It is certainly a difficult task to narrow the enormous range of research interests and needs to just two topics …
1. Intercultural relations – I’d second Amanda’s thoughts and add a few of my own. Currently the most common approaches to community relations and antiracism work focus on dialogue and are highly dependent on the participation, generosity and often the volunteer labour of Australians who are subjected to racism and prejudice. The demands of cross-cultural education, Interfaith dialogue, cultural awareness training etc place much of the burden of responding to racism and building better community relations on the very communities experiencing racism – in particular Muslim communities and organisations during the ‘war on terror’. These are also strategies which overestimate the importance of individual prejudice and underestimate structural or institutional racism. We need to develop more innovative approaches which distribute the hard work and responsibility of antiracism work more widely and which can tackle difficult questions and uncomfortable conversations beyond ‘harmony’ and the celebration of diversity.
2. Media and cultural diversity
Media provide some of our most widely shared cultural resources for understanding places we will never go to and people we will never meet. Images and information circulated through media also shape our understandings of our own neighbourhoods, and debates around Australian culture, values etc. While much media research focuses on identifying media ‘problems’ – stereotyping, misrepresentations, inflaming intercommunal tensions – we need to much better understand the role of media in everyday negotiations of cultural diversity. How do media shape our understandings of proximity and strangeness, connections and conflicts? How does media facilitate or constrain capacities to listen across differences? How can media contribute to social justice and processes of conflict transformation?
3. Multiculturalism and Indigenous sovereignty
The bifurcation in research, policy and programs around multiculturalism and Indigenous affairs continues largely unchanged – for very understandable reasons. Nevertheless, there is a need for research which can underpin more integrated approaches beyond simply ‘including’ Indigenous Australians in understandings of multiculturalism which have been developed with with a focus on migration, rather than Indigenous sovereignty. Recent research which identifies the shared use of public spaces (parks, beaches, shopping strips etc) as a catalyst for intercommunal tensions offers a possibility for innovative work. Research into place-sharing, neighbourliness and belonging must engage with the disspossession of Indigenous people and questions of land/place, otherwise we reproduce the logic of ‘terra nullius’ and develop strategies which again leave Indigenous Australians to negotiate a place within relationships of belonging developed by those who have benefited from their dispossession.
