On the Accumulation of Homeliness: Practices and Mobilities - HDR Panel: Kate Naidu and Alex Coleman
Date: Thursday, 7 November 2019
Time: 11.30am–1pm
Venue: EB.G.35, Parramatta South campus, Western Sydney University
On the Accumulation of Homeliness: Practices and Mobilities
HDR Panel - Kate Naidu and Alex Coleman (Institute for Culture and Society)
Discussant: Dr Shanthi Robertson
Abstract
Kate Naidu: This presentation addresses the notion of ‘home’ and ‘home-building’ practices of Australian students in Indonesia, in order to explore the processes of interculturalisation connected with the in-country educational experience. Through empirical accounts of these students’ experiences, I attend to the diverse ways in which people adjust to new environments, some more so than others; illustrating ways of home-making that create proximity with the new cultural surrounds as well as those that maintain distance. Drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and Hage’s work on ‘home-building’, my approach emphasises an understanding of intercultural development as temporal, pedagogic, and embodied. This presentation highlights several dimensions of such provisional ‘home-building’ practices in the context of in-country education, including the significance of routines, and various forms of labour.
Alexandra Coleman: This presentation explores the post-university experiences of graduates from Cranebrook in outer Western Sydney. It considers relations of “staying put”, or being oriented back to place – to Cranebrook and the wider Penrith region more generally. Working-class places like Cranebrook, can be sites of a good life, not just places to be left behind, but places of possibility. The paper also explores micro-mobilities in place, not just mobilities between differently classed worlds, and develops the concept of “homely mobility” – a term used to describe degrees of social and existential mobility in Cranebrook. It examines how processes of class distinction, as well as relations of faithfulness and gratitude, shape mobilities in place. Structural inequalities are an embodied dimension of social being, and through the lens of homely mobility, this presentation affords insights into broader processes of social reproduction, to the ways people make meaningful a world that makes them.
Biography
Kate Naidu is a third year PhD candidate here at the Institute for Culture and Society. She previously completed undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the University of New South Wales, before working as a school teacher for several years. In 2016, she completed her Master of Research, with a thesis titled ‘Issues of ‘interculturality’ in Indonesian language teaching’. Her doctoral research project examines the experiences of Australian university students studying in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, to consider the development of intercultural capacities as a function of in-country educational programs.
Alexandra Coleman is a Doctoral Candidate at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. She has a Bachelor of Arts (Honours 1) from Western Sydney University.
