Speakers' Abstracts and Biographies
Sheenagh McShane
Co-authors: Karen Block and Rebecca Bentley (University of Melbourne)
‘I Wish I Had a House Like This’ Reimaging Home: Refugee Experiences of Housing, Resettlement and Wellbeing in Australia – A Photovoice Study
The relationship between refugee housing and wellbeing extends beyond basic shelter, encompassing social, cultural and spatial dimensions. This study explores how housing is experienced and understood by refugees not merely as a physical structure but as a site of meaning, identity, and belonging. Drawing on Massey’s relational theory of space and a multidimensional understanding of belonging, this research examines the housing aspirations of refugees through the photovoice component of a larger qualitative study on refugee housing and health in Victoria. Twenty-one refugee participants used photography to capture aspects of their lived experiences of housing and neighbourhoods that may have been difficult to articulate through conventional methods. A thematic analysis of workshop discussions revealed that housing aspirations extend beyond affordability and homeownership to include safety, connection, cultural fit, and access to green space and local amenities. Where these aspirations were unmet, participants reported feelings of insecurity and frustration, negatively affecting their wellbeing and sense of belonging. Participants' photographs and narratives revealed not only barriers to integration but also the everyday practices through which they created connections and reshaped their housing environments as relational spaces of care, connection, and community.
Sheenagh McShane is a PhD candidate in the Healthy Housing unit based in the Centre for Health Policy. She has a keen interest in human rights work and brings this focus to her research. Her research interests include housing as a determinant of health, people from refugee backgrounds, and health equity.
Eun Su Lee
Co-authors: Betina Szkudlarek and Sophia Johnson (University of Sydney), Chris Brewster (University of Reading)
Advancing Inclusive Recruitment of Refugees: A Practice-Based Analysis of Employer Responses to Proximal and Distal Barriers
This study shifts the focus from refugee jobseekers to employers, examining how their recruitment practices address challenges in hiring refugees. Drawing on interviews with 39 Australia-based employers, we identify two types of barriers —proximal and distal —distinguished by their scale, locus of influence, and impact. Using a practice theory lens, we show how employers’ responses can either reinforce or disrupt the structural conditions shaping refugee employment. Most employers adopt adaptive practices targeting immediate, proximal barriers. However, we argue that transformative practices aimed at distal, structural barriers are crucial to addressing deeper inequities. Our findings advance refugee workforce integration literature by highlighting how employer assumptions about these barriers can limit engagement and effectiveness. We outline managerial implications, showing how employers can play an active role in tackling systemic challenges traditionally seen as outside their remit, thereby contributing to more inclusive and equitable recruitment outcomes.
Eun Su Lee is a Lecturer in Management at the Faculty of Business and Economics. Her research interests are in the fields of international human resource management and global mobility, focusing on migrants’ workforce integration and the role of multiple stakeholders in such efforts.
Shouyue Zhang
La China: An Ephemeral Chinese–Mexican Community in San Antonio and One Family’s Extraordinary Journey across Asia, Mexico and the United States
Chong Kung Dong, a native of Guangdong, China, migrated to Mexico in the early twentieth century before becoming entangled in the Mexican Revolution along the U.S.–Mexico border. During the U.S. Punitive Expedition against Mexican revolutionary Francisco “Pancho” Villa in 1916–1917, Dong served as one of several hundred Chinese logistical personnel attached to General John Pershing’s forces. Although the expedition failed to capture Villa, Pershing brought 527 Chinese refugees, or “Pershing Chinese,” back to the United States, despite the ongoing enforcement of Chinese exclusion laws. Eventually, 365 of these Chinese migrants, including Dong, benefited from U.S. Public Resolution No. 29 (1921), which granted them legal residence as an exception in recognition of their military service. They settled in a neighborhood locally known as La China in San Antonio. There, they operated small businesses and formed close ties with Mexican American communities, facilitated by their fluency in Spanish. Dong ran a gambling house in a Chinese Freemasons Lodge and married a Mexican woman. Together, they raised a family whose subsequent generations continued to serve in the U.S. military, with deployments in Korea, Vietnam, and Taiwan. By the 1960s, La China itself was erased through urban renewal. The Central West Area Project displaced low-income and racialized communities and destroyed over 90 percent of the neighborhood’s buildings. Tracing the rise and disappearance of La China alongside the Dong family’s overseas service and interracial marriages, this presentation illuminates how marginalized individuals navigated shifting regimes of exclusion and empire in the twentieth century.
Shouyue Zhang is a third-year PhD candidate in History and a visiting research affiliate at the University of Texas at Austin. His doctoral dissertation examines Chinese immigrants in twentieth-century Texas through the lens of the U.S.–Mexico borderlands and U.S. foreign relations history. He also serves on the editorial collective of Melbourne Historical Journal.
Jemima McKenna
Domination and Asymmetric Choice Freedom: The Role of Third-States In Externalised Asylum Governance
The engagement of the third-states within the Global South as sites of external asylum governance has become an increasingly popular policy approach with states of the Global North. Whilst these bilateral asylum agreements are consistently described as ‘asymmetrical’, ‘imbalanced’ and ‘neocolonial’, the precise nature of these power relations remains unarticulated in existing literature. Through repurposing neo-republican domination theory, this research project identifies three conceptual elements of domination (inequality, dependency and interference) that comprise a theoretical framework for investigating power asymmetry within the practice of externalisation. In order to investigate these conceptual elements, this paper employs the case studies of Australia-Nauru and UK-Rwanda, and draws on 45 interviews as well as substantive document analysis. This paper finds that paying attention to the relational dimensions of inequality, dependency and interference reveals that third-states experience asymmetric choice freedom in entering asylum agreements with states upon which they are dependent on for foreign aid. Further, externalisation contributes to an erosion of third-state self-determination and diminishment of destination-state capacity to manage what ought to be a domestically regulated practice. This research clarifies what is normatively at stake within the practice, provides new insights into the relational dimension of third-state agreements and contributes to bridging the gap between abstract theoretical conceptualisations of externalisation and the concrete empirics of the practice.
Jemima McKenna is in the final year of her PhD in the School of Social and Political Science, and lectures in public policy and asylum politics at Deakin University. Jemima has completed Visiting Fellowships at the University of Oxford and the University of Bologna. She has worked in refugee and asylum seeker advocacy for the past 7 years. She holds a B-Arts (Hons) and M-IR from the University of Melbourne.