'Exarcheia doesn't exist': Authenticity, Resistance and Archival Politics in Athens

My thesis investigates the ways people, materialities and urban spaces interact to form affective ecologies and produce historicity. It focuses on the neighbourhood of Exarcheia, Athens’ contested political topography par excellence, known for its production of radical politics of discontent and resistance to state oppression and eoliberal capitalism. Embracing Exarcheia’s controversial status within Greek vernacular, media and state discourses, this thesis aims to unpick the neighbourhoods’ socio-spatial assemblage imbued with affect and formed through the numerous (mis)understandings and (mis)interpretations rooted in its turbulent political history. Drawing on theory on urban spaces, affect, hauntology and archival politics, I argue for Exarcheia as an unwavering archival space composed of affective chronotopes – (in)tangible loci that defy space and temporality. I posit that the interwoven narratives and materialities emerging in my fieldwork are persistently – and perhaps obsessively – reiterating themselves and remaining imprinted on the neighbourhood’s landscape as an incessant reminder of violent histories that the state often seeks to erase and forget. Through this analysis, I contribute to understandings of place as a primary ethnographic ‘object’ and the ways in which place forms complex interactions and relationships with social actors, shapes their subjectivities, retains and bestows their memories and senses of historicity

Lebanese, Indian and Anglo LGBTQ + young Australians’ experiences at school and university: an analysis from the middle

This article explores LGBTQ + young adults’ schooling and university experiences at the intersection of ethnicity and sexuality in Australia. Using the lenses of sexual citizenship and belonging, a sociomaterial polytextual analysis of the ‘middle’ was conducted with data from qualitative in-depth narrative and photo-elicitation interviews among Lebanese, Indian and Anglo LGBTQ + young adults. The analysis found that while participants had encountered bullying and prejudicial attitudes based on sexuality, gender and ethnicity, many of them had positive experiences at school and viewed university as facilitators of opportunity and discovery. The findings suggest that educational institutions are neither inherently safe nor unsafe; rather, they are important spaces whereby the sociomaterial entanglements of identity, sexual citizenship and belonging are negotiated. Crucially, they demonstrate that minority sexuality, ethnicity and gender themselves are not immutable barriers to participation, and call for strategic investment into spaces that support both student safety and critical discussion

The Entangled Sites of Memory: The Significance of Photography for the Contentious Movements of May 1968 and June 1936

Ph. D. ThesisThis thesis explores the photography of two major strike movements in French history, both of which have attained ‘iconic’ status and both of which produced substantial and diverse photographic records. The central aim of the thesis is to analyse these images, drawn from archives, exhibitions, digitised and printed collections, and examine their relationship to the collective memories and historiographical narratives of the strike movements. It analyses the entanglements and commonalities between the photographic representations of the two movements, and argues that the photographic record of these strike waves needs to be analysed in relation to the social context it was produced in. Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin and John Berger, it proposes an approach that links the production of a photographic record to the social contestation it displays, as well as analysing what the photographic afterlives of the movements tells us about how they have been subsequently understood. This thesis approaches this photographic record on three different levels: through particular photographers or exhibitions, through discrete themes and framings and as individual photographs. It provides an analysis of diverse body of sources, some of which have been extensively used and re-used, and others that are less well known. A key area of enquiry is how the preservation and presentation of the photographic record links to the historiography of the events they depict. This thesis places the photographic record of two important strike movements within contemporary historiographical debates and highlights the value of a comparative approach informed by methodical innovations, such as entangled and transnational history.AHRC Northern Bridge Doctoral Training partnership,Society for the Study of Labour Histor

Navigating Citizenship in the Harbour City: Sexuality, ethnicity and belonging among Lebanese, Indian and Anglo LGBTQ+ young adults in Sydney, Australia

Drawing on Karen Barad’s agential realism and the lens of citizenship, this thesis explores the lived experiences and attitudes of Lebanese, Indian and Anglo LGBTQ+ young adults living in Sydney, Australia. Data collection and analysis were based on qualitative in-depth narrative interviews (n=42) and optional follow-up photo-elicitation interviews (n=20). Participants’ responses, analysed abductively, were framed along broader themes of moral, cultural and sexual citizenship, each further contextualised using aspects of Barad’s theorising: diffraction, time and agency. The thesis has three main findings. First, ‘Australianness’ was predicated on a form of Whiteness that is linked to colonial history and disenfranchisement of First Nations peoples, with consequences for social participation, inclusion within LGBTQ+ communities, and sexual citizenship. Second, heteropatriarchal community values, material culture, religion and spatiotemporal geographies were found to be key factors that influenced young adults’ connection with their cultural communities. Third, the attainment of – or limits to – sexual citizenship and participation was found to be a collaborative endeavour created by an entanglement of formal and informal policies, everyday experiences and material factors. While intersections along the lines of ethnicity, gender, financial ability, locality, disability and so on influenced participants’ participation in domains of everyday life, employing a Baradian framework revealed that young people were far from passive subjects in their social environments and often found ways to explore various aspects of citizenship through an ever-evolving entanglement of agencies. The thesis concludes by arguing that key to the realisation of more just and promising futures and more embracing notions of youth citizenship is the attention paid to relations between belonging, hope and flourishing, which shape, and are shaped by, valences of moral, cultural and sexual citizenship

Games, push-backs and the everyday violence at the Bosnian-Croatian border

This thesis explores violence against migrants at the Croatian-Bosnian border, with the focus on migrants’ everyday sites and practices. Whilst the rich literature discusses structural violence against migrants at the EU’s borders, it omits to consider direct and concrete daily acts of violence. We also know little about violence against migrant men and violence at the latest transit spot at the Croatian-Bosnian border. This thesis addresses this research lacunae while drawing upon eight months of participant observations in makeshift camps in Velika Kladuša (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and 68 interviews with migrants. It questions diverse forms of violence against migrants and seeks to what degree and in which ways this violence impacts their everyday practices. In addition, it asks whether and how the dominant assumptions about race and gender impact migrant men’s experiences of violence and how this violence is circumscribed by the historico-political context of the Bosnian-Croatian border. The findings suggest that direct border violence against migrants – border attacks, takes place alongside more structural violence - border administrations and withdrawal of aid in makeshift camps. Yet border violence is also at work in migrants’ everyday practices where violence is least expected; in private sites, where violence is routinised and leaves no visible marks, but has power to harm or kill. This thesis also argues that Arab Muslim men, in this context at least, are most commonly subjected to border violence due to the dominant racialized and gendered assumptions about (migrant) men of colour as dangerous and in need of violent interventions. Yet violence against migrants is also enforced and concealed by the Western dominant imagination of the Croatian-Bosnian border as a line between peaceful Europe and the violent Balkans. However, migrants challenge such assumptions by their own meaning makings of this geographical location upon their experiences of solidarities and violence here. This thesis nuances knowledge on border violence as a complex phenomenon that functions as an ongoing daily process across months or years rather than singular episodes that come and pass. By doing so, it demonstrates the importance of bringing direct but also taken-for-granted practices in research analysis of violence to develop an understanding of how violence is experienced and made meaning of by diverse people exposed to it

Disarming dissent: The institutional politics of sexual violence in the neoliberal university

For decades, feminists at Australian universities have fought to publicise and politicise the issue of campus sexual violence. These efforts have recently come to fruition, with universities publicly acknowledging the problem and undertaking various institutional reforms. However, there has been little scholarly attention paid to political struggles over sexual violence within universities. This thesis critically examines the politics of feminist activism against sexual violence at Australian university campuses. It situates this activism against the backdrop of the neoliberalisation of Australian universities, to reveal how feminists have challenged – and at times, acted in complicity with – these transformations in the landscape of Australian higher education. This analysis is both historical, drawing on archival material relating to the history of campus feminist politics, and contemporary, using data from interviews with students currently engaged in organising against sexual violence. It explores the strategies and tactics adopted by feminist collectives, the constraints on feminist mobilisation in the neoliberal university, and the shortcomings of these movements. This thesis makes two original contributions to knowledge. Firstly, it extends existing analyses of university sexual violence and contributes to the growing body of scholarship on this topic. Research on campus sexual violence in Australia has so far focused on policy analysis and prevalence data. While this provides an important basis for evaluating the scope of the problem and potential remedies, it is largely disconnected from political struggles over institutional responses to sexual violence, a gap this thesis seeks to fill. I offer an analysis of the historical and contemporary struggles that have created the conditions for institutional change, as well as the complex ways in which the neoliberal university undermines and constrains oppositional movements. Secondly, this thesis makes a theoretical contribution to the field of New and Feminist Institutionalism. It critically intervenes in the institutionalist field, drawing greater attention to the roles of macro-social contexts and actors in the form of social movements in processes of institutional change and proposing a framework that foregrounds these aspects of institutional politics. The findings of this research reveal significant limitations in Australian universities’ responses to sexual violence, with their actions falling short of both student demands and expert recommendations. I argue that these actions have largely functioned to consolidate managerial power and mitigate reputational risk, in doing so narrowing the space of political contestation. My analysis further illuminates the specific institutional constraints that bear upon student feminist organisers within the neoliberal university. This analysis offers strategic insights into feminist engagement with institutions, suggesting that student movements must develop the capacity to disrupt processes of institutional reproduction and challenge the reformist approach adopted by universities. A transformative response to campus sexual violence, I argue, will require broader and better-organised coalitions of staff and students in order to collectively challenge and overcome these constraints

Queering Governance at/of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY): Discourses of Gender, Sexuality, and Violence

This thesis highlights the centrality of gender, sexuality, and violence to the governing practices of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). It builds on queer, feminist and poststructural theories and contributes an innovative queer poststructural discourse analysis to studies of global politics. It does this by conceptualising the ICTY as a governance mechanism that is constituted by and adjudicates violence through the (re)production of cis-heteronormative discourses of gender, sexuality, and ethnic identity. The thesis shows how the ICTY is a gendered and gendering governance mechanism that is constitutive and agential, violent and violating. To do this, the thesis deconstructs discourses of gender, sexuality, and violence that are invoked by ICTY discourse, including the effects of these practices, such as legitimating criminalising and carceral responses to violence. The thesis begins by introducing its conceptual framework through an empirical analysis of the ICTY as a governance mechanism. Revealing the origin stories and logics of governance that constitute the ICTY, the thesis deploys cutting-edge queer methodology to highlight how the ICTY invokes gendered, Balkanist logics in its governing practices. These logics have significant effects on the ICTY’s juridical practices, legitimating the construction, denunciation, and incarceration of hyper-heteromasculine Balkan criminals, and the silencing of feminised, Balkan victims. Analysing key legal documents from five ICTY cases, the thesis illustrates that the ICTY governs through representation by organising violence through objectifying, humiliating, and dehumanising logics. It exposes how practices of legal violence (including victimisation, denunciation, excision, and paternalism) perpetuate Balkanist logics and gendered discourses to construct certain types of victims, perpetrators, and adjudicators. These practices legitimate discursive and juridical possibilities such as imprisonment, and co-exist with subversive discourses of violence. Ultimately, the thesis reveals that the ICTY (re)produces cis-heteronormative and essentialist discourses of gender, sexuality, and violence, and these enable the ICTY to make sense of, subvert, and govern violence. The thesis argues that these discourses have significant implications, including the (re)production of the straight, cis-gender legal subject as common-sense. They also institutionalise, through juridical practices, the violent, gendered and pejorative classification of violent and violated bodies in the former Yugoslavia

Eco-spirituality: Collective identity and spirituality in the wilderness action group

At a peripheral glance the collective action of a social movement group creates a perception of rational and homogenous internal group identity. This façade has led some social movement theorists to take for granted the internal cohesiveness of the groups they are studying. Yet this emphasis on the rationality and structure of collective action over-simplifies the complex and dynamic interactions that occur in the construction of individual and collective identities. Accordingly, the constructivist New Social Movement theoretical paradigm actively eschews these misleading assumptions, instead granting primacy to the study of the reflexive, complex and dynamic interactions that occur in the construction of individual and collective identities. By employing the tools provided by New Social Movement theory my study unravels one such under-researched identity, namely the diverse and multifaceted ‘eco-spiritual’ identity. The rich narratives of actors who consider themselves spiritual and are environmental activists are analysed through a case study of the Wilderness Acton Group, a collective within The Wilderness Society, Sydney. Analysis of the fieldwork data informs a theoretical and empirical understanding of social movements with regard to the negotiation and construction of political goals; trajectory and rejuvenation; individual movement motivation and participation; ongoing construction of group identity and solidarity; emotional commitment; action event selection; and group rituals, activism and practice