Abstract
The author introduces and contextualises this 3 year research project, Cross-Marked: Sudanese Australian Young Women Talk Education, which drew on the various knowledges of Sudanese students from refugee backgrounds and the principles and practices of ethnocinema which prioritise relationship and mutuality in intercultural collaborations over aesthetics or outcomes. The seven documentary films which comprise Cross-Marked and the following text together comment on the complexities of the performance of identity for both researcher and co-participants, and for students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds – particularly those from refugee backgrounds – trying to survive and thrive in western schools. This text offers a deeply personal, socio-cultural perspective on this daunting task for the 16 young women who filmed part of their journeys. Each chapter focuses on one film, using a different theoretical framework for understanding the themes and concerns that emerged in each film, culminating with the author’s own journey.
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Notes
- 1.
‘The Kakuma Refugee Camp is a moderate-sized “city” of tents, shacks, and thatched roof huts in the desert of northwest Kenya, inhabited by more than 90,000 refugees (Sudanese, Ethiopian, and Somali, mostly, but also Congolese, Burundian, Rwandan, and Ugandan). Dating to 1991, it is equally a sanctuary and a prison – once admitted, residents cannot leave without permission of the Kenyan government – and inside its fences, children age into adulthood. The United Nations High Commission on Refugees administers the camp, with aid from a patchwork of international relief agencies, or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).’ This camp, located in the Turkana region of northwest Kenya, was home to many Sudanese-Australians in transit from Sudan. Others came via Egypt. From http://bcm.bc.edu/issues/spring_2008/features/the-camp.html, accessed on August 10, 2009.
- 2.
Marginalization has been defined by Yvonna Lincoln (Guba and Lincoln 2006:207) as: ‘omission of stakeholder or participant…views, perspectives, claims, concerns and voices…’.
- 3.
‘There are scarcely any major studies dealing with African refugees in Australia and none with a focus upon young people (cf. Beattie and Ward 1997; Gow 2002; Udo-Ekpo 1999)’ (Cassity and Gow 2006).
- 4.
For many cultural workers, the term intercultural replaces the sometimes-contentious connotations of multicultural and is the preferred current terminology.
- 5.
Freire’s articulation of a banking system of education, to be avoided, is characterised by a perception of students as empty vessels who require ‘an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor’ (Friere 1970:58).
- 6.
Dinka for ‘educated girls’.
- 7.
This performative seventh moment, says Denzin, ‘enacts the feminist, communitarian ethic’, is ‘subversive’, and is characterised by an ‘anti-aesthetic’ (Denzin 2003:122).
- 8.
Denzin and Lincoln define this as the period from 2005 onward, or the ‘fractured future’ (2005:3), which ‘confronts the methodological backlash associated with the evidence-based social movement’.
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Harris, A.M. (2012). Introduction. In: Ethnocinema: Intercultural Arts Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4226-0_1
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