Paper short abstract:

Through ethnographic research with twelve Chinese-Indonesian women living in Singapore and Australia, this paper considers subjectivity and victimhood as transnational family narratives of political exile, two decades after experiences of state driven gendered ethnic violence.

Paper long abstract:

In response to the 1998 attacks on Chinese-Indonesians, many young women left Indonesia through family efforts to ensure their safety. Drawing on ethnographic research with twelve Chinese-Indonesian women living in Singapore and Australia, this paper considers challenges to transnational families due to the various states' mobility regimes two decades after experiences of gendered ethnic violence. In contrast to current approaches to these overseas Chinese-Indonesians broadly as migrants, we emphasize their departures and lives in terms of exile. Thus, we illuminate the subtle and enduring effects of state driven political violence on their current gendered practices and family ties, by examining their intimate lives, particularly reproductive and childrearing practices. Their life history narratives reveal fragmented identities and contingent household formations which, while enabling family resilience for some, created long-term fissures for the majority of our respondents. We argue for more critical attention to how gender mutually constitutes political experiences of exile, and the long-term impacts of state driven political violence on marriage and parent-child relations. In doing so we try to address how Chinese Indonesian women as marginalised groups operate within the discourse of state driven political violence as well as the degree to which their identification as 'victims' empower them to re-construct the state's mobility regimes.

Paper short abstract:

In post-colonial Australia, the state government of Queensland continues to wield power over the construction of historical narratives and Indigenous identities. This paper explores the discursive power of histories in the construction of Queensland Aboriginal identities.

Paper long abstract:

During early settlement and up until the mid-1980s, Queensland Aboriginal groups found themselves under the 'Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 (QLD)'. This Act gave colonial authorities enormous powers over the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in Queensland. As a result, huge quantities of documents were produced, including records of births, deaths, marriages, removals, work places, crimes, family connections, 'tribal' affiliations and stolen wages. While Aboriginal people are known to have a practice of detailed and far-reaching oral histories that include complex genealogical information and stories from the period of 'first contact' and earlier, many in Queensland have been separated from knowledgable Elders and currently find themselves in search of ways to fill the gaps in their social memory. As a result, they are now seeking out more information from this repository of restricted records. Through the Community and Personal Histories team of the state government, Aboriginal people may request access from government historians to all the information pertaining to their ancestors. These documents often expose narratives about the past that contradict histories shared among family members and cause problems for the construction of family identities. While ostensibly an attempt to return indigenous cultural property to its rightful owners, in reality this process allows the state to continue to construct and define what it is to be Aboriginal. This paper explores the role of state histories in the definition of indigeneity.

Paper short abstract:

I explore memories of specific events of religious violence across three different residential clusters in Mumbai. How does the Indian state feature in these memories? How does this influence people's sense of collective victimhood, if at all?

Paper long abstract:

In 1992-1993, Mumbai witnessed one of the worst Hindu-Muslim riots. Muslim victimhood in Mumbai has since been widely written about both in popular and in academic literature. In 1997, in Ramabai Nagar, a Dalit-Buddhist neighbourhood in Mumbai, 10 people were killed when the police opened fire against protestors. Although not as widely written about, this is a significant event in Dalit and Dalit-Buddhist collective history in Maharashtra. Twenty years on, how do people remember these events? In October 2016-April 2017, I conducted fieldwork in three different religious residential clusters in Mumbai. I identified Mumbra as a majority Muslim space, Dadar Parsi Colony as a majority Zoroastrian space and Gautam Nagar, Dadar as a majority Dalit-Buddhist space. My PhD project seeks to understand how the residents of these spaces remember these violent events. I interviewed people about their memories of these events. What are the different memories and narratives that exist about these events? Since this investigation was conducted twenty years after the fact, there were very few of my respondents who were directly affected by the violence. In this paper I wish to address the following questions. Which of these narratives engendered the sense of collective victimhood? And how does the perception of the role of the Indian state in these events feature in these narratives and memories?

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how the Greek Cypriot Diaspora in Australia has been affected by the Missing Persons of Cyprus from the 1974 Turkish invasion. This research gives a voice to the relatives and explores their personal experiences of being a victim of warfare and challenging governments for answers decades later.

Paper long abstract:

Ethnographic interviewing is used to explore relatives’ personal experience concerning their missing relatives from the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974. The research also has an intensely personal dimension, reflecting upon the author’s family member’s own experiences and following their personal journeys of wanting to find their loved ones by lobbying governments and NGOs to provide answers. Historical research also gives input into people’s experiences and circumstances so as to serve as a basis for recommending practical applications to somehow make improvements to lobbying in the global community. This Cyprus humanitarian issue involves up to 1,464 Greek Cypriot and 502 cases of Turkish Cypriot Missing Persons — both military personnel and civilians, including women and children. This is still a current and ongoing international humanitarian problem. The paper explores issues such as experiences with authorities, psychological impact, opinions on how decision makers should have / could have resolved the issue decades earlier, and how things could be improved in today’s society in the 21st Century. One question raised is whether the relatives of Greek Cypriot Missing Persons had adequate government support to cope with being victims of warfare and conflict, both from homeland Cyprus and new homeland Australia. How can international humanitarian issues from warfare be handled better by governments in future?

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how the state is actualised through frontline welfare services, specifically those that rely on the work of volunteers. Ethnographic fieldwork conducted at one of these sites explores how volunteers balance empathy for clients on the one hand, and state bureaucracy, on the other.

Paper long abstract:

Welfare delivery evokes images of large institutions that enforce state policy through the guidance of professionally trained social workers and bureaucrats. However, supplementary welfare supports in the form of material aid is delivered through a network of smaller sites such as Emergency Relief (ER) Centres. ER centres provide immediate assistance in the form of food parcels and food vouchers. In this paper, I draw from 8 months ethnographic work at one of these sites. It examines how the welfare state is actualised through front-line welfare delivery. These sites rely on the work of volunteers, who have some independence to use their discretion to distribute material aid. The paper will explore how volunteers, while not having an explicit mandate from the state, ultimately serve the functions of the state. Volunteers are not simply impersonal bureaucrats, they balance the responsibility of delivering material aid 'fairly,' with their inclinations to judge clients with empathy. Volunteers can personalise their dialogue, share personalised advice and advise clients through empathetic dialogue. In doing so they provide some spontaneous counselling while categorising people based on policy to evaluate the person's eligibility for a welfare package. Throughout the paper I will explore how state categories are reproduced through these semi-formal engagements between volunteers and clients.

Paper short abstract:

For decades, indigenous medics in southeastern Myanmar struggled for the health and rights of ethnic minorities. With fledgling peace and democracy, the medics' ongoing quest for recognition illustrates how the subjectivity of the 'victim' can be redefined to empower marginalised communities.

Paper long abstract:

Over the past twenty-five years, a network of indigenous medics has grown into a strong parastate system for health service delivery in Myanmar's contested borderlands. Working as part of community-based and ethnic health organisations, indigenous medics have provided vital care in areas where ethnic minorities were subjected to state violence and abuses. Their positioning as, simultaneously, victims of the state and survivors struggling for the health and rights of their communities shaped the subjectivities of these marginalised actors. At the same time, the medics' quest for health and human rights in southeastern Myanmar was inextricably linked with a political struggle for the recognition of ethnic minority governance systems as legitimate.

As Myanmar now undergoes fledgling democratisation and as peace discussions proceed unsteadily between the new government and different ethnic armed organisations, the medics' ongoing struggle for recognition highlights what is at stake in the country's contemporary health systems reform. Indeed, the state's new National Health Plan is framed within a centralised political model, which does not recognise ethnic governance systems. Current expansions of state systems for health into the borderlands are perceived as renewed attempts by the state to control ethnic minority communities and their resources. The reactions of indigenous medics to these evolutions - and their attempts to advance an alternative model for health systems reform - in turn illustrate how local actors are redefining the subjectivity of the 'victim' in their quest for empowerment as political subjects with a role in the construction of a new Myanmar.