A Plural and Uneven World: Queer Migrations and the Politics of Race and Sexuality in Sydney, Australia

This dissertation examines how the geographies of sexuality and race shape queer migrants’ experiences of settlement and citizenship in Sydney, Australia. Against a backdrop of economic shifts in the Asia Pacific and Australia\u27s long history of racialized exclusion, I conducted 43 in-depth interviews with queer migrants and \u272nd generation\u27 adult children of migrants who reflect the diversity of Australia\u27s migration streams, including historically important migration from Southern and Eastern Europe and increasingly significant movements from South, Southeast, and East Asia. Through those interviews, I examined participants\u27 migration histories, everyday spatial trajectories in the city, and involvement with queer and ethnic communities in and beyond the city. This was supplemented by an additional 23 interviews with policy-makers and advocates whose work intersected with these issues, as well as the analysis of archival materials related to the politics of race and sexuality in Sydney. In contrast with a depoliticizing \u27torn between two worlds\u27 frame that imagines queer migrants as being torn between ethnic or religious communities on the one hand, and LGBTQ communities on the other, I showed—in dialogue with Hannah Arendt\u27s writing on plurality in a single, unevenly shared world—how participants cultivated opportunities to appear and to act politically as they worked to make a place for themselves in Sydney. This dissertation collects three articles, which speak to both the quotidian politics of everyday life and participants’ organized political projects in Sydney. The first article examines the politics of race and multiculturalism in the context of a city council-sponsored project working to raise awareness about ‘sex, sexuality, and gender diversity’ within Sydney’s migrant and ethnic communities. The second contributes to literatures on encounters across difference by showing how experiences of sexual racism worked as an obstacle to participants’ sense of belonging and citizenship, even as these ‘bad encounters’ also provided an impetus to political organizing. The third article examines the publically intimate nature of debates around migrant integration and explores the intimate geopolitics through which participants made a place for themselves in Sydney, which entailed assertions of \u27privacy\u27 as much as more immediately recognizable forms of \u27public\u27 politics

Inconvenience, ambivalence, and abolition : A politics of attachment and detachment in geography

In this commentary, we explore the idea of detachment that we see as central to Anderson's notion of attachment but that nevertheless does not take centre stage in the paper. We situate detachment not as attachment's antithesis, opposite, or negative, but as its structural condition and as irretrievably interwoven with attachment. Through Berlant's recent writing, we foreground the notion of ambivalence as a way to think about the complexity of attachment–detachment and to foreground politics and differences in these processes. Then, we draw on abolitionist writers like Gilmore and Lewis to highlight the complicated intersection of structural and affective attachment and to consider the possible intellectual and political stakes of pursuing a geography of attachment.publishedVersionPeer reviewe

Intervention : Engaging post-foundational political theory requires an ‘enmeshed’ approach

This intervention argues for renewed engagements with post-foundational political theory (PFPT) within political geography. We feel that post-foundational political geography may be on the cusp of becoming consolidated as a distinct and expansive approach to political geographic scholarship, but we argue that reductionist and binary caricatures of its central distinction between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ must be avoided for it to reach its full potential. To this end, we suggest that ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ need to be considered as more ‘enmeshed’ than they have often been represented. We write as four political geographers and will, each in our own ways, highlight how an ‘enmeshed’ approach to PFPT can better translate its conceptual interventions into political geographic research whilst facilitating productive encounters with the broader worlds of critical geographic inquiry.publishedVersionPeer reviewe

Editorial Introduction to ‘Paddison Geographies’

Reflecting biographical entanglements at varying points in both their and Ronan’s lives and careers, the contributors bear witness to Ronan’s expansive intellect and the thematic, conceptual, disciplinary, methodological and geographical breadth of his research concerns. We can learn much from studying an academic life, and especially one as rich and prodigious as Ronan’s. And yet, as academics, we do so little of this kind of labour, depriving ourselves of repositories of vital wisdom and knowledge and wastefully neglecting hard won intellectual resources. In Ronan’s scholarly corpus, there is much to excavate, reappraise, and appreciate. But this Editorial Introduction to ‘Paddison Geographies’ will not revisit Ronan’s research, teaching, and service – this task is performed with authority, empathy, wisdom and verve in the formal introduction to the Special Issue written by Chris Philo and thereafter in the articles which follow

Spooks and Holy Ghosts: Spectral Politics and the Politics of Spectrality in Hilary Mantel's 'Eight Months on Ghazzah Street'

This article maps the complex interactions between the political and the spectral in Hilary Mantel’s critically neglected novel Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, charting the complex and sometimes paradoxical relationships between agency, invisibility, spectrality, and power that are present in this text. By mobilizing the work of Jacques Rancière alongside the thinking of Jacques Lacan, this article establishes Eight Months on Ghazzah Street as a text driven by the need to articulate the politically charged nature of the liminal space wherein individuals and events can be rendered spectral

‘We’re in Asia’ : Worlding LGBTQI+ activism otherwise in Sydney

Building on recent work in postcolonial urban studies that has developed more genuinely plural approaches to urban theorising, this article poses the problem of ‘worlding’ in relation to urban LGBTQI+ activism in Sydney, Australia. Specifically, the article examines how Sydney is variously worlded as or against ‘Asia’ in public debate around LGBTQI+ politics and in the imaginaries of activists living in Sydney. These worldings are shown to be an important aspect of queer activisms and urbanisms in Sydney, and I argue that attention to this worlding can productively complement a renewed focus on place and specificity in queer urban literatures. While imagining Sydney or Australia as part of Asia is itself no guarantee of productive politics or of decentring epistemologies, the article argues that some of these worldings do provide an occasion and a provocation to think elsewhere and otherwise in ways that are responsive to the specific character of White Australia’s colonial pasts and presents, while also generatively (dis)locating Sydney beyond the ‘West’.publishedVersionPeer reviewe

Evaluating otherwise: hierarchies and opportunities in publishing practices

This short paper responds to the provocations set out in Kirsi Pauliina Kallio’s recent editorial on ‘Subtle radical moves in scientific publishing’ and emerges out of my participation in a Fennia-organized panel at the 2017 Nordic Geographers’ Meeting where participants reflected on the challenges and opportunities of creating a more equitable and pluralistic international publishing environment. Given the dominance of English language publishing in international academic work and the broader geopolitics of knowledge production through which some contexts, approaches, and modes of knowledge are regularly devalued, I suggest that—to the extent that publishing outlets are evaluated or ranked—they should be evaluated and ranked, in part, based on their contribution to a pluralistically international academy. This revaluation could help shape the informal assessments made by scholars in the context of hiring, funding, and other key decisions.  It could also be integrated into more formal channels, such as within the deliberations of the boards who produce publication rankings in, for example, Finland’s Publication Forum.  Such a tactic need not preclude other work to contest rankings hierarchies and audit cultures as they advance the neoliberalization of academic work, but it does 1) suggest the importance of paying attention to what and how scholars value when we evaluate publishing outlets and 2) point toward the potential of critical and creative engagement with the range of processes (i.e. indexing, accrediting, measuring, ranking etc.) that surround and subsist within academic publishing

Ambivalent methods, geographical difference, and the politics of feeling-knowing

We offer an engagement with the generous responses to our article, ‘Feeling Otherwise’. We think with the authors who responded to our paper to sketch out an affirmative way to understand the concept of ambivalence. We clarify key points, reflect on the responses, and make suggestions for ways to explore this topic further.publishedVersionNon peer reviewe