Between ‘here’ and ‘there’: family violence against immigrant and refugee women in urban and rural Southern Australia

The purpose of this article is to investigate how (dis)connection with place influences immigrant and refugee women’s experiences of family violence in regional/remote and metropolitan southern Australia. We draw on research from the ASPIRE project (Analysing Safety and Place in Refugee Experience) in the states of Victoria and Tasmania. A participatory research approach was used to interview immigrant and refugee women who had experienced violence, and providers of family violence services from eight locations in the two states. Both inner urban, regional and remote locations were included in the study. The findings present new insight into how geographic isolation and the scarcity of specialized services affected the experiences of immigrant and refugee women in regional/remote areas. Across all settings, participants described experiences of social isolation associated with both distance from community networks and being ostracized or seeking to avoid the proximity of perpetrators and their social networks. Notably, the experiences of women living in regional Tasmania and regional Victoria shared more similarities than did those of immigrant and refugee women in regional Victoria and inner-urban Melbourne despite the different legislative environments in the two states.     

Archaeological Investigations at Yunkaray (Cuzco,Peru): Reconstructing the Rise and Fall of an Early Inca Rival (A.D. 1050–1450)

In the highland Andes during the centuries leading to Inca imperial expansion (ca. a.d. 1400–1530s), the people of the Cuzco Basin established alliances and rivalries with diverse neighbors living across the Cuzco region. Among the most powerful of those groups was a polity centered at Yunkaray (occupied ca. a.d. 1050–1450) on the Maras Plain just northwest of the burgeoning city of Cuzco. Recent settlement survey and excavations in and around Yunkaray have identified the site as the principal settlement of the Ayarmaca group, which remained outside the sphere of Inca cultural influence despite its proximity to Cuzco. The distinctive nature of Yunkaray’s interaction with the Incas is examined here through household excavations, which indicate that the large village was occupied by a population presenting modest status distinctions and relying on locally derived sources of social identity.     

Journeying from “I” to “we”: assembling hybrid caring collectives of geography doctoral scholars

Completing a PhD is difficult. Add a major earthquake sequence and general stress levels become much higher. Caring for some of the nonacademic needs of doctoral scholars in this environment becomes critical to their scholarly success. Yet academic supervisors, who are in the same challenging environment, may already be stretched to capacity. How then do we increase care for doctoral scholars? While it has been shown elsewhere that supportive and interactive department cultures reduce attrition rates, little work has been done on how exactly departments might create these supportive environments: the focus is generally on the individual actions of supervisors, or the individual quality of students admitted. We suggest that a range of actors and contingencies are involved in journeying toward a more caring collective culture. We direct attention to the hybridity of an emerging ‘caring collective’, in which the assembled actors are not only ‘students’ and ‘staff’, but also bodies, technologies, objects, institutions, and other nonhuman actors including tectonic plates and earthquakes. The concept of the hybrid caring collective is useful, we argue, as a way of understanding the distributed responsibility for the care of doctoral scholars, and as a way of stepping beyond the student/supervisor blame game.     

Aphra Behn’s first marriage?

ABSTRACT

This article discusses three new documents that seem to pertain to the early life of the Restoration playwright, Aphra Behn. These documents suggest that Behn was betrothed in 1657 to a gentleman named John Halse; that she corresponded from London in the mid 1660s with William Scot, son of the parliamentarian and regicide Thomas Scot; and that, after her journey to Flanders as a spy, she borrowed money from the Devonshire Butler family to facilitate her return to England. Providing new contexts for Behn’s development as a playwright, these documents not only help to revise our understanding of Behn’s early life, but open opportunities for further research and discoveries.