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Mainstream housing service providers are increasingly involved in the provision of housing services to Indigenous clients but there has been little investigation of how housing staff experience and manage the intercultural dimensions of this. This issue is important because of the considerable discretionary power that tenancy managers and frontline staff, exercise in their role. This paper develops a theoretical model for exploring how housing practitioners construct and understand cultural differences and/or similarities and the role this plays in shaping their professional interactions with Indigenous tenants. Thirty-one semi-structured in depth interviews were conducted in metropolitan and regional Queensland with housing practitioners working with Indigenous clients, in state, community and Indigenous-specific social housing services. Early findings suggest practitioners’ understandings can be located along a continuum of Racialised Dichotomy, Homogeneity and Recognition. This combines with their experiential knowing of Indigenous people and their cultural practices, and may help to explain how practitioners utilise their discretionary power at the interface of service provision.

Item Type:	Refereed Conference Paper
Research Division:	Human Society
Research Group:	Sociology
Research Field:	Sociology of migration, ethnicity and multiculturalism
Objective Division:	Culture and Society
Objective Group:	Communication
Objective Field:	Communication across languages and culture
UTAS Author:	Proudfoot, F (Dr Fiona Proudfoot)
ID Code:	98252
Year Published:	2014
Deposited By:	School of Social Sciences
Deposited On:	2015-02-08
Last Modified:	2017-10-04
Downloads:	198 View Download Statistics