and how it acquired greater significance for them as they sought emotional support from their friends and family at home through the use of various communication technologies and social media. Their familial bonds were thus strengthened and led them to reimagine how they were positioned in the world. The major contribution of this analysis shows that it challenges the common understanding of how transnationalism is constituted by various empirical modalities. Instead, the paper shows how transnationalism involves dynamic processes of the ways in which human agents make sense of the shifting material conditions pertaining to cross-border connectivities.
The arrival of unaccompanied Afghan minors in Sweden during the 2014-2015 European refugee crisis highlights the challenges of forced migration and conditional belonging. This article examines how participation in the Dream Orchestra, a symphonic music education initiative in Gothenburg, mediates experiences of instability and conditional belonging among young Hazara Afghan men who arrived as unaccompanied minors in 2015. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the study explores how participants navigate fragmented migration trajectories through the need to 'keep moving to stay', and how collective, embodied musical practices foster affective regulation, kinship, and psychosocial resources. The analysis foregrounds music education as a form of cultural mediation through which young refugees negotiate everyday life under conditions of forced interculturality. The article contributes to debates on refugee (im)mobility, interculturality, and community music education by showing how inclusive cultural practices can support identity negotiation, emotional balance, and situated forms of social integration.
This article examines contemporary European borders through the lens of the borderscape, understood as a dynamic socio-semiotic environment where language, material traces, and human interaction intersect. Although narratives of post-national openness followed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Schengen Agreement, border controls have intensified over the past three decades, especially since the 2015 so-called 'migration crisis'. The resulting securitisation and public spectacle of border control have reinforced media discourses of conflict and threat, obscuring alternative views of border zones as sites of everyday negotiation, multilingual interaction, and complex social relations. Drawing on the project Beyond the Border based on ethnographic fieldwork since 2017 in Ventimiglia, Biha & cacute;, Lesbos, and Montgen & egrave;vre, the article analyses multilingual signage produced by people on the move, local communities, law-enforcement agencies, and humanitarian organisations. These signs reveal borderscapes as ambivalent, contested spaces where messages of despair, solidarity, resistance, and agency coexist yet remain largely marginalised in mainstream discourse. By addressing researcher positionality and the ethics of seeing, the article advocates for a methodology grounded in partiality and emic presence, linking Linguistic Landscape studies with visual arts and aesthetic theory to reconceptualise borders as epistemological and ethical frontiers.
What does it mean to seek belonging to a dispersed Indigenous community when genealogical descent is present, yet recognition, resources, and lived connection remain fragile or absent? This study examines how descendants of the Okinawan (Ryukyuan) diaspora utilise digital platforms, specifically the Shimanchu Server on Discord, to re-establish a sense of ancestral homeland and belonging in the absence of sustained intergenerational ties. Shaped by Japanese assimilation policies and the geographical limitations of traditional Okinawan associations, the server addresses forms of cultural disconnection experienced by later-generation descendants. Drawing on digital ethnography, the study illustrates how members engage in identity-making practices, language revitalisation (particularly Uchinaaguchi), and genealogical inquiry to reclaim cultural traditions. The analysis demonstrates how the Shimanchu Server mediates the gap between genealogical descent and socially recognised belonging, showing that recognition emerges through peer interaction and collective learning. By showing that digital diaspora dynamics develop even without first-hand migration memory, this article contributes to debates on digital homeland-making and diasporic identity formation. It argues that grassroots digital initiatives provide relational spaces for negotiating heritage, articulating responsibility, and cultivating affective, dialogical, and collectively sustained forms of belonging across distance.
This paper re-theorises the Vietnamese refugee intake of the late 1970s and early 1980s as a key moment of civilisational anxiety in Australia's national imaginary. While the end of the White Australia policy is often celebrated as the beginning of a humanitarian and multicultural era, this paper argues that the arrival of Vietnamese refugees revealed unresolved anxieties within the settler-colonial psyche, particularly regarding Australia's identification with whiteness, Western modernity, and civilizational order. Drawing on critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and settler-colonial critique, the paper develops the concept of civilisational anxiety to explain how racialised migrants are included or excluded and symbolically framed as threats to national cohesion. Through discursive and conceptual analysis, the study shows how Vietnamese refugees, especially those arriving by boat, became figures of symbolic disruption, activating fears around borders, racial purity, and Australia's geopolitical position in Asia. Their conditional inclusion exposed the limits of multiculturalism, which often functioned more as a mechanism of containment than genuine transformation. Marking fifty years since Vietnamese resettlement, this paper urges a critical reassessment of national belonging. It offers civilisational anxiety as a diagnostic framework for understanding how race, identity, and emotional governance continue to structure Australia's response to migration and difference.
Exploring musical identity amongst those forcibly displaced engages with broader issues of nationhood, belonging and migration. People seeking international protection inhabit intersectional experiences of identity, holding the conflicting experience of negotiating the culture they have left and living within a new culture. This article examines the migratory stories of four female professional musicians, specifically from Ukraine, now living in Germany and Ireland. Through narrative interview data, insights are provided on the lives and musical career trajectories of these women, as well as key 'turning points' as they navigate new musical and cultural contexts. Their stories are revealed to be non-linear and complex. Thus, the article pieces together narrative fragments from four different Ukrainian women to inform understandings of how these musicians actively construct meaning from their musical experiences and utilise their professional musical identities as an alternative way of being to that of an asylum seeker. The women, through music, reject marginalisation and assimilation and instead forge new sounds, connections and ways to understand the self and 'other'.
Bushfires, though an inevitable part of life in Australia, have rarely been discussed from a migrant's perspective. The regional context brings aspects of place and environment to the fore that are not always present within life-narratives that focus on the social and cultural or urban experiences of migration. This regional context shapes the experiences and reflections of migrants and their environmental understandings and sense of place within a disaster-prone location. Tensions between a perceived 'new' and 'ancient' Australia are evident in the way some people reflect upon their reading of the landscape and environment. The longer presence of history encapsulated in the built environment in migrants' hometowns in Europe seemed at odds with the timespan of history captured in Australian cities and towns. Migrants' interviews highlighted the way that national connotations ascribed to bushfires and floods contributed to some people's reflections on belonging, community and place within regional and disaster-prone Australia. People had an experience of something that seemed quintessentially Australian, that helped them to feel part of their community and indeed the nation. These life narratives are but one moment captured in an ongoing process of place-making and life narration in regional Australia.
Art has long served as a form of social critique, yet the perspectives of minority artists often remain on the margins of public discourse. This article investigates how minority artists in increasingly diverse Nordic contexts - The Faroe Islands and Norway - use art to negotiate identity, claim heritage, and engage majority audiences. We present two telling cases: (1) a Faroese case involving two second-generation artists - a musician and a visual artist - who reflect on growing up visibly different in a culturally homogeneous society; and (2) a Norwegian case featuring three Latin American artists - a dancer, a guitarist, and a storyteller - whose performances challenge stereotypical notions of 'Latino culture'. Based on interviews and ethnographic observation, the analysis traces how these artists transform personal and collective experiences into public engagement. Drawing on theories of identity and heritage, the article highlights how art functions as a safe space for existential grounding, articulating minority experiences, and acts of cultural engagement. By centring minority voices within contexts often perceived as culturally homogeneous and egalitarian, this study sheds light on the transformative potential of art, with relevance beyond the Nordic region.
