Mediated connectedness: practices and strategies of Russian speaking migrants to Melbourne

Abstract

Migration of Russian speaking people around the globe has accelerated in the past 30 years creating a complex diaspora of Russian speakers extending even to ‘far abroad’ countries, such as Australia. In Australia, especially in the past 25 years, traditional local ethnic media, ranging from print to public and community broadcast media, have been an important resource in supporting linguistic and cultural maintenance and diasporic connectedness for immigrant communities. In the past decade, in particular, advances in communication technologies have generated the capacity to access media worldwide and also to create new mediated social spaces, and virtual communities (Rheingold, 2000), which dramatically extend the capacity for global diasporic engagement and connectedness. Drawing on in-depth qualitiative interviews with Russian speakers who have migrated from former Soviet republics to Melbourne since 1990, this presentation will discuss the attitudes and experiences of the interviewees and their families in engaging with both traditional and online media, and computer-mediated communication in their daily lives. The paper will focus on how they are choosing to utilise the potential various media and how their preferences and strategies reflect their evolving diasporic identities and their valuing of different forms of social and cultural connectedness.

Assoc. Prof. Helen Borland

Helen Borland is Associate Professor in the School of Communication, Culture and Languages at Victoria University and currently, Principal Advisor International to the Pro Vice Chancellor, International. She has a background in Russian, Linguistics, and English as a Second Language and teaches sociolinguistics, cross-cultural communication and communication research methodology. She is well known for her research into language, identity and communication issues in migrant communities in Melbourne and, particularly, in Melbourne’s west. In 2006, with Dr Charles Mphande she completed a report for the then Victorian Office of Multicultural Affairs investigating the numbers of speakers of various African languages in Victoria. She and Dr Mphande are currently working for the Victorian Multicultural Commission on a second stage of this project which involves community consultations to gain a more in-depth understanding of patterns of language and literacy usage in some of the larger African language communities in Victoria.

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