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Mobilising trauma, recognising refugees
Abstract   Peer reviewed

Mobilising trauma, recognising refugees

Julie M Matthews
Moving cultures, shifting identities: A conference about migration, connection, heritage and cultural memory, 2007 (Adelaide, Australia, 2007)
2007
url
http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/events/movingcultures.htmlView
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Abstract

Cultural Studies refugee
In Australia the figure of the refugee is mediated though forms of speech and representation that establish the experience as profoundly and fundamentally traumatised. Trauma discourse represents its object 'The Refugee' as in dire need of a wide gamut of humanitarian health and psychological interventions. Refugees have become a sign of humanitarian concern and intervention par excellence, and a prima facia object of knowledge, assistance and management (Malkki, 1996). On the one hand they stand for a seething mass of psychologically wounded victims in need of rescue by western cultures, and on the other for disruptive and barbarous threats to western culture and civilisation. Using photographs produced by refugee young people this paper considers the dehistoricisation of political and ideological understandings of migration and globalisation and the just potential of a politics of recognition (Markell, 2003).

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