Oral Presentation The Institute of Australian Geographers Conference 2023

Thinking Carefully: Zara’s House as a Community Infrastructure (18038)

Jean-Louise Olivier 1
  1. University of Newcastle, Newcastle, NSW, Australia

This paper conceptualises Zara’s House, a centre for women and children from refugee backgrounds in Newcastle, NSW, as a community infrastructure. Drawing on a theoretical framework situated within feminist care ethics and emergent infrastructures of care literature, this paper demonstrates what these theories mean for conceptualisations of community infrastructures. Positioning Zara’s House as a community infrastructure allows us to see the importance of such spaces to meet the everyday care needs of women, their families and communities. This centre allows women to engage in mother tongue literacy, English language classes, citizenship test study and a whole range of creative activities ranging from make-up classes, dance, yoga and sewing. The infrastructures, bodily, material and immaterial in this space are highly political in the ways they facilitate access for communities who have been structurally excluded from many other supports and services. In a time dominated by neoliberal conceptions of care, this paper explores the value of making visible the role of community infrastructures for women from refugee backgrounds. This reflection is affected by my positionality, from a specific gendered identity, as a white woman, migrant, queer body and PhD candidate.

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