“It doesn't make me any lessAboriginal”: The complex politics of translocal place‐making forIndigenous tertiary student migrants

Abstract

Indigenous migratory practices have never been comfortably explained using deterministic theories of migration. In this paper, we argue that translocalism offers new hopeful possibilities for building more robust and nuanced understandings of Indigenous migration and for extending theorisations of translocality in postcolonial settler‐states. Drawing on empirical evidence from a small‐scale exploratory study of Indigenous adults who migrated from rural/remote Australia, to Perth, Western Australia, to study at a university, we suggest that a particular politics of place‐making characterises Indigenous translocal subjectivities in settler states. These politics are evidenced by the ways in which the very act of movement from rural/remote areas to large cities for education can draw the authenticity of Indigenous identities into contestation. It also speaks to the resultant importance of translocal networks and places that provide relational spaces to share experiences of, and respond to, these contestations. The participants in this study made use of Indigenous student centres at their universities to develop a sense of place, build translocal networks, nurture their cultural identities, and contest settler assumptions that situate “authentic” Indigenous identities in a remote wilderness past.

Migrant youth ‘between mobilities’: Sessility as a working concept

“…Place, space and localities have always been regarded as integral to youth identities (Cuervo & Wyn, 2014; Farrugia, 2016; Hall et al., 2009; Nayak, 2003; Thomson & Taylor, 2005), and although successful transition is often associated with ‘moving on’, there is increasing attention to place‐attachment, at times in the context of thwarted aspirations and rural/urban/neighbourhood/township belongings and identifications (Risør & Pérez, 2018; Swartz et al., 2012) or to trouble dichotomous ideas of belonging and mobility (Fallov et al.,2013). Sometimes this work has taken the perspective of local attachment as a way for ‘emplaced’ young people to defend themselves against the pressures and imperatives of globalization and the false promise of mobility to those who are stuck at the bottom of its hierarchy, whilst other research has focused on nuancing views of ‘staying put’, noting that global flows continue to influence young lives regardless of physical mobility (Dolby & Rizvi, 2008), and that mobility/immobility is not a simple binary and nor should agency be only associated with leaving (Cook & Cuervo, 2020; Cuzzocrea & Mandich, 2016; Harris & Prout Quicke, 2019; Somaiah et al., 2020). What we further show here is that certain experiences of migration and mobility can also engender strong (and perhaps apparently counter‐productive) place attachment amongst young people who are transnationally experienced, active and inclined, cosmopolitan in disposition and who can theoretically capitalize on some of the opportunities that mobility brings – and yet are obliged to cash these out in extremely difficult personal and socio‐political conditions of instability, precarity and unmooring.…”

“…This is a metaphor we introduce to consider how such young people might express agency and engage to some extent in the advantages of global flows and movements even when mobility plans and opportunities are disrupted or rerouted, and when, for positive and negative reasons, they stay in place. We build on work such as that of Cook and Cuervo (2020), Cuervo and Wyn (2012), Finn (2017), Harris and Prout‐Quicke (2019), and others, who consider what it means for young people to choose to remain in place. We concur with Somaiah et al.…”