Description:
This thesis seeks to develop a critical understanding of the impact of a particular Community Renewal project on the residents. The Wendouree West Community Renewal was part of a broader Victorian state government intervention, Neighbourhood Renewal, which worked ‘on’ communities identified as disadvantaged. The study investigated the experiences of key residents, along with those of the author, during the period 2001-2013. The main contention is that Wendouree West Community Renewal project colluded with the welfare sector to impose a hegemonic and alien set of understandings on the community. This study is passionate; it takes a stance that is unashamedly political, ideological and partisan. Its key premise is that government interventions of this kind are damaging to communities like the one investigated. The Wendouree West experience promoted a three-fold residualisation: at the level of a ‘breaking down’ of local economies; an undermining of formal and informal education at a community level; and a manipulation of understandings of place, belonging and community that resulted in the imposition of a fake ’aspirational community’ in Wendouree West. The impact of this three-fold residualisation was a deep stigmatisation of Wendouree West as a ‘non-place’ (Auge, 2008), enabling its ultimate ghettoisation, both within the broader context of the regional city of which Wendouree West forms a small part, and within the understandings of residents themselves. This thesis represents struggle at a number of levels: the struggle of the residents to push back against a hegemonic intervention; the struggle of a scholar to make sense of his own role within the action; and the struggle of how to represent the residents’ stories in ways that are powerful and ‘truthful’ within the context of a PhD thesis. ii The ‘critical hope’ of this work is that the residents are able to push back against this program through acts of resistance and that community organising, in the style of the American radical Saul Alinsky, may represent a possible longer term means for empowerment and self-determination.
Description:
This thesis seeks to develop a critical understanding of the impact of a particular Community Renewal project on the residents. The Wendouree West Community Renewal was part of a broader Victorian state government intervention, Neighbourhood Renewal, which worked ‘on’ communities identified as disadvantaged. The study investigated the experiences of key residents, along with those of the author, during the period 2001-2013. The main contention is that Wendouree West Community Renewal project colluded with the welfare sector to impose a hegemonic and alien set of understandings on the community. This study is passionate; it takes a stance that is unashamedly political, ideological and partisan. Its key premise is that government interventions of this kind are damaging to communities like the one investigated. The Wendouree West experience promoted a three-fold residualisation: at the level of a ‘breaking down’ of local economies; an undermining of formal and informal education at a community level; and a manipulation of understandings of place, belonging and community that resulted in the imposition of a fake ’aspirational community’ in Wendouree West. The impact of this three-fold residualisation was a deep stigmatisation of Wendouree West as a ‘non-place’ (Auge, 2008), enabling its ultimate ghettoisation, both within the broader context of the regional city of which Wendouree West forms a small part, and within the understandings of residents themselves. This thesis represents struggle at a number of levels: the struggle of the residents to push back against a hegemonic intervention; the struggle of a scholar to make sense of his own role within the action; and the struggle of how to represent the residents’ stories in ways that are powerful and ‘truthful’ within the context of a PhD thesis. ii The ‘critical hope’ of this work is that the residents are able to push back against this program through acts of resistance and that community organising, in the style of the American radical Saul Alinsky, may represent a possible longer term means for empowerment and self-determination.
Description:
This article draws together arguments for an interdisciplinary ‘spatial turn’ within sociology to analyse the subjectivities and biographical imaginings of Australian rural youth. It draws on a theoretical dialogue between theories of social change, and developments in socio-spatial theory in order to analyse the spatial contours of young people’s narratives, making a case for the significance of an ‘extraverted’ and porous sense of place for understanding rural youth identity. After a theoretical argument about the contemporary meaning of place for theories of globalisation and individualisation, the article presents two theoretically driven sets of case studies. The first discusses rural youth whose identities speak to the importance of place and ‘the local’ as resources for identity, while the second describes young people whose identities are ‘stretched’ across multiple spaces and locales. The analysis speaks to the importance of place for understanding the forms of reflexivity that rural youth mobilise in constructing their place in the world, and speaks to new ways in which to re-embed sociological analyses of youth within the spatially complex social landscapes of a globalised world.