ICS Seminar - Julia Cook

Understanding the role of migration, culture and transnational ties in family financial assistance with home ownership

Event Details:

Date and Time: Thursday, 15 September, 11:30am - 1:00pm

Location: Building EA, Level 2, Room 22 (EA.2.22), Parramatta South Campus, Western Sydney University

Presenter: Julia Cook (University of Newcastle)

Discussant: Emma Mitchell

Abstract

Intergenerational financial assistance with first home ownership has attracted increasing scholarly and public attention in recent years. Rates of this type of assistance, as well as sums involved, are particularly high in Australia, with around 60 percent of first home buyers receiving an average of $99,000 in mid-2021 (DFA, 2021). Research to date has focused on family cultures of transmission (Brannen, 2006), the role of welfare state regimes (Albertini and Kohli, 2013), and social norms and obligations (Rowlingson, Joseph and Overton, 2017). However, it has remained silent on the significance of culture and family experiences of migration. This seminar seeks to address these areas of silence in the literature. Drawing on the findings of an ongoing interview-based study of donors and recipients of family financial assistance in New South Wales, I consider how family experiences of migration may shape the types of financial assistance that are provided and how they are understood, how financial assistance is negotiated and managed across national borders, and how culture may be used as an explanatory framework for both giving and accepting family financial assistance with first home ownership.

Biographies

Julia Cook is a Lecturer and ARC DECRA Fellow at the University of Newcastle. Her research interests include the sociology of youth, time and housing, and the intersections of each of these topics and economic sociology. Her most recent research addresses young adults’ pathways into home ownership and young adults’ navigation of debt and financial assistance, with a particular focus on buy now pay later services. She is a chief investigator on the current phase of the long-running Life Patterns research program (2021-2025).

Dr Emma Mitchell is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Urban Geographies of Care in the Institute for Culture and Society. She works alongside Emma Power on the ARC Discovery Project ‘Shadow Care Infrastructures: Sustaining Life in Post-welfare Cities’ (2021-2024), which asks how people reliant on government income support make ends meet. It investigates whether and how ‘shadow care infrastructures’ – a wide range of formal and informal material and social supports – enable the survival, well-being and flourishing of income support recipients.

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The Institute for Culture and Society is located in Parramatta, “the place where the eel sets down” in Dharug language,
along the north bank of the Parramatta River. It sits on the traditional lands and waters of the Burramattagal people of the Dharug Nation,
who have been stewards and caretakers of these territories since time immemorial, in what today is referred to as Greater Western Sydney,
one of the most diverse cultural communities in the world and home to the largest number of Indigenous Australians in the country.
The Institute for Culture and Society acknowledges the Dharug, Eora, Dharawal (also referred to as Tharawal)
and Wiradjuri peoples as traditional custodians and Indigenous knowledge-holders, whose storytelling serve
as historical record, a form of teaching and learning, a way to care for Country,
and an expression of Indigenous culture and identity.