Dr Eliza Crosbie (IAG Award for Dissertation Excellence) Citation
The IAG Award for Dissertation Excellence is made at Honours, Masters, or PhD level, and acknowledges the disciplinary contribution that the candidate has made to geography.
Awardee: Dr Eliza Crosbie
For dissertation entitled: Ubuntu-led settlement: migrant aspirations for emplacement in regional Australia
This dissertation is embedded within a community-led, cross-cultural research collaboration— developed in response to concerns of communities from the Great Lakes Region of Africa who are living in Australia—which aimed to advocate for policy change to improve settlement outcomes for these communities. Viewing these concerns through a cultural and material lens, Eliza explored the relationship between African ways of knowing and being (Ubuntu) and notions of emplacement to understand how these relationships might inform contemporary Australian humanitarian migrant settlement policy and practice.
The dissertation was awarded without corrections and responded to calls from both within and outside the discipline to challenge traditional research power dynamics and go beyond harm minimisation as part of refugee research—by taking seriously and privileging participant voices and African philosophy—to produce culturally sensitive, relevant, and useful research outcomes.
A significant impact of this research is that it makes three novel contributions to the discipline: geographic and migration theory through the framework of ‘relational emplacement’; more-than-human methodologies through developing the ‘more-than-interview’ method; and Australia’s settlement policy with the ‘Ubuntu-led settlement’ approach.
An examiner of the dissertation writes: “The depth of research conducted was impressive with Eliza demonstrating a solid grasp and understanding of a wide range of literature covering migration, methodologies, historical policy and context of humanitarian migration and resettlement in Australia... Through the framing of dislocation, repair, and hope, Eliza drew on Ubuntu philosophy to challenge conventional paradigms in migration studies ... despite the ‘sense of discomfort’ indicated by Eliza in relation to creating or owning ‘something related to Ubuntu’, she should be congratulated and commended in how she skilfully, ‘as a non-African, female Anglo-settler researcher’, deeply engaged with Ubuntu philosophy, thus shaping her performative research practice to communicate, share and apply knowledge to improving resettlement policy and praxis ... The thesis constitutes an original contribution to understanding how current models of resettlement are limited and through a better understanding of Ubuntu and engaging with, will result in how resettlement policy and praxis in Australia can be improved not only for those from the Great Lakes region of Africa, but potentially for those resettling from other parts of the world. This research makes a major disciplinary contribution, combining theoretical innovation and methodological advances".