This year marks five decades since the official dismantling of the controversial White Australia Policy. Despite this milestone, Australia continues to grapple with its multicultural identity. In the intervening decades our migration and settlement objectives have tended to be homogenising and vague, and policies still lack meaningful acknowledgement of the importance of cultural continuity to international migrants as they settle into Australian communities. Crucially, we know that settlement is complex; it is always more than just ‘settling’ in. Emerging migration literature suggests that rather than arriving to pre-fabricated spaces and passively settling, migrants undertake processes of emplacement (Brun 2001) through which they are actively co-creating the places that they move to through complex relations with humans and more-than-humans, guided by both pre and post-migration lives.
Entangled within these processes are the cultural subjectivities that migrants bring with them, and which hold continuing significance in their lives in Australia. Woldeyes (2018) suggests that for migrants of African heritage, relational and communal notions of belonging may influence their processes of making home, and thus are important considerations in settlement policy and practice. Insights such as this have led me to engage with the dynamic Ubuntu philosophy as a guide for my research, and to consider the implications of interweaving Ubuntu within Australia’s settlement policy framework.
I invite you to join me in this session as we explore what a culturally relevant, Ubuntu-led settlement framework could look like for migrants of African heritage, and its implications for contemporary Australian policy and practice.