Bittersweet: beauty and wellbeing with Meg and Alex Lee

To help expand our understanding of beauty and wellbeing beyond aesthetics standards and practices, we are joined by early career researchers Meg and Alex Lee. In this episode, we discuss issues of access, mobility and belonging shaping the experiences of migrant youth in rural communities and Asian Australian young adults. We explore what wellbeing feels and looks like for those living on the margins and how we can find beauty in everyday life. 

Check out Meg’s awesome publications: 

• Not settlement but movement: Exploring mobility as central to the wellbeing of young people from migrant backgrounds building lives from rural Australia. 

• Being human and 'hanging out': Mutuality, trust, and 'voice' in youth participatory research. 

• ‘The little things’: The temporality of young people’s strategies for existential, grounded, and expansive wellbeing in rural Australia. 

• Meg’s research took place on Wadawurrung and Dja Dja Wurrung Country (Ballarat) and Wotjobaluk, Jaadwa, Jadawadjali, Wergaia, and Jupagalk Country (the Wimmera region). 

Support the podcast by following, rating, and reviewing us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Music. Sources consulted in the production of this episode:

• Sara Ahmed, ‘A phenomenology of whiteness’ (2007)

• Rose Butler, ‘Migration, class and intra-distinctions of whiteness in the making of inland rural Victoria’ (2022) 

• Kathryn Edgeworth, ‘Black bodies, White rural spaces: Disturbing practices of unbelonging for ‘refugee’ students’ (2015) 

• DV. Stead, L. Taula and M. Silaga, ‘Making place in a place that doesn't recognise you: Racialised labour and intergenerational belonging in an Australian horticultural region’ (2022)

• R. Wilding and C. Nunn, ‘Non-metropolitan productions of multiculturalism: Refugee settlement in rural Australia’ (2018)

• D. Bargallie, N. Fernando, & A. Lentin, ‘Breaking the racial silence: Putting racial literacy to work in Australia’ (2004)

• Ghassan Hage, White Nation (1998)

• Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The white possessive: Property, power, and indigenous sovereignty (2015)

• Helen Ngo, The Habits of Racism: A Phenomenology of Racism and Racialized Embodiment (2017) 

• J. Wyn, S. Lantz, & A. Harris, ‘Beyond the ‘transitions’ metaphor: Family relations and young people in late modernity’ (2012)

  
  

This podcast was produced by Miranda Park and Scarlette Do on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nations.