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We reflect on the process
We contribute to the development of grassroots sociology and heritage practice in Australia.
Just as we ask audiences to respond to the experiences of our project contributors, we critique and learn from our own experience of practice.
Compact projects with little outlay in finance make great testing grounds for the exploration of questions in methodology and common ethical dilemmas in curating, ethnography, placemaking, sociology and heritage work.
Past Presentations
Finding Empathy in Everyday Objects
2016, The Drawing Room, Radio National
PK interviews Katrina and Dr Daniella Trimboli, in the early days of creating our Lost and Found Archive and of The Good Room.
Italian/Australian: Creating Culture/Defining Diaspora: Moving beyond the migrant narrative in the community museum
2018, New York, Diaspore Italiane Conference.
This symposium – the first international conference of its kind – brings together researchers and practitioners from Australia, the United States, Italy and other locations to explore the vicissitudes of Italians and Italian identity in the transcultural spaces defined by mobility. We travelled to New York to participate. Watch us talk about the making of the Italian/Australian exhibition, and the value of personal experience in finding what is missing in policy.
Visualising the Ethnic Experience, International Visual Sociology Conference, 2021, in Dublin, Ireland.
“Her, Grace (2014) ‘cuts and pastes’ in ‘bits and pieces’ the complexity of diasporic life as it navigates everyday joys and traumas within a political framework that does not always accommodate its difference. It destabilises the white national legacy that the current ItaloAustralian digital storytelling public archive attempts to consolidate.” (Trimboli 1999) Strangleman (1999) argues nostalgia is often confused with memory. Indeed, discourses of nostalgia are often used to dismiss or debase the remembering’s of communities and individuals whose heritage and sense of identity exists outside the dominant narratives of national heritage: nations remember, communities reminisce; national heritage constructs national identity, community heritage is nostalgic. Can otherwise ‘nostalgic’ photographs, film and oral history be critically repackaged to present audiences with nonmainstream versions of Australianess in the absence of complex representation or monuments within the nation’s grand narrative? Do attempts by cultural institutions to present neatly edited, narrative driven, ‘sharable stories’ lesson audiences’ inclination for deep listening? Is there merit in replicating the messy nature of memory?
A snapshot of Brunswick and Fawkner: Documenting ‘seen’ and ‘unseen’
International Visual Sociology Association Conference, 2021, Dublin, Ireland.
Situated in Melbourne’s north, Brunswick and Fawkner share a local council and the Upfield train line. Both were founded on Wurundjeri land. Both suburbs are understood to have multicultural and socio-economically diverse populations. However, there is little doubt that both are becoming more ‘White’, as fewer people born in non-English speaking countries settle in the area and older generations of non-English speaking migrants pass on. While council argues that gentrification has ‘revitalised’ both Brunswick and Fawkner, recorded here, are local perspectives on how the process or indeed, the threat of gentrification raises anxieties about job security, housing affordability, access to public transport and a loss of the ‘authentic’ local cultures of these neighbourhoods, shaped through the developed experiences and contributions of past, working class, migrant generations.
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