Alhassan, Abdulkhalig (2024) Diaspora in the making in Australia: investigating socio-cultural factors among communities from Sudan. PhD thesis, Victoria University.

Abstract

Human mobility has been acknowledged by the UNDP as a way of improving wellbeing for many from regions that have experienced upheavals. The Horn of Africa in general, and Sudan in particular, have sent migrants to the Middle East, Europe, North America and, more recently, Australia. Sudanese migrants have lived in Australia for more than two decades. During this time, the wider Sudanese community has gone through a process of settlement and integration that is complex; that is, active in Sudanese socio-political dynamics, but marginally visible in terms of participation in Australian civic life. Sudanese immigrants’ community formations tend to reflect the socio-political and ethno-linguistic patterns of interaction that they knew in Sudan. This study investigated the settlement and integration experiences of migrants from the Sudan. Given the diversity of the Sudanese people and their socio-political background, the study sought to examine whether they have been able to develop a diasporic identity (or identities) or remain a set of groups who have brought “home abroad”. The study adopted a phenomenological approach and a critical-realism paradigm to investigate the lived experiences of the Sudanese migrants based on how they have used the community as a socio-cultural space provided by Australian multiculturalism. Semi-structural interviews have been applied as methods by which 22 participants representing different categories: political activists, ethnic groups and self-identifying liberal women. The findings showed that the migrants from the Sudan are one of the most heterogeneous migrant populations in Australia, and their identities revolve around ethnicities as well as their historical and socio-political status in their homeland. The major sub-categories of the community – the Nuba Mountains, Darfurians, Copts, the elite Arab stock, and more-progressive groups, including those self-identifying as liberal women, remain distinct communities. Australian multicultural spaces, which celebrate diversity, have partly supported this tendency of maintaining separate identities that mirror the entrenched identity fragmentation of the Sudan along the lines of social status and access or in-access to power.

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