ICS Seminar Series - Chris Ho, Rose Butler and Eve Vincent
Date: Thursday 29 October 2015
Time: 11.30am - 1pm
Venue: EB.3.17, Western Sydney University, Parramatta South campus
Chris Ho, Rose Butler and Eve Vincent
Everyday and Cosmo-multiculturalisms: Doing Diversity in Gentrifying School Communities
Abstract
Gentrification is transforming the class and ethnic profile of urban communities across the world, and changing how people deal with social and cultural difference. This paper looks at some of the social consequences of gentrification in Sydney, Australia, focusing on local schools. It argues that in this urban Australian context, the influx of middle-class Anglo-Australians into traditionally working-class, migrant-dominated areas is significantly changing how people relate to each other within local schools, often fragmenting and dividing school communities. These shifts are intensified by the public policy of school choice, which has enabled some parents to bypass their local school for a more 'desirable' one.
This paper presents a close local study of two schools within one gentrifying Sydney suburb, examining how the schools have become more polarised. In particular, we examine how this demographic polarisation has given rise to two distinct modes of 'doing diversity', namely, everyday and cosmo-multiculturalisms. While the former is about daily, normalised encounters across difference, the latter is a form of multiculturalism based on strategic and learned 'appreciation' and consumption of difference, characteristic of gentrified communities.
Biographies
Dr Christina Ho is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney. She researches cultural diversity in Australia, with a focus on inter-cultural relations within urban settings. Her current research is on school communities and education cultures in diverse areas, and inter-cultural relations between residents within high density housing. Her most recent book, co-edited with Andrew Jakubowicz, is For Those Who've Come Across the Seas: Australian Multicultural Theory, Policy and Practice (Australian Scholarly Publishing 2013).
Dr Eve Vincent is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University. She is the co-editor of History, Power, Text: Cultural Studies and Indigenous Studies (UTS E-Press, 2014). Eve undertakes ethnographic research in Aboriginal Australia.
Dr Rose Butler was awarded her PhD from the ANU in December 2014 and is currently a Research Associate in the Centre for Social Impact (CSI) at UNSW. Her research areas include children and youth; young people, family and the economy; education and social change; class, culture and emotions; and ethnography, qualitative and visual research methodologies.
