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As global migration reshapes communities and economies, the promise of opportunity often collides with the realities of settlement and integration. Accessibility, Participation and Agency explores the complex pathways of immigrants, refugees, and international students in Australia, as they seek employment, belonging, and a better life in their new home.
Bringing together scholars from education, migration studies, psychology, human resource management, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and IT, this volume offers a rich, interdisciplinary lens on the lived experiences of mobility groups. Drawing on diverse empirical methods, the chapters examine how accessibility, participation, and agency intersect to shape transition-to-work journeys.
With a focus on the Australian context and insights that resonate globally, this volume highlights structural barriers, and celebrates stories of resilience. It is essential reading for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners committed to social justice and inclusive futures.
This is a timely and carefully curated volume. It foregrounds language as a key site where inclusion and exclusion are negotiated, with immediate consequences for individuals, institutions and society at large. The chapters show that access, participation and agency are never neutral or evenly distributed; they are shaped in and through linguistic practices and in/formal policy in workplace and everyday encounters.
The chapters reflect and explore the tensions of contemporary multicultural societies. While openness and diversity are celebrated, the contributions demonstrate how inclusion is negotiated, contested and often remains partial, conditional or symbolic. The volume avoids simplistic accounts of migration and instead captures the complex trajectory to access and fitting in.
Bringing together varied contexts, groups and methodological approaches, the volume offers a nuanced account of mobility, employment and belonging in changing societies. Its focus on combining perspectives is especially valuable at a time when single-method and deficit-based accounts are not synchronised with our societal realities. This volume will be direct interest to scholars, policymakers and practitioners concerned with language, migration and social justice.
— Professor Jo Angouri, Applied Linguistics, University of Warwick
Australia is a nation of migrants, apart from the Indigenous peoples who have lived here for over 60, 000 years. Initially settled by predominantly white Anglo migrants, its population has diversified significantly under policies of multiculturalism over the last 50 years. It is therefore an appropriate place to understand processes of settlement, and issues of access, participation and agency for migrants from different visa categories. The introductory chapter sets this context and makes it clear why Australia is an excellent site for consideration of the challenges and opportunities migrants, refugees and international students face, and their heterogeneity of experience.
This collection brings together a range of authors at different career stages, from across Australian universities, many themselves of migrant backgrounds, to interrogate the settlement experience, covering new migrant groups such as African and Ukrainian Australians, those of refugee backgrounds and particularly issues of language, employment, and education. Several chapters deal with refugee settlement, including in regional areas of Australia outside the capital cities,. Given Australia is one of the most centralized countries in the world, and recent government settlement policies have required some to live in these areas, this provides important insights into opportunities for inclusion and issues around service provision.
As well as this focus on refugee settlement, some chapters consider employment opportunities outside Australia. Several chapters use small numbers of research participants or single case studies, enabling depth of their lived experience to be shared. The structure reflects the key issues for migrants, particularly questions of accessibility, opportunities and barriers for participation, and the range of ways in which migrants and refugees exercise agency.
There has been a recent turn in Australian migration literature, after years of focusing on barriers, to recognizing the agency of migrants as they navigate making a new life for themselves. This collection provides some excellent examples of this, putting migrant students and workers at the centre of their story rather than as subjects for the research gaze. It beautifully illustrates how they negotiate structures to achieve their ends, providing a wealth of empirical material, and access to the voices of migrants and refugees. Most of the chapters also offer thoughtful engagement with concept of agency, with some using assemblage theory to extend simplistic structure/agency binaries.
A key insight of the collection is the importance of education and the challenges of converting educational capital into material employment outcomes.
Using a diverse range of methods, from a case study of a student’s use of AI to assist their university studies, to a longitudinal study over 5 years of the transition from education to work, to analysis of reflections of return migrants on the value of the soft skills and critical thinking achieved during their education, to critical participatory action research with migrant community leaders demonstrating how unpaid labour is both a burden and yet provides opportunities, to a study of linguistic accessibility in regional communities and its effects on employment, the collection offers a fascinating insight into the lived experience of migrants, refugees and international students. As well as more qualitative work, the collection includes a study based on a survey of the relationship between regional employers’ contact with refugees and their willingness to employ them, and another identifying factors influencing job search behaviours and employment outcomes.
The collection is an excellent source for use by academics, postgraduate students and undergraduates seeking to understand the barriers, but more importantly, the ways in which migrants exercise agency in pursuing positive educational and employment outcomes in Australia. It will also be useful for policy makers and institutions such as educational institutions and chambers of commerce to better prepare for, settle and retain migrants of different visa categories, ensuring access and opportunity for all.
— Farida Fozdar, Professor of Sociology and Dean, Global Futures, Humanities, Curtin University
This timely volume makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing migrants, refugees and international students as they navigate education, employment and social participation in Australia. Bringing together scholars from applied linguistics, education, social psychology and human resource management, the collection is distinguished by both its interdisciplinary reach and the way it engages three organising concepts: accessibility, participation and agency.
The three-part structure — moving from the structural conditions that enable or constrain access, through the ways in which newcomers actively participate in workplaces and professional communities, to the micro-level and longitudinal dimensions of individual agency — provides a coherent analytical framework. The discussions demonstrate how both structure and agency shape transitional experiences. The contributors draw attention to the resilience, the strategic thinking and the resourcefulness of migrants and international students within the varied contexts in which they find themselves working.
The chapters canvass a wide range of methodologies including linguistic landscape analysis, longitudinal case study, assemblage theory, quantitative survey modelling and participatory action research. And while the focus is Australia, the chapters range across both metropolitan and regional Australia, as well as the transnational trajectories of graduates who return to their home countries. Moreover the authors raise issues of international significance.
This collection will be invaluable for researchers, policymakers and educators with an interest in migration, international education and workplace inclusion.
— Emeritus Professor Janet Holmes, Language in the Workplace Project, Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington/University of Canterbury
This is a highly valuable and timely collection of research that brings together a range of empirical studies, including detailed case studies and broader analytical work, offering diverse perspectives on migration settlement in Australia. The book’s interdisciplinary nature, reflected in contributors’ expertise spanning linguistics, education, international education, migration studies, sociology, psychology, and workforce studies, provides a nuanced account of how different migrant groups (refugees, skilled migrants, and international students), navigate institutional structures and sociocultural systems across various context. Through the lens of transitional experiences across accessibility, participation, and agency, the book collectively cuts through broad brush approaches to settlement by elucidating diverse social realities of migration, thereby deepening understanding of the interplay between structure and agency. I highly recommend this book to students and migration scholars across disciplines, and to policymakers and practitioners seeking to better understand, and shape policies and services that are accessible and meaningful in Australia.
— Dr George Tan, Department of Geography, Environment and Population, School of Society and Culture, Adelaide University
Zuocheng Zhang is a member of the English, Literacies and Language Education team at the School of Education, the University of New England, Australia.
Ly Thi Tran is a Professor in the School of Education and Research for Educational Impact (REDI) centre, Deakin University, Australia.
Toni Dobinson is Discipline Lead in Applied Linguistics, TESOL/Languages in the School of Education at Curtin University, Australia.
Wei Wang is an interdisciplinary linguist at the University of Sydney, Australia.
Meredith Marra is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.
Chapter 1. Accessibility, Participation and Agency in the Transitional Experiences of Migrants, Refugees and International Students in Australia: An Introduction; Zuocheng Zhang, Ly Thi Tran, Toni Dobinson, Wei Wang, and Meredith Marra
Part 1. Accessibility
Chapter 2. Accessibility of Public Communications to New Mobility Groups: Linguistic Landscape and Implications for Settlement and Work in Regional Australia; Wei Wang
Chapter 3. Refugee-Background African Australians: Educational Attainment and Employment Trends; Tebeje Molla
Chapter 4. Host Community Attitudes and Refugee Employment in Regional Areas; Susan E. Watt and Cameron Goodall
Chapter 5. “How Did I End up Being an Unpaid Middle Manager?” Institutional and Shadow-Work in New Migrant Communities; Sally Lamping, Toni Dobinson, Sonja Kuzich, Julian Chen, Stephanie Dryden, and Paul Mercieca
Part 2. Participation
Chapter 6. From Agency to Action: Job Search Behaviours as Drivers of Skilled Migrants’ Employability; Thi Tuyet Tran
Chapter 7. Ukrainian Migrant Teachers’ Professional Transition in Australia: Factors Supporting and Impeding Their Agency, Access and Participation; Larysa Chybis
Chapter 8. Assemblage Theory: A Novel Approach to Understanding International IT Graduates’ Experiences of Employability in Australia; Thuan Nguyen, Jane Southcott, and Christopher Thompson
Part 3. Agency
Chapter 9. The Education-Migration Nexus: A Longitudinal Case Study of an International Student’s Journey from University to the Workplace in Australia; Zuocheng Zhang
Chapter 10. International Students’ Agency in Their Use of AI Tools for University Studies: A Qualitative Enquiry; Huifang Li
Chapter 11. Converting Capital into Employment Outcomes: How Do International Graduates from Australian Universities Leverage Employability Skills, Knowledge, and Experiences to Access the Labour Market in Vietnam?; Ly Thi Tran and Huyen Bui
Chapter 12. Epilogue: Speaking to and with the World About Employment, Education and Societal Participation; Meredith Marra