Humanities and Social Sciences

School of Social Sciences

La Trobe Refugee Research Centre

Home Lands Project

Many young refugees struggle to develop positive cultural identities. The Home Lands project investigates the role that communication technologies might play in connecting young refugees to their diasporic communities, and whether this assists them in developing positive social and cultural identities. The aim of the project is to investigate the ways in which information communication technologies can promote positive transnational identities among refugee youth in Australia. The findings will have implications for promoting positive settlement for refugee youth in Australia and elsewhere.

An assumption of the project is that one way of providing positive future pathways for refugees is to recognise the positive skills and strategies that refugee youth have developed through their unique experiences. They are not only displaced, dispossessed people, defined only by their past experiences of trauma. They are also young people who, often as a direct result of their displacement experiences, have developed language, social and cultural skills in multiple locations. Through their enforced migrations, they have developed transnational networks of friends and family.

Professor Sandy Gifford (Director, LaRRC) and Dr Raelene Wilding (Lecturer, Sociology & Anthropology, La Trobe University) are undertaking a study that will document, analyse and report on the progress of Home Lands, an innovative project being conducted by the City of Melbourne, Cultural Development Network, Centre for Multicultural Youth and the Association for Progressive Communications (Australia).

Home Lands aims to support young people from refugee backgrounds in making internet television programs and exchanging them with peers in their homelands and other settlement contexts around the world. The program includes a series of workshops, in which young people from refugee backgrounds will be taken through the steps involved in creating and communicating audiovisual material over the Internet. This program is underpinned by the premise that young people from refugee backgrounds will more successfully resettle in Australia if identification, communication and engagement is maintained with home communities. (For more on the Home Lands Program please visit http://www.culturaldevelopment.net.au/homelands/index.htm)

This study, funded by an Australia Research Council Linkage Grant, the City of Melbourne (Community Cultural Development Program) and the Cultural Development Network, in association with the Centre for Multicultural Youth and the Association for Progressive Communications (Australia), will utilise three methods for information collection:

1. Participant Observation of Internet television production workshops and other Home Lands meetings and events.
2. Interviews with participants in workshops, meetings and other Home Lands events, where they will be asked a series of questions aimed at helping them to reflect on their experiences of participating in Home Lands.
3. Document Analysis of Internet Television production materials.

For a more detailed outline of this study please follow this link. (Word - 50 KB)

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