About

Introduction

Kathy is an Academic in the Discipline of Geography & Environmental Students in the School of Environmental & Life Sciences.

Qualifications

B.Ec.(Hons), Sydney, 1989

PhD, in Geography, Sydney, 2000

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Research

Research Interests

 My primary research focus is cultural geography. I am interested in how places are understood, represented, valued and experienced by people at a range of scales. This research interest has developed in three main ways. First, I have undertaken projects that investigate the meanings of places. These projects have looked at the discursive construction of places in a range of cultural texts including the news media, films, government reports and documents and private sector advertising. Second, I have investigated how places are experienced by residents. Recent research has focused on the experience of inner Newcastle neighbourhoods for public housing tenants and private residents. Third, I am interested in how places are managed. My interest in place management involves a consideration how places are managed by public sector institutions, how technologies can be used to enhance the management of places, and how residents experience place management through an understanding of care. My current research projects on belonging and vulnerability bring together these interests through an entry point of the cultural geography of places.

Current Projects:

Cultural Geographies of Belonging
Belonging and exclusion are central geographical processes through which identity and entitlement are negotiated and realised. Despite the centrality of belonging to many social processes and to the ways that power and identity are configured in society, it is not a concept that has been well theorised. Rather than exploring belonging, much literature begins instead with an entry point of exclusion and marginalisation. Our aim is to contribute to a theorisation of belonging by exploring practices, meanings and processes of belonging at different scales and spaces: from the body, the house or home, the neighbourhood, the region, the nation and the global. Important issues examined through the project include the construction of belonging and exclusion; the vital role of borders, frontiers and liminal spaces in constituting belonging; attempts at the purification of space; practices of belonging such as care and the contestation of geographies of belonging through processes of transgression and or resistance.

Institutional Management of Social Vulnerability in the Hunter
My second research focus concerns the geography of social vulnerability in the Hunter Region (NSW) and the institutional behaviours and practices of human service agencies in managing service delivery to vulnerable communities The research team (O'Neill, McGuirk, Mee and King) has developed two key collaborative partnerships with regional offices of the NSW Department of Housing and with NSW Premier's Department. The research is using GIS technologies to develop spatial indicators of social vulnerability and to assist in improved regional human services planning. Simultaneously, we are exploring the contingent processes of through which neo-liberalised social policy practices are institutionalized across regional service agencies. The research team also includes three PhD students.

More details of current and past research project can be found on the web-site of the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies (CURS

Refereed Journal Articles

Mee Kathleen Jeanette, ’A space to care, a space of care: Public housing, belonging, and care in inner Newcastle, Australia’, Environment and Planning A, 41 842-858 (2009) [C1]

Mee Kathleen Jeanette, Wright Sarah Louise, ’Geographies of belonging Why belonging? Why geography?’, Environment and Planning A, 41 772-779 (2009) [C3]

Mee Kathleen Jeanette, ’'I ain't been to heaven yet? Living here, this is heaven to me': Public housing and the making of home in inner Newcastle’, Housing, Theory and Society, 24 207-228 (2007) [C1]

Dowling R, Mee Kathleen Jeanette, ’Home and homemaking in contemporary Australia’, Housing, Theory and Society, 24 161-165 (2007) [C3]

Mee Kathleen Jeanette, ’The perils and possibilities of hanging out with geographers’, Geographical Research, 44 426-430 (2006) [C1]

Mee Kathleen Jeanette, ’A companion to cultural geography (book review)’, Cultural Geographies, 12 532-533 (2005) [C3]

Ruming Kristian James, Mee Kathleen Jeanette, McGuirk Pauline Mary, ’Questioning the Rhetoric of Social Mix: Courteous Community or Hidden Hostility?’, Australian Geographical Studies, 42 234-248 (2004) [C1]

Mee Kathleen Jeanette, Waitt Gordon, ’Editorial: Culture matters’, Social & Cultural Geography, 4 131-138 (2003) [C1]

Mee Kathleen Jeanette, Dowling Robyn, ’Reading Idiot Box: film reviews and intertwining the social and cultural’, Social & Cultural Geography, 4 185-199 (2003) [C1]

Mee Kathleen Jeanette, ’Prosperity and the suburban dream: quality of life and affordability in Western Sydney’, Australian Geographer, 33 337-351 (2002) [C1]

Books and Monographs

O'Neill Phillip, McGuirk Pauline Mary, Mee Kathleen Jeanette, Wright Sarah Louise, Markwell Kevin Wayne, Momtaz Salim, King Robert Arthur, Urban Development and the Lower Hunter: Understanding Context, Connections and Flows, Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, School of Environmental and Life Sciences, University of Newcastle, Callaghan, N.S.W., 359 (2007) [A2]

Book Chapters

McGuirk Pauline Mary, Dowling Robyn, Gibson Chris, Iveson Kurt, Mee Kathleen Jeanette, ’Urban vitality, culture and the public realm’, Urban 45: New Ideas for Australia's Cities, RMIT, Melbourne, VIC, 51-54 (2007) [B2]

Mee Kathleen Jeanette, ’Necessary Welfare Measure or Policy Failure: Media Reports of Public Housing in Sydney in the 1990s’, Social Constructionism in Housing Research, Ashgate Publishing Limited, Hampshire, 117-141 (2004) [B1]

Mee Kathleen Jeanette, Dowling R, ’Tales of the City: Western Sydney at the end of the millenium’, Sydney: The Emergence of a World City, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 273-291 (2000) [B1]

Conference Papers

McGuirk Pauline Mary, Dowling Robyn, Gibson Chris, Iveson Kurt, Mee Kathleen Jeanette, ’Urban vitality, culture and the public realm’, Urban 45: New Ideas for Australia's Cities, RMIT, Melbourne, VIC, 51-54 (2007) [B2]

Mee Kathleen Jeanette, ’Necessary Welfare Measure or Policy Failure: Media Reports of Public Housing in Sydney in the 1990s’, Social Constructionism in Housing Research, Ashgate Publishing Limited, Hampshire, 117-141 (2004) [B1]

Mee Kathleen Jeanette, Dowling R, ’Tales of the City: Western Sydney at the end of the millenium’, Sydney: The Emergence of a World City, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 273-291 (2000) [B1]

Grants and Funding

CURRENT FUNDING:

ARC Linkage Grant (with O'Neill, Mee and King) and NSW Department of Premiers' ($189,000) Building technologies and engagement processes for using spatialised data to enhance family and community outcomes in a region experiencing major change

TUNRA Urban Research Development (with O'Neill, McGuirk, Wright, Markwell, Momtaz). Funding: $150 000 (2005 - 2006)

PREVIOUS FUNDING:

NSW Cancer Council ($26, 418) (with Chris Paul of CHeRP) Exploring the relationships between retail access to tobacco, socio-economic status and tobacco consumption

University of Newcastle Research Management Committee Project Grant ($5000) Neighbourhood resources in inner Newcastle: social mix and neighbourhood networks in Hamilton South

University of Newcastle Research Management Committee Project Grant ($8000) Public Housing in Inner Newcastle: Gentrifying Neighbourhoods and Social Mix

ARC Linkage Grant (with O'Neill and McGuirk) ($180, 990) Effective public housing management strategies for rural and regional Australia

Faculty of Science Research Committee, Early Career Researcher Grant, ($3000) Discourses of housing in the 1990's: housing affordability and problematic public housing in Sydney and Newcastle

University of Newcastle New Staff Grant ($6812) Wattle Grove: discourses of the urban and suburban in south western Sydney

Research Supervision

Nicholas Nolan - PhD (Human Geography)
"Reserve or Resort? Conflicting values and ideology in the use and management of Kosciuszko National Park"

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Teaching

Teaching Interests

My motivation for becoming a human geographer was interest in the discipline's concern with issues of justice, particularly the ways in which social relations between groups of people are expressed in places. As a cultural geographer I am particularly concerned with everyday spaces in the contemporary city, the creation and recreation of places and the management of places. My philosophy of teaching is based on the firm belief that university education is a key force for social justice and change. My undergraduate education in human geography opened windows on new social worlds; as a teacher I hope to motivate students to look through many news windows, or see old windows in news ways, or just to comprehend that there are windows in some walls. This philosophy is expressed in three ways, I believe: that learning should enable students to develop key competencies relevant to their discipline, that incorporating aspects of student centred learning can enhance motivation to learn, and that teaching is an important part of learning. In each of my courses students engage with material theoretically, methodologically, develop their communication skills and choose case studies that appeal to their own geographical interests.

Courses

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Other

Awards and Prizes

1998 Vice-chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching

Membership of Societies and Professional Bodies

Convenor/ Deputy Convenor of the Cultural Geography Study Group Institute of Australian Geographers 2001-2006.

Member of the Institute of British Geographers

Member of the Institute of Australian Geographers

Member of the Geographical Society of NSW