Australian Media and the Politics of Belonging

By David Nolan

Australian Media and the Politics of Belonging explores mediated debates about belonging in contemporary Australia by combining research that proposes conceptual and historical frameworks for understanding its meaning in the Australian context. A range of themes and case studies make the book a significant theoretical resource as well as a much-needed update on work in this area. Australian Media and the Politics of Belonging also provides an intervention that engages with key contemporary issues, questions and problems around the politics of belonging that are relevant not only to academic debate, but also to contemporary policy development and media and popular discussion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Mar 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781783087808

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Australian Media and the Politics of Belonging

Anthem Studies in Australian Politics, Economics and Society

This series showcases the most significant contributions to scholarship on a wide range of social science issues, dealing with the changing politics, economics and society of Australia, while not losing sight of the interplay of other regional and global forces and their influence and impact on this region. Anthem Studies in Australian Politics, Economics and Society is intended as an interdisciplinary series, at the interface of politics, law, sociology, media, policy, political economy, economics, business, criminology and anthropology. It is seeking to publish high quality research which considers issues of power, justice and democracy; and provides a critical contribution to knowledge about Australian politics, economics and society. The series especially welcomes books from emerging scholars which contribute new perspectives on social science.

Series Editor-in-Chief

Sally Young – University of Melbourne, Australia

Series Editors

Timothy Marjoribanks – Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

Joo-Cheong Tham – Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne, Australia

Editorial Board

Iain Campbell – Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), Australia

Sara Charlesworth – Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), Australia

Kevin Foster – Monash University, Australia

Anika Gauja – The University of Sydney, Australia

John Germov – The University of Newcastle, Australia

Michael Gilding – Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

Simon Jackman – Stanford University, USA

Carol Johnson – The University of Adelaide, Australia

Deb King – Flinders University, Australia

Jude McCulloch – Monash University, Australia

Jenny Morgan – University of Melbourne, Australia

Vanessa Ratten – La Trobe University, Australia

Ben Spies-Butcher – Macquarie University, Australia

Ariadne Vromen – The University of Sydney, Australia

John Wanna – Australian National University, Australia

George Williams – The University of New South Wales, Australia

Australian Media and the Politics of Belonging

Edited by David Nolan, Karen Farquharson and Timothy Marjoribanks

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2018

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© 2018 David Nolan, Karen Farquharson and Timothy Marjoribanks editorial matter and selection; individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-778-5 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-778-1 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Part I. THEORIZING BELONGING IN CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIA

Chapter 1.Australian Media and the Politics of Belonging

David Nolan, Karen Farquharson and Timothy Marjoribanks

Chapter 2.Politics of Belonging in a Mediated Society: A Contribution to the Conceptual Exegesis

Val Colic-Peisker

Chapter 3.Media, Belonging and Being Heard: Community Media and the Politics of Listening

Tanja Dreher

Part II. SUDANESE AUSTRALIANS, MEDIA PRACTICES AND THE POLITICS OF BELONGING

Chapter 4.Talking about the Other: Sudanese Australians and the Language of Difference on Talkback Radio

Scott Hanson-Easey

Chapter 5.In a Context of Crime: Sudanese and South Sudanese Australians in the Media

Karen Farquharson and David Nolan

Chapter 6.Journalism Practice, the Police and Sudanese Australians

Denis Muller, Karen Farquharson and David Nolan

Chapter 7.Constructing the Heroic Other and ‘They Always Asked about Africa, They Never Asked about Me’: Three Screen Representations of Sudanese Australians

Paola Bilbrough

Part III. SHIFTING THE POLITICS OF BELONGING: MEDIA INTERVENTIONS AND POSSIBILITIES FOR TRANSFORMATION

Chapter 8.Towards an Australian Framework for Best Practice in Reporting News Involving Muslims and Islam

Jacqui Ewart and Mark Pearson

Chapter 9.Creating Media, Creating Belonging: Young People from Refugee Backgrounds and the Home Lands Project

Raelene Wilding and Sandra Gifford

Chapter 10.Creating Belonging: The Possibilities and Limitations of an Organizational News Media Intervention

Timothy Marjoribanks, Denis Muller and Michael Gawenda

Notes on Contributors

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure

2.1The ‘triads’: an intersecting conceptual framework

Tables

5.1Newspaper items on Sudanese Australians, 2007–12

5.2Television news items on Sudanese Australians, 2007–12

5.3Main category of news item (per cent)

5.4Other elements included where the main context was crime (per cent)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book brings together contributions from leading scholars in their disciplines, working on critical issues advancing our understanding of belonging. As an editorial team, we thank them for their willingness to contribute their important work to this volume and for their earlier participation in a workshop that provided the basis for this book. As a note, individual authors have provided their own acknowledgements where appropriate in their respective chapters.

We thank the editorial and production team at Anthem Press for their work through all stages of the editing and production process. It has been a pleasure to work with them, and we thank them for their professionalism and encouragement in bringing this book to publication. We thank Vassilissa Carangio for her work on the final manuscript. We also very much thank the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne for a publication grant that contributed to the final publication of this book. We are also grateful to Matthew McCarthy, Founding Director of Clear Design, for his permission to use the cover image, which features posters produced for the ‘Identity: Yours, Mine, Ours’ exhibition at the Immigration Museum, Melbourne. The project would not have been possible without the support of these individuals and organizations.

This book had its origins in a research project on the communication needs of Sudanese Australians, with a research team of chief investigators that comprised Michael Gawenda, David Nolan, Karen Farquharson, Denis Muller and Timothy Marjoribanks. A number of the chapters in this book present findings from the project. The members of the research team wish to express their heartfelt thanks to all those who contributed to this project, in particular Violeta Politoff, who organized much of the early work; Reece Lamshed, who managed the training programme; and Alice Burgin and Aisling Bailey, who, along with Violetta Politoff, provided excellent research assistance.

Particular thanks also to all the members of the Sudanese and South-Sudanese Australian communities who participated in or in any way contributed to the project. Without their willingness to participate in the project (details of which are provided in chapters in this book), the research project and book would not have been possible. Louise Wilson and Lucy Chancellor-Weale at the Centre for Advancing Journalism (CAJ) at the University of Melbourne provided invaluable and greatly appreciated administrative support throughout the project, and we also thank Margaret Simons for ensuring the continued support of the CAJ.

The contributions of the project’s industry partners the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and Adult Multicultural Education Services (AMES) are also richly deserving of acknowledgement and thanks. AMES provided accommodation for the training and for workshops at which the participants were able to gain access to computers for the purpose of building and maintaining the website that became the main work of the group. We are particularly grateful to Cath Scarfe and Adam Baxter for their support and advice, and to Maureen O’Keeffe and Maria Tsopanis for their work in contributing to and facilitating the training sessions.

The ABC, in particular Carolyn MacDonald and Frances Green, provided access to their journalists and persuaded them to act as mentors, gave generously of their own time as teachers and harnessed resources across the organization to provide the participants with training in technical as well as editorial fields.

Through the project, numerous current and former journalists, as well as other colleagues, made significant contributions to the training programme through a range of activities including delivering training and being involved in mentoring. We thank them for their generosity and for their important contribution to the project. We also thank members of the broader community who attended project roundtables for their interest in, and engagement with, the project.

The project was made possible by a Linkage Project grant from the Australian Research Council, ARC LP 110100063. We are grateful for the support provided by the ARC. We also thank the Sidney Myer Foundation and the Social Justice Initiative at the University of Melbourne for financial support through their grant schemes for this project. The project would not have been possible without their financial support.

The support of the University of Melbourne, Swinburne University of Technology and La Trobe University, the institutional homes of the members of the research team at the time the book was developed, is also gratefully acknowledged.

Part I

THEORIZING BELONGING IN CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIA

Chapter 1

AUSTRALIAN MEDIA AND THE POLITICS OF BELONGING

David Nolan, Karen Farquharson and Timothy Marjoribanks

Introduction: Feels Like Home?

In late 2015, Qantas released the second of its ‘Feels Like Home’ television advertising campaigns. This series of advertisements, aired extensively on Australian commercial television during its coverage of the 2016 Olympic Games, focused on a series of stories of members of a real-life family, the Shelpers, travelling to spend Christmas with their parents on the NSW coast. In the ads, each family member travels from a different location – one daughter from what is recognizably the Australian outback, another from Brisbane, a third from country Victoria and the youngest son orchestrates a surprise visit from New York, from where he is shown travelling home on business class.¹ Each story, featuring a family member travelling to their parents’ home with Qantas, is accompanied by the Randy Newman song ‘Feels Like Home’ covered by young Australian singer Martha Marlow. The culmination of each advertisement shows the emotional scene of the whole family reunited for Christmas dinner, accompanied by the climax of the song’s chorus in its final line:

Feels like home, feels like home to me

Feels like I’m all the way back – where I belong.

This text replays what is a familiar and nostalgic scene for many Australians who travel home to share time with their families, and this sense of nostalgic familiarity is linked in each of the advertisements of Australian locations that are drawn together through its national family narrative. During the Olympics, this familiarity was interlinked with a sense of national pride evoked by the warm feelings the ads evoke, their linkage with an airline that is a national icon in its own right and the evocation of sporting patriotism. In this way, the ads directly appealed to and constructed a sense of national belonging – an image, or set of images, of homeliness constructed through synecdoche and personification, via which an individual family – the Shelpers – are signified as a national family. To understand this as a semiotic process, we must not only pay attention to what these advertisements depict, or what is presented, but also the relationship between what is present and what is absent in them. In its focus on a singular, middle-class ‘white’ family enjoying a secular ritual rooted in Christian tradition, these ads necessarily exclude other potential images of Australia: its non-white and Indigenous populations, scenes of urban and working-class life and the presence of non-‘Anglo’ cultural traditions and rituals associated with Australian multiculturalism. In drawing attention to this, our point is not to criticize these ads as ‘bad’ in themselves. On the contrary, they are highly accomplished products that no doubt achieved the identificatory aims they were designed to fulfil. Instead, we focus on this example as a starting point for this book because it highlights key themes regarding both the nature of belonging and the role of media in constructing it that ensuing chapters build on.

The most fundamental point to draw here is that ‘belonging’ refers to a feeling, or a set of feelings, of being ‘at home’. Such feelings bring with them a sense of security and confidence in one’s capacity to operate socially, as an accepted member of a given community. Greg Noble has defined such ‘homely belonging’ by drawing on Anthony Giddens’s concept of ‘ontological security’, which refers to ‘the confidence or trust we have in the world around us, both in the things and the people with which we share our lives, and hence which provide stability and a continuity to our identity’, contributing to a ‘settled feeling’ (Noble 2005, 113). ‘Settled’ here means ‘unperturbed’, yet this word choice nevertheless also refers us to other aspects of ‘settlement’ that may also be implicated in belonging. Interestingly, much of the affective power of the Qantas campaign derives from images of Australian landscapes – scenes of outback life, of country living and of natural beauty. That these landscapes can be presented as ‘home’ implicitly references a historical process of white settlement and the forcible appropriation of land, here also referencing another sense of ‘belonging’ as ownership, whereby the nation is constructed fundamentally as a white possession (Moreton-Robinson 2015). Settled feelings, in this respect, can be situated in the Australian context as a historical legacy of a process of settlement that involved an accumulation of land by dispossession via the now notorious and discredited, albeit still consequential, doctrine of terra nullius. This brings us to a third meaning of ‘settled’, referring to a state of affairs that exists as a consequence of a (negotiated or enforced) achievement of a political settlement. Indeed, it is interesting to reflect here on the degree to which the incorporation of the Australian landscape into a narrative of belonging associated with a ‘white’ family implicitly relies on a history of colonial violence and dispossession, where the question of whom land belonged to, and which populations could legitimately claim belonging in relation to it, was treated as a zero-sum game.

The ontological security of feeling ‘at home’, then, can be seen to be produced by, and implicated in, processes whereby feelings of belonging have historically accrued to particular populations. If belonging can be taken to refer to an affective sense of security and comfort, such feelings are also associated with material dimensions: personal well-being and economic security; a capacity to both operate and be welcomed within various social networks and sites of interpersonal exchange; a confident knowledge of and familiarity with one’s surroundings, contributing to a sense of environmental comfort; and a familiarity with, and comfort in, the idioms, objects and customs that are characteristic of particular social spaces. Historically, the material underpinnings of ‘ontological security’ have not only been unequally distributed among populations along the grounds of ethnicity and ‘race’ but also divisions of class and gender, among others. Indeed, much interdisciplinary work that has been historically concerned to address forms of social inequality has highlighted how these are based on exclusive constructs of sociality that work to benefit certain subjects while excluding others: how workplaces, for example, are not only structured in ways that further male dominance but also by forms of sociality that privilege masculinity and exclude women. Feelings of belonging, in this respect, are both products and part of the structures of privilege associated with the operation of social hierarchies. This raises questions that the chapters of this book address in detail: To what extent, and how, are media texts and practices implicated in reiterating and challenging such structures? What are the models of ‘belonging’ that such texts and practices represent and construct, and to what extent do these serve to support forms of sociality that are inclusive and/or exclusive for different populations? To what extent do media practices and texts serve to reiterate inherited traditions upon which senses of belonging rest, or work to contest and replace them?

These questions take us from a consideration of belonging, as a condition or feeling of ‘ontological security’, to the ‘politics of belonging’ – the processes through which such feelings are produced and struggled for and over. As we have noted in our reading of the Qantas ‘Feel Like Home’ campaign, the construction of particular feelings of belonging relies not only on its inclusions but also on its structuring exclusions, or what is absented or repressed in the models of sociality that provide a basis for identification. Such inclusions and exclusions are, we suggest, not coincidental but rather products of political settlement, whereby particular images and norms of belonging have become installed and are reiterated as dominant within a particular setting. Yet, because politics are never entirely settled once and for all, ‘belonging’ does not constitute a given or uncontested condition but rather an object or field of ongoing struggle.

It is important, here, to provide a brief reflection on the relations between belonging and citizenship. While belonging is irreducible to citizenship, both formal definitions of and the politics surrounding citizenship have material implications for both the experience of belonging and the relations of power that shape the terrain upon which struggles for belonging take place. Equally, however, media practices and representations may inform, as well as be informed by, definitions of citizenship, and media provide a vital terrain through which debates about citizenship are (well or ill) informed. In addition, as several contributions to this volume highlight, media engagement and use provide a vital part of the social terrain within which belonging is experienced, and individuals’ engagement with media institutions, practices and projects can provide resources that work to empower or disempower them in their experience of and struggles for belonging. Media institutions and practitioners are also, significantly, actors in their own right, whose actions and representations do not simply reflect state agendas or everyday life but are also shaped by their own identities, concerns and agendas.

This book aims to consider, and analyse, the multiple ways in which media are implicated in belonging, how it is constructed and the struggles which surround it. While this is a potentially broad terrain, it is focused through three thematic sections. Part I (which this chapter opens) provides a series of theoretical and historical engagements with both the concept of belonging, and how different media sectors and practices are implicated in Australia’s politics of belonging. Part II provides a set of case studies of how the mediated politics of belonging affects and implicates a particular group, Sudanese Australians, as these politics play out across and through mediated public spaces and, simultaneously, how Sudanese Australians are engaged in mediated struggles to belong and over what defines belonging. Part III, by contrast, examines a number of academic projects that seek, in different ways, to intervene in the politics of belonging, providing both practical avenues for achieving shifts in mediated politics and reflecting on the challenges such projects confront. Before we turn to introduce the constituent chapters of this book in greater detail, however, we turn first to further elaborate on the concept of belonging, and to provide an initial consideration of the socio-historical context in which this book’s engagement with Australia’s politics of belonging is situated.

Australia’s ‘Politics of Belonging’

As Nira Yuval-Davis has defined it, the ‘politics of belonging’ refers to ‘specific political projects aimed at constructing belonging in particular ways to particular collectivities that are, at the same time, themselves being constructed by these projects in very particular ways’ (2005, 197). Here, as we previously focused on the divergent connotations of Noble’s reference to belonging as a ‘settled feeling’, we highlight the different meanings of the concept of a political ‘project’. On the one hand, as Yuval-Davis uses it, this term refers to a course of action that is future oriented, and to the achievements of those courses of action. On the other, shifting from noun to verb, to ‘project’ refers to the process of envisioning a future state of affairs, of the ‘projected’ relations that particular political projects seek to put in place. Taking both aspects into account, we may ask questions about the sort of relations envisioned or projected in different mobilizations of a politics of belonging, and the degree to which particular projects are successful in realizing these visions, fully or partially, and installing them in the public imaginary. As Yuval-Davis (2005) suggests, the politics of belonging combines a reference to practices (or ‘projects’) that seek to realize and/or maintain particular relations of belonging, and the ongoing production of social relations that are both the outcomes of such practices and that form the conditions for further practices.

Such practices of belonging are primarily concerned with the definition and management of social boundaries surrounding who or what ‘belongs’, and are thereby welcomed, in a particular social space or community. While by comparison to more easily identifiable constructs such as ‘nationality’ or ‘citizenship’ the idea of ‘belonging’ may appear rather abstract, theorists of intersectionality have noted that boundaries and categorizations of belonging are seldom constructed on a single axis. Rather, these boundaries and categorizations are produced along the convergent and divergent lines of nationality, ethnicity, ‘race’, gender, class, religion, age and sexuality, alongside other categories of identity that provide the grounds for variable practices and experiences of inclusion and exclusion (Rigoni 2012, Yuval Davis 2011, Anthias 2008). As a ground on which experiences and conditions of ‘ontological security’ are socially distributed, ‘belonging’ refers not only to an object of struggle but also to the stakes around which contests over belonging are conducted. Ghassan Hage (1998, 21) has memorably referred to these processes as subjects’ ‘struggles to make their lives viable’. Thus, for example, where subjects struggle for recognition within a national space, or to redefine the boundaries around which an economy of national belonging operates, this is not because nationhood has an inherent value but because it provides a significant ground upon and through which ‘belonging’ is socially organized and distributed.

‘National belonging’ remains, nevertheless, a significant site of articulation in the politics of belonging, intersecting with (though not reducible to) formal definitions of, debates surrounding and everyday experiences of citizenship. Kevin Dunn (2005) has drawn on the work of Judith Butler to suggest that definitions and experiences of national belonging are dependent on processes of performative reiteration and repetition, through acts and statements that are produced, constrained and judged according to the normative orders installed by previous iterations of national identityand its limits, while non-normative identities and performances are critiqued or punished. In the case of Australia, Dunn argues, an effect of its history is that sedimented norms of national identity and belonging, which have been historically constructed by reference to white and later Anglo-Celtic identity, remain persistent. As Val Colic-Peisker recounts in the next chapter in this book, the Federation of British colonies into the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 installed the norm of white Australia as a political settlement that dominated society for the next half-century, largely as a consequence of the restriction of immigration to white migrants from the British Isles. Nevertheless, the economic requirement of an expanded intake of immigrant labour in the post-war period saw the gradual contestation and partial displacement of the norm of white Australia in favour of policies and discourses of ‘multiculturalism’ that, at their peak in the early 1990s, sought to install a new vision of Australia as a ‘multicultural nation’.

Although multicultural policies and constructions of Australia may be argued to have partially contested and troubled the sedimented norms of white Australia, Dunn notes that ‘multiculturalism is by no means sedimented as a national norm in Australia’ (2005, 35). While multiculturalism involved a qualified representation of Australian national identity as both constituted and enhanced by cultural pluralism, alongside policies that involved some recognition and facilitation of minority rights, in recent years this focus has been displaced in favour of a framework centred on imperatives of ‘social cohesion’ and ‘harmony’ (Ho 2014, Harris 2010). ‘Social cohesion’ has developed as a policy approach that seeks to promote shared values and social equality across various groups (Markus and Dharmalingam 2012). However, its deployment has also been articulated to a problematization of multiculturalism’s emphasis on cultural pluralism (Ho 2014, 39). In this respect, Australia’s policy shifts align with an international critique of and backlash against multiculturalism, largely based on the long-standing critique emanating from the Right that,