- Title
- Ubuntu-led settlement: migrant aspirations for emplacement in regional Australia
- Creator
- Crosbie, Eliza Jane
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2025
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (Phd)
- Description
- The research for this thesis emerged from a community-led study conducted by and with individuals from the Great Lakes Region of Africa, living in urban Australia, whose needs were unmet by Australia’s humanitarian settlement program. In the absence of formal qualifications, and in the face of compounding urban challenges, many community members perceived that moving to regional areas would allow them to cultivate more successful settlement outcomes. Guided by these initial findings, a community-led, cross-cultural research collaboration was established, which aimed to develop an evidence base to understand the hopes and aspirations of Great Lakes community members living in Australia, and to advocate for policy change that could nourish improved outcomes. This thesis is embedded within that collaboration. Its discrete aim is to explore the relationship between African ways of knowing and being (Ubuntu) and notions of emplacement, and to understand how these relationships might inform contemporary humanitarian migrant settlement policy and practice in Australia. This research was undertaken through a performative, Ubuntu-led research process guided by more-than-human methodologies. These methodologies centred the vitality of the more-than-human world, and the social and embodied encounters of the interviews led to the emergence of the “more-than-interview”. The more-than-interview seeks to respond to the spontaneous, embodied, and often unexpected interactions, including with non-humans, which took place in the interviews. For example, uduseke—seed baskets—present in several homes played a performative role that enabled me to more deeply understand participants’ enduring connections to pre-migration life and the hopes they held for farming futures in Australia. Encounters such as this revealed the varied relationships entangled within participants’ efforts to belong in Australia or, as I came to understand it, efforts at Ubuntu-led emplacement. In this thesis, participants’ life experiences across diverse temporalities and localities are described using the themes of dislocation, repair, and hope. Dislocation reflects the harsh disjuncture experienced when participants were dis-located from the Great Lakes Region of Africa, the place where their lives had been unfolding for generations. Repair foregrounds the active ways that participants have been repairing their dislocation through practices of ubuntu, such as farming, in both urban and regional Australia. Hope looks toward the future to understand the ongoing, yet-to-be-met aspirations that participants strive for as they emplace themselves, weaving their being-becoming—a formative philosophy and practice of ubuntu—within the fabric of Australian society. Guided by the relationality and resilience of Ubuntu-led emplacement, this thesis proposes Ubuntu-led settlement as an approach to support successful settlement of Great Lakes communities in Australia.
- Subject
- emplacement; refugee settlement; more-than-interview; relational emplacement; Ubuntu-led settlement; regional settlement; more-than-human research; more-than-human methodologies; Hhuman geography; Ubuntu; African philosopy; policy research; Ubuntu-led emplacement
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1519644
- Identifier
- uon:57409
- Rights
- Copyright 2025 Eliza Jane Crosbie
- Language
- eng
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