Local Kids, ‘Refugees’ and Publics of Privilege: Children’s Mediated and Intercultural Lives in a Regional Australian City

This paper considers contradictions and complexities around mediated and intercultural relationships between local children, primarily of Anglo-Australian descent, and ‘refugees’, in a regional Australian primary school community. It examines two different spaces in which local children engage with asylum seekers on a daily basis – the prolific ’speech communities‘ around refugees which circulate in public culture, and lived practices of ’everyday multiculturalism‘. Young people are shown to draw on negative tropes around ‘refugees’ to anchor themselves in a local cultural order. These speech communities, however, differ significantly from the forms of everyday multiculturalism which take place between local children and asylum-seeker youth. This raises questions about how narratives around refugees, privilege and morality become embedded in local cultural identities, and what this might mean for children’s attempts to belong within such contexts. These practices are discussed here through long-term ethnographic fieldwork, the importance of which is highlighted for making sense of young people’s prejudices and racism towards refugees in economically insecure communities.