Seminar: Migration, Class and Rural Colonial Legacies

The Social Inequalities and Social Ordering research theme and Migration Research Group warmly invite you to a research seminar where we will be joined by Dr Rose Butler, a Senior Research Fellow in Sociology at Deakin University. Rose will present on the topic of Migration, Class and Rural Colonial Legacies: Young People’s Rural Mobilities in Settler Australia.

If you would like to attend the seminar virtually, please email L.Connelly@sheffield to request the joining link.

Abstract: This talk draws on sustained research in the rural city of Mildura in south-eastern Australia to examine how colonial legacies and historical projects of class ideation continue to shape young people’s rural mobilities in the present. Mildura, like many other towns and cities across the rural global north, is today the site of accelerated labour migration and humanitarian settlement, with young people front and centre of these mobilities. In the Australia context, popular entrenched narratives of this social transformation typically chart a story from white rural ‘hardship’ in the nineteenth century, to burgeoning rural ‘diversity’ in the twenty-first. In these depictions, both rural ‘settlers’ and ‘migrants’ are uncoupled from the racialised migration schemes and legacies of coloniality and class which, for non-Indigenous young people, have conditioned their families’ lives as well as their own. In this paper I reposition Mildura as a transnational colonial enterprise and show how this history is a precursor to the town’s incorporation into today’s deeply unequal global mobility regimes for youth. Drawing on extensive ethnographic, interview and archival research, I consider how young people’s rural mobilities in settler Australia remain deeply shaped by these colonial legacies of empire, and by their conditioning effects of class in the rural present.

Speaker Bio: Dr Rose Butler is a Senior Research Fellow in Sociology at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University. Rose’s current book project stems from an Australian Research Council (DECRA) fellowship on ‘Young people’s mobilities, relationships and place-making in rural Australia’. Her most recent book is Love Across Class, written with Eve Vincent (Melbourne University Press, 2024). Along with Sylvia Ang and Christina Ho, Rose is currently leading a Special Issue on ‘Class and migration: interrogating class across borders’ for the Journal of Ethnic & Migration Studies (forthcoming 2025).

Chair’s Bio: The event will be chaired by Professor Sarah Neal. Sarah’s research focuses on the following areas and their intersections: quotidian social life in urban and rural environments; ethnicity, multiculture, migration and superdiversity; community, belonging and place; education, citizenship and school worlds; the politics of Brexit and identity; leisure practices, inequalities and urban and rural greenspace and qualitative research methods.