Exploring the lived experiences of migrants in regional Victoria, Australia
- Authors: Patil, Tejawswimi , Mummery, Jane , Pedersen, Cassie , Camilleri, Marg
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Technical report , Report
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- Description: This research project has been undertaken by Federation University Australia and was commissioned by the EVOLVE Strategic Multicultural Capacity Building Partnership. The purpose of this research was to examine the lived experiences of migrants living and/or working in the areas of Ballarat, Horsham, and Nhill from 2009 to 2018 in accordance with the nine key priority areas set out in the Department of Social Services National Settlement Framework (2016). These include language services; employment; education and training; housing; health and wellbeing; transport; civic participation; family and social support; and justice. The research analysed the lived experiences of migrants to identify key benefits and barriers to settlement within Central and Western Victoria, and will be used to enhance service provision available to migrants in Ballarat, Horsham, and Nhill. The research has utilised interpretative phenomenology, which is a qualitative methodology that draws on participants’ multilayered descriptions of their lived experiences. In accordance with this methodological framework, nine individual interviews were conducted in Ballarat as well as two focus groups that consisted of one group of women and one group of men. In Horsham, four individual interviews were conducted in addition to one focus group. In Nhill, the research team conducted five individual interviews and one focus group. Participants were presented with a range of open-ended questions concerning their settlement experiences across Ballarat, Horsham, and Nhill.
Ruptures in understanding : the banality of evil and the differend
- Authors: Pedersen, Cassie
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: I Want to Do Bad Things: Modern Interpretations of Evil p. 21-31
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: This chapter draws upon respective concepts of postmodern theorist, Jean-François Lyotard and political theorist, Hannah Arendt in order to account for the unspeakability and incomprehensibility attributed to Auschwitz. This will be achieved in a means which neither mystifies unspeakability and incomprehensibility, nor negates the legitimacy of that which is said to lie outside of speech and comprehension. Throughout his works, Lyotard uses the term ‘postmodern’ to describe what he deems to be the state of culture following on from certain transformations in conceptions of knowledge prevalent within the twentieth century. The postmodern condition, according to Lyotard, heralds incredulity towards legitimizing grand narratives and the subsequent visibility and proliferation of heterogeneous discourse genres. Due to their heterogeneity, genres of discourse are incommensurable and irreconcilable. It is within this context that the ‘differend’ emerges: the manifestation of the unspeakable, where one cannot express damages inflicted upon them, due to a lack of any universally applicable rule of judgment between heterogeneous genres of discourse. Arendt, on the otherhand, argues that the traumas associated with Nazi totalitarianism constitute a break with traditional ways of understanding; there has been a rupture in moral, political and juridical categories in the wake of Auschwitz. Specifically, this chapter will look towards Arendt’s account of Nazi senior functionary, Adolf Eichmann, who supposedly re-defined what it is to commit evil in terms of the banality of his crimes. Such banality signifies a rupture of pre-existing ways of making sense of evil, thus resulting in incomprehensibility and unspeakability. Through this discussion, it will be demonstrated that the incomprehensible can indeed emerge, when a phenomenon challenges one’s pre-existing ways of understanding the world - especially when these means of understanding are reliant upon universal, totalising regimes. In these instances, it is vital to acknowledge that one’s modes of judgment have been pushed to their limits, in order to explore the possibility of new ways of understanding. © Inter-Disciplinary Press 2014.
The immanence of traumatic rupture : From the extra/ordinary to the originary
- Authors: Pedersen, Cassie
- Date: 2017
- Type: Text , Thesis , PhD
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- Description: This thesis critically intervenes into the interdisciplinary space of trauma theory by both identifying and circumventing the tendency of theorists to posit trauma in a relation of either transcendence or immanence to the contexts in which it occurs. In the classical trauma theories of Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, and Cathy Caruth, trauma is broadly defined as a disruptive and aporetic event that shatters the cognitive, experiential, and representational frameworks necessary for making sense of the occurrence. These theorists conceptualise trauma as transcendent, seeing trauma as existing “outside” or “beyond” the frameworks in which it comes into being. However, more recent critics enter a polemic with classical trauma theorists by reconceptualising trauma as immanent to the all too human frameworks that facilitate its occurrence in the first place. I contend that the mutual exclusive insistence that trauma need either be conceived as immanent to, or transcendent of, the frameworks in which it occurs has led to a conceptual impasse in trauma theory that is rooted in a false dichotomy between these extremes. Tracing this oppositional tendency across a broad disciplinary spectrum, engaging contributions to trauma theory from philosophy, literary theory, and history, the major aim of this thesis to move beyond the false dichotomy between the immanent and the transcendent by revealing that these terms are inextricably bound. Drawing on the works of Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jean Laplanche, and Jean-François Lyotard (to name only a few), this thesis revitalises the space of trauma theory by offering a series of interlocking arguments that conceptualise the alterity of trauma as being immanent to the frameworks it transcends. This paradoxical logic is at the crux of what I refer to as the immanence of traumatic rupture.
- Description: Doctor of Philosophy