Reimagining Citizenship in Suburban Australia

Lobo, Michele
Dr Michele Lobo completed her PhD in Human Geography from MonashUniversity, Australia in 2008. Her doctoral research focuses onethnicity and the lived experience of citizenship in the City ofGreater Dandenong, suburban Melbourne, Australia. Michele iscurrently working as a Research Fellow at Deakin University.

Conventional approaches to understanding urban inclusion and belonging focus on the process and acquisition of formal citizenship. In contrast, the critical approaches adopted in this research aim to analyse how belonging is constituted, regulated and negotiated in everyday spaces of the city, in this case the City of Greater Dandenong, Australia. The research focuses on providing an in-depth understanding of the relationship between the constitution of ethnicity and the lived experience of citizenship in suburban Australia. Using a theoretical and methodological approach that draws on poststructural and feminist ideas, the research examines the processes, practices and subtleties of white privilege, to illustrate how the norms of inclusion are reproduced as well as unsettled by people who live and/or work in Dandenong. Listening to stories of home that value moments of social connection, provide examples for reimagining citizenship as an ethical responsibility that values interdependence.