Residential patterns of Australian mixed-ethnicity couples: advancing understandings of ethnic geographies

School of Geography and Sustainable Communities 2018-01-01T08:00:00Z

Intimate partnerships between people of different ethnicities signal the decreasing social and cultural distance between ethnic groups. Such partnerships are also powerful agents of social and demographic change. They can further erode barriers between ethnic groups by fostering interactions within partners’ personal networks. Equally, they can re-shape the ethnic identities of future generations as their children typically identify with multiple ethnicities. A geographic perspective on mixed-ethnicity partnerships reveals that these processes of change are spatially uneven. Prejudices against mixed-ethnicity couples persist among some segments of society, and vary geographically. By shifting the scale of ethnic diversity research to the household, a geographic perspective on mixed-ethnicity partnerships sheds new light on ethnic landscapes, challenging established understandings of diversity and segregation across cities. Yet to date, distributions of mixed-ethnicity couples have seldom featured in social geographic analysis, and not at all in the Australian context. This is a significant oversight given rising rates of mixed-ethnicity partnering. This thesis accordingly addresses the question, ‘How does a focus on Australian mixed-ethnicity couples and individuals advance established understandings of ethnic residential geographies?’ It adopts a mixed-methods approach, structured around distinct quantitative and qualitative components. Empirically, the focus is on couples involving an Anglo-European partner, and a partner from a visibly different ethnic minority group. The quantitative component of the study utilises customised census data to conduct Australia’s first-ever geographical analyses of mixed-ethnicity couples and individuals. It adopts finer-grained ethnic groups that have been conflated within broader pan-ethnic or racial categories in much existing geographical research on this topic. The qualitative component draws on in-depth interviews to explore

mixed-ethnicity; census; diversity; residential geography; segregation; households; thesis

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LP1 oai:ro.uow.edu.au:theses1-1327
https://ro.uow.edu.au/theses1/318
https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1327&context=theses1
1285874698

UNIV OF WOLLONGONG
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