Presenter/Speaker: Professor Linda Briskman
Date: Thursday 24 May 2012 - Thursday 24 May 2012
Time: 1:10 PM - 2:00 PM
Location: Room S.1.02
Contact: foroutan@waikato.ac.nz
Website: http://www.waikato.ac.nz/nidea/events

Indigenous Populations and Asylum Seekers in Australia: Human Rights Perspective.

Professor Linda Briskman, (Swinburne University of Technology, Australia)

Abstract: Increasing evidence in Australia reveals extreme levels of disadvantage for Indigenous populations, particularly those who were removed from their families and communities, and refugee populations, predominantly those emerging from immigration detention centres. The paper argues that interdisciplinary perspectives supplement the field of demography in analysing the reasons why such disadvantage persists. Using the concept of ‘racialised banishment', the findings from qualitative and ethnographic research in Australia are presented to examine how both Indigenous peoples and asylum seekers/refugees have been excluded from the nation state through removal to sites of isolation (reserves, missions, immigration detention); by denial of normative state rights (liberty and economic and social rights); and through the denigration of cultural, spiritual and religious identities (Indigenous relationship with land and Muslim asylum seekers). The paper poses the question of how exclusionary trends might be reversed to overcome disadvantage and to reinstate rights to both population groups.

Short Bio. Professor Linda Briskman is a human rights academic and activist. Her work spans the domains of Indigenous rights and asylum seeker rights and she has published extensively in both areas. Linda convened the People's Inquiry into Immigration into Detention in Australia and is committed to ensuring that asylum seeker voices are heard in the public domain. Publications include Social Work with Indigenous Communities (2007) and the co-authored Human Rights Overboard: Seeking asylum in Australia which won the 2008 Australian Human Rights Commission Award for Literature (non-fiction). Linda is currently working with Yaghoob Foroutan and Douglas Pratt from the University of Waikato on developing an international project on religious and racial intolerance.


RSVP to Dr. Yaqub Foroutan (foroutan@waikato.ac.nz)

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