Sarah is currently engaged in a postgraduate research position in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Sydney, where she is writing a thesis on comparitive reportage on Arab-Australians between news mediums, and the progression of pop culture characters and concepts as a result of this. Her research area is outlined below.

Gangs & the Glory Box: The moral panics, reels and realities of Arab-Australian gang crime and its glamorisation in Australian media and popular culture.

Research Area

When 14 year old Korean school boy Edward Lee was stabbed to death outside a party in the south-western Sydney suburb of Punchbowl in 1998, police described his attackers as being of Middle-Eastern appearance, and conducted a ‘stop and search’ campaign in nearby suburbs – targeting a number of Middle-Eastern youths in a series of arrests. Two weeks later, the local police station of Lakemba was shot at in a drive-by, and despite no evidence to suggest that this was in fact the case, Australian media described this drive-by shooting as ‘retaliation’ for the ‘stop and search’ campaign, and, in its reportage of both events, contextualised the criminal acts through the race and ethnicity of the suspects, constantly re-iterating that they were perpetuated by gangs who were Middle-Eastern, and Lebanese (Collins et al. 2000:1).

It has now been over ten years since Lee’s murder, when the Middle-Eastern community was first showered with a criminal spotlight in Australian media, and such reportage has not changed. In these ten years, we have also witnessed a series of infamous gang rapes, Cronulla riots, and religious extremism – events which not only warrant concern in and of themselves, but also in the context of a post-September 11 culture of fear, a culture that has divided our Australian society in a panic of ‘us’ and ‘them’, fuelled by a dominant Australian culture and an unassimilated ‘other’ whose values warranted question – the Middle-Eastern community. In the past decade, the ethnic contextualisation of this reportage has not changed much, and society remains divided along an axis that, as the Cronulla riots displayed, threatens multicultural cohesiveness. The examination of the reportage of the events in question, as well as the responses to them by those involved (Australian society, first generation Australian-Arabs and Arab-Australian migrants) makes up my proposed research topic.

Significance

Research in this area has primarily been concerned with the study of the socialisation of Arab-Australians in Australian societies, and how this has impacted on their assimilation and integration, or lack thereof, which in turn plays a role in their criminal behaviour, with key thinkers including Greg Noble, Jock Collins and Scott Poynting, who have published books on the topic (Kebabs, Kids, Cops and Crime, and Bin Laden in the suburbs: Criminalising the Arab Other). This community has also been the subject of writings and studies on the moral panics that the media has fuelled around these communities, namely in an edited collection by Scott Poynting and George Morgan, where Rob White and Selda Dagistanli explore the moral panics surrounding the gang rapes and the public street fighting between these groups and the Australian community. In terms of the media representations, where these studies fall short is that they don’t look at the way these events were also represented in the Arabic language newspapers – to analyse just how these events were represented in comparison. Furthermore, with the exception of one chapter in Kebabs, they don’t analyse youth responses to these representations. My research takes into account three aspects of our society and how they have dealt with Middle-Eastern crime:

• the Australian print media, whose audiences are the bulk of our society

• the Arabic-language newspapers, whose audiences are recent migrants and Australians born and raised in the Middle-East, and who still don’t maintain an advanced enough grasp of the English language in order to read the Australian papers, or just feel comfortable reading their own

• and of course, the members of society in the mix: Australians of Arabic background who have embraced their heritage as it is represented by media reportage – and then used this representation to develop characters in TV shows and plays that play on their characterisation as gangsters, thieves, drug dealers etc (Cedar Boys, The Combination, Fat Pizza, From Lebanon With Love and various stand up comedies).

Previous Study

Sarah also has a Master of Media Practice from the University of Sydney (2007) and a Bachelor of Media Writing from Macquarie University (2006).