Photo: Escape from Melbourne by Mugley appears courtesy of a creative commons attribution share alike 2.0 generic license.

Micro cultures

Recently I read an interesting article entitled Ethnicity and the multicultural city: living with diversity by Professor Ash Amin from the University of Durham that appeared in the journal Environment and Planning A. Amin’s article addresses the issue of segregation and whilst his research was not based on the experience of trans-national students, I believe many of his arguments resonate with their experience in Melbourne. 

For Amin, micro-cultures of place are the primary site for the formation of identity and attitudes. The author uses the term micro-cultures of place to refer to those places of everyday experience and everyday encounters, places such as our university campuses, our libraries, our bus stops, and our basketball. Amin states that whilst the possibility for intercultural exchange within these sites do exist, people should be actively encouraged to step out of their routine environment and step into other spaces where new connections can be made.

 

For me, this means that merely placing local and trans-national students on the same campus together is not enough to create meaningful interaction between these populations. What is needed are ventures that are multi-ethnic in their composition, that are established as habits of practise either within everyday sites of interaction such as schools, workplaces and other public spaces or in transitory sites of cultural displacement such as communal gardens, theatre groups or even sporting teams.

 

I was really struck by this article and the clarity of Amin’s reasoning. I believe that what is needed in Melbourne are more ventures that are truly multi-ethnic in their composition and that are established as habits of practise. One example of such a venture is the basketball team I play in. The team is called the Unicorns and we compete each week in a social basketball competition at Monash. This team grew out of a conversation I had with a student of mine about the game we both love. Both of us were very interested in playing basketball but individually we didn’t have enough friends to put a reliable team together that would turn up to games every week. We decided to start a team together, Hank would ask some of his Chinese friends to sign up and I would ask a few of my friends. What we finished with was a team that featured three Chinese players, two Australians, a New Zealander, a South Korean and a Taiwanese.

 

The cultural diversity of the team was definitely a point of interest but never something that occurred to me whilst we were standing together on the side lines hanging out before games, or on the court together, or waiting at the train station afterwards talking about where the game was won or lost. Playing basketball allowed us to transgress those invisible cultural and ethnic boundaries that many of my students see and that have been the stimulus for much debate and research regarding how best to live in a multi-cultural city. The basketball court became our own micro-culture of place and our team was an opportunity to enter into a new cultural space where cultural and language differences where no barrier to meaningful, fun and fulfilling inter-cultural interaction.