William Macmahon Ball Theatre

Level 1, Old Arts (Building 149) University of Melbourne, VIC 3010

9.30am registration and coffee

Session 1

10am – 10.45am | Ryan Gustafsson (writer and researcher)

Trans phenomenology, (im)mobility, and contingent ‘home’

10.45am – 11.30am | Helen Ngo (Deakin University)

On diasporic longings and the im/possibilities of home in settler colonial contexts

LUNCH (11.30am – 12.30pm)

Session 2

12.30pm – 1.15pm | Jaya Keaney (University of Melbourne)

White fathers

1.15pm – 2pm | Beau Kent (Deakin University)

Dis-location and world-travelling: The extraterritorial condition of transnational adoptees

AFTERNOON TEA (2pm – 2.30pm)

Session 3

2.30pm – 3.15pm | James Nguyen (artist)

Staging photos of home and family life: for the VISA process

Keynote Address

3.15pm – 4.45pm | Mariana Ortega (Pennsylvania State University, USA)

Nostalgia, Home-memory, and Photographic Fabulation

Trans phenomenology, (im)mobility, and contingent ‘home’

Trans bodies are often imagined as one the move—crossing borders, journeying from and to—or as ‘stuck,’ desirous of movement but unable to escape. The idea of being in the ‘wrong body’ is key to this; ‘wrongness’ serving as the impetus for movement and the obstacle to be overcome. The notion of wrong-bodiedness, which has come to dominate Western understandings of trans lives and desires, positions the trans body as tragically incomplete and trapped, while the normative trans subject is cast as a redemptive figure capable of finally arriving at ‘proper embodied belonging.’ This arrival, if late, is often framed as a type of ‘coming home’—‘home’ here conceived as proper and authentic belonging. In this paper, I outline how trans phenomenology offers a way of accounting for idealized notions of home mobilized in the idea of wrong-bodiedness as liminality geared toward its own erasure. The desire to come, go, arrive at, and feel at home can be gleaned in everyday practices and meanings of what it means to be in the world. We can invoke a more everyday rendering of ‘home’ – contingent home – that affirms the body-world nexus and the inseparability of homeliness and conditions of livability.

Dr Ryan Gustafsson (they/he) is a writer and researcher living on Wurundjeri country. Their work takes a phenomenological approach to understanding histories and experiences of Korean transnational adoption, and trans studies. Their recent essays have appeared in Adoption & Culture, Trans Philosophy (University of Minnesota Press, 2024), and Philosophies of Adoption (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024).

On diasporic longings and the im/possibilities of home in settler colonial contexts

For those writing from the margins, “home” has long served as a central motif, with meditations on its loss, longing, -making, and -coming, often animating the writings of immigrants, members of diaspora, and racialised communities. But what conceptions of home or modes of homeliness and belonging do they imagine? This talk will examine a range of Asian diasporic literature in order to explore the tensions of longing for homes that in a sense no longer exist, and a feeling of homeliness that perhaps never will attain. With particular emphasis on the phenomenon of diasporic home-longing in settler colonial contexts, I will examine how diasporic communities navigate the complex positionalities of those who are often displaced, but whom in settler colonial societies, can become poised to replace. In doing so my aim is to draw attention to the deeply fraught status of the home, and to open up the question of its im/possibility.

Dr Helen Ngo (she/her) is an ARC DECRA Research Fellow at Deakin University. She works in phenomenology and critical philosophy of race and has published on topics such as habitual racism, racialised temporalities, antiracist activism, white privilege, white supremacy, and diasporic bilingualism. She is the author of The Habits of Racism: A Phenomenology of Racism and Racialized Embodiment (Lexington Books, 2017), and her current research project explores peri-phenomenological accounts of racialised alienation and the practices and tensions of diasporic home-making.

White fathers

This paper begins from the lingering trace of two interview encounters that unfolded as part of my project on queer family making. David and Stuart are white gay fathers to biracial children, who were born in India and Thailand through commercial surrogacy. These interviews linger in my body long after our meeting, in part because of the saturating role of colour-blindness in how family stories were told. Our conversations raised a question that won’t subside: how can we know racism in contexts where effacement is a primary structure of (racial) feeling? Here, I begin to sketch an answer by positioning the white father as a prism for thinking about feminist knowledge production and the affective tenor of brownness. Reflecting on the crucial role of embodied sensation in surfacing imperial residues, I attend to three modalities through which racism circulates: silence, affective switch-points, and smiles. In doing so, I aim to elaborate a minor empirics beyond the juridical register of white colonial kinship that allows us to attend more closely to racism’s intimate life.

Dr Jaya Keaney (she/her) is a Lecturer in Gender Studies in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. She writes, researches, and teaches in the fields of queer and feminist theory, feminist technoscience, and cultural studies. Her research across these fields explores reproduction, racism, and queer feminist practices of embodiment and inheritance. Jaya is the author of Making Gaybies: Queer Reproduction and Multiracial Feeling (Duke University Press, 2023), which was a finalist for the 2024 Rachel Carson Prize.

Dis-location and world-travelling: The extraterritorial condition of transnational adoptees

This paper will explore what I call the ‘extraterritoriality’ of transnational adoptees. I ground my understanding of adoptee subjectivity in Mariana Ortega’s theory of the multiplicitous self and then argue that these experiences should be understood through a re-worked analysis of Siegfried Kracauer’s concept of extraterritoriality. I then claim that there is a strong relationship between extraterritoriality as a lived ‘displacement’, and the actual practices and processes that the child must undergo in order to become an adoptee — an initial ‘disembedding’ from kinship, home and origin. I use this to reveal an underexplored possibility in the concept of world-travelling in the work of Ortega and María Lugones, that of being part of a social group for which there is no world that could be properly their own.

Beau Kent (he/they) is a Masters student in philosophy at Deakin University. His philosophical work centers predominantly around critical phenomenology, adoption studies, and deconstruction. He is currently working on a thesis centered around critical phenomenology as methodology and the structure of expressivity. They also currently work as a research assistant at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation.

Staging photos of home and family life: for the VISA process

Fleeing Vietnam in the years following the fall of Saigon and the Đổi Mới postwar reforms, the only family photos that remain in my case were those submitted for the Refugee Family Reunification VISA. Not only was film and photopaper extremely difficult to get a hold of throughout this period, the photograph became a rare commodity of function; to be made visible to the Socialist state, or to convince the Commonwealth that your pictorial representations of home and family life met the criteria of the family reunification program.

To this day, many Vietnamese continue to participate in the practice of staged anniversary and wedding photography. Carefully crafted before the actual anniversary or wedding, the presentation of these photographs at these gatherings become an event in themselves.

Dr James Nguyen (he/him) was born in Bảo Lộc, Việt Nam. He is currently based in Murrumbeena (close to where the Boyds once ran their pottery studios). Nguyen’s work engages with reMatriation, decolonial disobedience, smuggling and language-brokering. He makes memes, performances, film and installations that draw attention to the diaspora absurd. James has shown both ground-breaking and lacklustre work at institutions including ACCA, MCA, NGV, Fairfield City Museum and Gallery, 4A, and Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art.

Nostalgia, Home-memory, and Photographic Fabulation

This presentation examines the nexus between nostalgia, memory, embodiment, and the photographic event. Guided by Koyolzintli’s series Other Histories/Historias Bravas, it introduces the notion of photographic fabulation, a narrative written with light that illustrates the art of home-memory, multiply-layered aesthetic modalities that engage the nostalgia of those whose lives have been marked by displacement or painful departures and arrivals. The photograph in Miranda-Rivadeneira becomes a locus of enunciation for a self in search of a past given a history of migration and liminality.

Prof Mariana Ortega (she/her) is Professor of Philosophy at the Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of Carnalities, The Art of Living in Latinidad (Duke University Press, 2025) and In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self (SUNY Press, 2016). She is co-editor of Theories of the Flesh, Latinx and Latin American Feminisms, Transformation and Resistance (Oxford University Press, 2020) and Constructing the Nation: A Race and Nationalism Reader (SUNY Press, 2009). She is the founder and director of the Latina/x Feminisms Roundtable, a forum for Latina/x and Latin American feminisms.