Search

Walking interviews generate contextualized dialogs and place-based narratives prompted by sites and routes. We used walking interviews with three refugee-background women in Australia to find out what the act of walking could reveal about notions of home and broader narratives of forced migration. We used a participatory approach to privilege women’s perspectives as co-creators of new knowledge on the topic.

ABSTRACTRefugees often come from countries with histories of human rights violations and can face multiple challenges in building a new life in Australia. Little is known about the specific experiences of those who also live with a disability, and how this may impact their rights to health. We present an intersectional approach to using arts-based research to bring to light the embodied experiences of these people, who live at the intersection of multiple axes of marginalisation. Bringing together lived experience of displacement and disability, with interdisciplinary researchers and a range of clinicians and service providers, we present an overview of the issues faced by refugees with disabilities in Australia. We then discuss how arts-based research could help to generate academic and policy discourses which are more attentive to the needs, priorities and identities of refugees with disabilities.

Despite significant research into media and political coverage of refugees and asylum seekers, and ongoing Commonwealth policies to resettle refugees to regional areas, analysis of the regional press is lacking. We reviewed articles from four regional newspapers using quantitative content analysis and qualitative content analysis to examine some initial trends in how regional newspapers represent refugees and asylum seekers. Despite the dominant negative framing of refugee issues at the national level, the regional media used positive, humanising frames and a broader range of sources in articles on local topics such as refugees’ personal stories. This reflects the community-building role of local journalism and challenges the familiar boundaries of the debate. However, there was a compelling distinction between articles on local and national topics, with the negative national discourse and dominance of government sources reflected in articles on national topics such as legislation and events.

ABSTRACTDespite considerable research on the impact of Australia’s mandatory detention policy on children, there is sparse focus on asylum seeker children’s own perspectives of how they conceptualise their experiences of living in detention. We were curious to understand how children in detention would convey their views on their circumstances through the medium of drawing. This paper uses secondary data analysis to explore children’s perspectives by considering key themes from two drawings created by asylum seeker children in Australian immigration detention centres: one from the Australian Human Rights Commissions’ Forgotten Children: National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention 2014 report, and another published in prominent Australian newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald. The focus on children’s first-hand experiences of mandatory detention through a non-invasive method conveyed a strong sense of isolation and ostracism, and revealed the mental health impacts on children and their families. These examples show that children were clearly able to convey how their rights were violated in the context of detention. Emerging themes highlight how children’s insightful perspectives of their own experiences are neglected in broader discourses, and provide a rationale for further visual research to provide nuanced understandings of asylum seeker wellbeing and children’s rights in particular.