ICS Seminar Series 2013

Jerry Watkins (ICS/UWS), 'Upwardly Mobile' This presentation considers how mobile, social and online content and devices can impact the design of creative engagement systems for communities and individuals. It presents findings from fieldwork conducted across south Asia and the Pacific Islands, and emphasizes how ‘access’ to mobile/online services does not automatically equate to ‘engagement’. This research is informed by sociotechnical systems theory, which examines information and communication technology from the perspective of both systems and users.

The presentation will also highlight innovative research methods developed at the intersection of ethnography and interaction design, in particular the application of communicative ecologies. BIO: Jerry Watkins current ARC-funded projects include ‘Opportunity Spaces’, an investigation of digital applications within shared-use education facilities, and ‘Mobile Indonesians’, a study of mobile telephony and cultural change in urban, regional and rural Indonesia. He has led projects with partners including Intel Corporation and has served as an Invited Expert on Mobile Media for UNESCO. He was a project leader at the ARC Centre of Excellence Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation (at QUT) and a member of the Swinburne Institute for Social Research before joining the Institute for Culture and Society (UWS).

Jerry has over 20 years’ high-profile international experience in communication and design and led major projects for some of the world’s biggest telecom companies including AT&T Wireless, Deutsche Telekom, Telecom Italia and Vodafone Group. He is Associate Professor in Design and Director International at the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, UWS.

Shanthi Robertson (ICS/UWS), 'Temporality and the (non) temporary subject: emerging forms of labour migration in Australia' This paper provides a theoretical and conceptual analysis of ‘being temporary’ in the context of two forms of temporary migrant labour that are of increasing significance in Australia: Temporary Graduate Workers (TGWs) and Working Holiday Makers (WHMs). Significant recent policy changes to these visa categories allow for extended periods of work and residence in Australia, primarily among young people who are seeking an overseas work/life experience or a pathway to more permanent migration.

The article brings the various temporal dimension of these migration schemes to the fore, asking how temporariness functions as both a disciplinary practice of the state and as a social process. In doing so, it problematizes the idea of temporariness as both a normative constraint and a qualitative experience in a national context in which ‘settler-citizen’ paradigms continue to dominate discursive constructions of migration. It creates a temporal framework for understanding these emerging forms of long-term temporary migration, revealing key temporal aspects of TGW and WHM migration processes: temporal eligibility and migrant subjectivities; temporal constraints and differential inclusion; and the contingent boundaries around temporariness, extended temporariness and permanence. This has salience for continued understandings of emerging forms of temporary migration in wider contexts.

BIO: Shanthi Robertson is a Career Development Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society. Shanthi was awarded her PhD in International Studies from RMIT University in 2009. She worked as a lecturer in Global Studies and researcher at the Globalism Research Centre at RMIT University until she joined the Institute in 2013. Her research over the last five years has centred on the political and social consequences of the intersections between international education and skilled migration in Australia, exploring how new forms of citizenship, transnationalism and urban transformation have emerged within the education-migration nexus. Her first book, ‘Transnational Student-Migrants and the State: The Education-Migration Nexus’ was published in April this year. Her research interests are broadly around the social and cultural consequences of globalisation, with a specific focus on labour mobility, transnational migration, citizenship, multiculturalism, and language politics. Shanthi is currently working on two research projects: on new forms of temporary labour migration in traditionally settler-citizen contexts; and on housing, employment and social cohesion in multicultural neighbourhoods in Melbourne’s inner north