What it means to be studying against the grain of neoliberalism in a community-based university programme in a 'disadvantaged area'
- Authors: Smyth, John , Harrison, Tim
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Educational Administration and History Vol. 47, no. 2 (2015), p. 155-173
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- Description: Australia is indicative of a country that is deeply confused and conflicted around a policy discourse of inclusion that is sutured within an existential context heavily committed to the tenets of neoliberalism. Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of higher education, in which the proportion of young people from backgrounds of 'disadvantage' has remained implacably stuck at around 15% for several decades. The research from which this paper comes is an innovative community-based university-provided programme for young people for whom university education was never a realistic possibility - because of family histories, interruption to their lives, of having undertaken forms of secondary education that prevented them from gaining university entrance qualification, or who had terminated their education before completing the secondary years of schooling. This paper explores the story of one young person in his first year in a university programme, as he struggled with obstacles and impediments of a higher education system and set of neoliberal policy discourses that remain deeply sceptical and antagonistic to his trajectory. © 2015 Taylor & Francis.
An Australian Rules for radicals? Community activism and genuine empowerment
- Authors: Harrison, Tim
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Thesis , PhD
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- 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: Doctor of Philosophy
Emplacing young people in an Australian rural community : An extraverted sense of place in times of change
- Authors: Farrugia, David , Smyth, John , Harrison, Tim
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Youth Studies Vol. 17, no. 9 (2014), p. 1152-1167
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- Description: This paper explores the identities of young people in an Australian rural town in relation to contemporary discussions of place and social change. The paper responds to dominant narratives in youth studies which position individualised, reflexive subjectivities at the centre of a homogeneous, placeless modernity with an emplaced analysis of contemporary youth identities. Young people's narratives reveal an attachment to place created in community activities and day to day farm life, articulated in the language of the ‘rural idyll’. Narratives about imagined future lives articulate classed and gendered competencies and dispositions acquired in and through place, reflexively mobilised in life planning practices. Therefore, whilst substantial social changes are reshaping youth identities across rural places, young people's responses to these changes are forged in the way that identities are emplaced, as well as articulated in reflexive orientations towards their future lives. © 2014, © 2014 Taylor & Francis.
Vulnerable, 'at risk', 'disengaged'. Regional young people.
- Authors: Farrugia, David , Smyth, John , Harrison, Tim
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Interrogating Conceptions of “Vulnerable Youth” in Theory, Policy and Practice p. 165-179
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Rural young people in late modernity : Place, globalisation and the spatial contours of identity
- Authors: Farrugia, David , Smyth, John , Harrison, Tim
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Current Sociology Vol. 62, no. 7 (2014), p. 1036-1054
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- 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.
Affective topologies of rural youth embodiment
- Authors: Farrugia, David , Smyth, John , Harrison, Tim
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Sociologia Ruralis Vol. 56, no. 1 (2016), p. 116-132
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- Description: This article explores the affective, embodied dimensions of young rural people's relationship with space and place. Relationship with space and place has been recognised as a significant dimension of rural youths' subjectivities but it has been primarily understood through representational perspectives which focus on young people's perceptions, images, or discursive constructions of their local places. In contrast, this article draws on non-representational approaches to subjectivity and space to highlight the embodied, sensuous entanglements between young people's subjectivities and the spaces they have inhabited and experienced. Qualitative data gathered as part of a project exploring youths' subjectivities in regional Australia shows that young people's experience of their rural locale, as well as their relationship to the city, reflect an affective topology of relations of proximity and rhythmic tempo which emerges from the relationship between the space of their bodily hexis and the spaces and places they are situated within. These non-representational, embodied processes are intrinsic to rural youths' subjectivities and structure how young people approach and navigate their futures. © 2015 The Authors. Sociologia Ruralis © 2015 European Society for Rural Sociology.
The ‘hidden transcripts’ of digital natives in the peri-urban jungle : Young people making sense of their use of social/digital media
- Authors: Smyth, John , Harrison, Tim
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Educational Practice and Theory Vol. 37, no. 1 (2015), p. 5-17
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- Description: The way young people engage with and make sense of digital/social media is not quite what it seems. In this paper we present two quite different versions, drawing on the work of political scientist James C. Scott. On the one hand, there is the ‘public’ or official transcript or rendition, which comprises the way adults conceive of this usage, and in which young people acquiesce with. On the other hand, in order to subvert the former, what is going on concurrently, is a hidden transcript which is opaque to outsiders and is revealed only to other young ‘insiders’. Acquiescing with the former, in a sense, provides young people with the space in which to construct a much more resistant version of their usage of digital media. © 2015 James Nicholas Publishers.
Moral distinctions and structural inequality : homeless youth salvaging the self
- Authors: Farrugia, David , Smyth, John , Harrison, Tim
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Sociological Review Vol. 64, no. 2 (2016), p. 238-255
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- Description: This paper explores the construction and contestation of moral distinctions as a dimension of contemporary structural inequality through a focus on the subjectivities constructed by young people who have experienced homelessness. Empirical material from two research projects shows that in young people's narratives of homelessness, material insecurity intertwines with the moral economies at work in neoliberal capitalist societies to construct homelessness as a state of moral disgrace, in which an ungovernable experience is experienced as a moral failure. When young people gain access to secure housing, the increasing stability and security of their lives is narrated in terms of a moral adherence to personal responsibility and disciplined conduct. Overall the paper describes an economy of worth organized around distinctions between order and chaos, self-governance and unruliness, morality and disgrace, which structures the experience of homelessness. As young people's position in relation to these moral ideals reflects the material conditions of their lives, their experiences demonstrate the way that moral hierarchies contribute to the existence and experience of structural inequalities in neoliberal capitalist societies. © 2016 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review.
Historical & heritage legacies of the Victorian gold rushes
- Authors: Reeves, Keir , Harrison, Tim
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Pay Dirt! Ballarat & other gold towns. Chapter 19 p. 203-207
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