Claiming Belonging: Migrant Solidarities through Arts and Media

Promotional image credited to Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Hello 

Thank you for tuning in to the seventh webinar of our 2024 series, Critical Public Conversations: Sovereignty and Solidarity: Redefining belonging in so-called Australia.

Sukhmani Khorana presents a series of case studies that begins with the forging of connections between Indigenous and refugee communities to demonstrate an evolution of Indigenous migrant allyship. These case studies include a range of migrant-initiated arts and media projects and activist initiatives that demonstrate solidarity with Indigenous people and causes. These activities have been led by primarily second-generation racialised migrants in Australia who demonstrate their solidarity with Indigenous causes or work alongside Indigenous artists. For Khorana, these alliances embody a kind of transversal solidarity. Alliances in which the children of migrants and refugees are working through the tension of demanding more diversity while residing on unceded Indigenous lands.

By detailing some more recent research and an advocacy-activist project, Khorana comments on how belonging, aspiration and empathy have the potential to be reclaimed for social change when they're mediated and community-based. Through this work, Khorana contributes to a nuanced understanding of solidarity as generative of political subjectivities and collective identities. Solidarity entails building alliances among diverse actors. It is situated in space and time and organised in multi-scalar relations. Crucially, solidarity also suggests an ethics of care around representing communities with which one shares some but not all experiences of structural disadvantage. One way such transversal solidarity can occur is by drawing on one’s own experiences with racialisation and with trauma, in using that kind of lived expertise to 'analyse nearby'. This practice is part of an overarching set of principles for decentring whiteness that focuses on exploring connections between different kinds of marginalised refugee and migrant communities and between migrant and Indigenous communities. Finding shared connections is about joining forces with one another and working towards shared objectives.

Questions and comments from the audience

• Is there a problematising of aligning Diaspora futurities with Settler-Coloniser futurities – that is, reconsidering solidarity in relation to resistance against global capitalism-coloniality?

• Have these kinds of initiatives that you're talking about produced more intentional contact between Indigenous and migrant populations?

• In your research, have you experienced spaces or avenues that allow for migrant/settler community members to work for and with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities?

Presenter

Sukhmani Khorana is a Scientia Associate Professor in the School of Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales (Australia). She is the external co-lead of the ‘Migration, Im/mobility and Belonging’ research theme at Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies, University of Sydney. She was appointed Editor-in-Chief of the journal, ‘Food, Culture and Society’ in 2023.
Sukhmani has published extensively on media diversity, food in multicultural contexts, and the politics of empathy and belonging. She is the author of Mediated Emotions of Migration: Reclaiming Affect for Agency (2023) and The Tastes and Politics of Inter-Cultural Food in Australia (2018). She has a forthcoming co-authored book, Migrants, Television and Australian Stories: A New History (2025).

Critical Public Conversations

Sovereignty and Solidarity: Redefining Belonging in So-Called Australia

In 2024, the Australian Centre’s Critical Public Conversations series will explore questions of belonging, borders, and place. We investigate how Australia’s founding as a settler colony constrains capacities to welcome refugees to these shores and highlight moments of transnational solidarity that bypass the settler order. We are guided by theorists, activists, and artists exploring the intersections and incommensurabilities between Indigenous, migrant, and other racialised communities’ politics and lived experiences. This series will go beyond settler binaries, boundaries, and borders, to explore the ways more humane international, domestic, and indeed interpersonal relations are inextricably bound to justice for First Nations.  

Later this year

The Australian Centre is located at the University of Melbourne, Parkville campus, on unceded Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung land. We acknowledge Country and the people belonging to Country, the Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung Traditional Owners, and we value our continuing relationship with you and your on-going care for Country. We thank the Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung Cultural Heritage Corporation for your generous and ongoing contributions to the Australian Centre.

We also acknowledge that the University of Melbourne has campuses on Country of other First Nation groups, and we acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the Parkville, Southbank, Werribee and Burnley campuses, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Bunurong/Boon Wurrung peoples; the Yorta Yorta Nations, whose Country the Shepparton and Dookie campuses are located, and the Dja Dja Wurrung Nations, Melbourne University’s Creswick campus location. 

The Australia Centre acknowledges all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and First Nations peoples whose work, lives and Country intersect with ours. We acknowledge that invasion and colonisation has caused harm that is on-going to First Peoples.