Amplifying the Third Space: Exploring the Knowledge and Artistic Production of Southwest Asia and North African Refugee Women Living in Australia

Abstract

Australia has been internationally criticised for its controversial treatment of refugees and asylum seekers. However, an underexamined aspect of Australia’s relationship to refugeehood is how the state’s approach to resettlement is informed by the coloniality of power shaping Australian institutions and bodies of governance. This has led to a blind spot in understanding how refugee women are crafted as a colonially managed population. This study examines the assumptions, experiences and opinions on settlement, artistic production, and lived realities of being categorised as a refugee woman as told by displaced women artists from Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) who are resettling in Australia. Using SWANA feminist scholarship and Indigenous epistemologies to frame SWANA women’s experience of coloniality in Australia, this work begins to build an archive of narratives that illuminate the diverse experiences of refugee women living in Sydney, with a focus on women who arrived in Australia between 2001 and 2019. Through their voices, this study critically analyses themes of identity, individual subjectivities, and their relationship to the state institutions, to deconstruct mainstream binary narratives that tend to portray refugee women as either victims or politically active rebels by exploring “The Third Space”, which this work conceptualises as a site of existence and relationality that intertwines politics and domesticity. These testimonies and insights create an avenue through which to critically analyse core aspects of Australian cultural history to provide an appraisal of how the colonial history of the Australian modern state affects its ways of interacting with people who are marginalised due to a combination of class, race, and gender factors. Through the analysis of refugee women’s knowledge production, the final thesis offers an alternative history of Australia, its state institutions, and multicultural ambition