SEMINAR: Anthropology and Sociology Seminar Series 2015: Charmaine Lim and Ashleigh Louise Haw, PhD candidates Anthropology and Sociology UWA

Two pre-fieldwork seminars:

Charmaine Lim, PhD Candidate, Anthropology and Sociology, UWA Imagining home and constructing identity: Transnationalism and diaspora amongst Filipino migrants in Australia and Singapore

This project aims to understand how men and women of Filipino background experience migration and how they construct belonging in a new country. More specifically, this project seeks to understand how these experiences influence forms of identity constructed between settings, how memory is used in the shaping of these identities, and how emotions are experienced across distances. This project will look at the constructions of belonging and identity from a care perspective, looking at how the "language of care" travels across families, markets, communities and nation-states. This project will present a clearer picture of how Filipinos situate themselves not only in relation to concepts of care inherited from their country of origin, but also on how Filipino migrants situate care-based orientations to accommodate or resist the nature of their overseas employment.

Ashleigh Louise Haw, PhD Candidate, Anthropology and Sociology, UWA

Public Discourse and the News Media: The Relationship between Mainstream Media Content and the Attitudes of Western Australians towards Asylum Seekers and Refugees

The proposed research will adopt a qualitative design using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to investigate the relationship between media and societal discourses on asylum seekers and refugees in Western Australia (WA). There is no Australian research to date that has directly focused on the relationship between media discourses and the views of the wider community. The overarching principle guiding the proposed study is that news media plays a key role in informing the Australian electorate on highly politicised topics such as asylum seekers and refugees and therefore, has considerable potential to influence, and be influenced by, societal perspectives on the issue. Examining this relationship is critical to addressing Australia's controversial treatment of asylum seekers and refugees as the dominant discourses within a society can significantly impact on the policy directions of the Australian government regarding humanitarian entrants. The proposed research will provide insight into how societal discourses are formed and reinforced by the information presented to the public about the asylum seeker issue, enabling for a more critical understanding of these discourses and how they can be addressed.