Description:
The discourse of integration has been ascendant in migration policy internationally, particularly after western concerns linking terrorism with cultural separatism. Retreats from multiculturalism signal a view that conformance by outsiders with a normative, universal, and static national citizen subject will facilitate social cohesion. The discourse of integrationism, perpetuated through the practice of UnSpeak (Poole 2006), represents resettled refugees as innately problematic against dominant, normative values (Marston 2004). I explore these representations in Australian settlement education policy and suggest an appeal to marginal voices (Foucault 1980; Spivak 1988) as a means for contesting them. Rejecting an engagement driven by policy categories (Bakewell 2008), I interview nine, long settled Melbourne refugee women about education’s purposes. I make sense of the women’s feedback through Foucault’s (1990) Care of the Self, which provides an account of agency in the subject. The interviewees emphasize education’s role in facilitating self actualization, informed by a ‘knowledge of the self’. In contrast to their dominant representation as the problematic subjects of a policy encouraging conformity, refugees should be regarded as agents with potential.
Description:
This paper examines indirect discrimination in Australian universities that tends to obstruct and delay women's academic careers. The topic is defined and contextualised via a 1998 speech by the Australian Human Rights Commission's Sex Discrimination Commissioner, juxtaposed with a brief contemporaneous exemplar. The paper discusses the prevalence of women among casual and fixed-term academic workers, and the contrasting low numbers of women in senior academic positions. It is argued that the neo-liberal 'marketisation' of higher education, which still prevails, has fostered a number of indirectly discriminatory practices and conditions that substantially disadvantage women. A selection of studies of the problem are critiqued. It is argued that a broad statistical methodology is inadequate due to its tendency to 'homogenise' the academy and its component individuals, in the process giving scope for unjustified optimism among university policy-makers. A particulate approach is advocated, acknowledging the wide variation between and within universities, and the range of hidden difficulties individual women academics can face. It is concluded that despite apparent reforms over the past decade, the situation of women has improved little in practical terms.