Dr Rae Dufty
Having completed her PhD at the University of New South Wales, Dr Rae Dufty now lectures on geography (land use economics) at the University of New England.
Rae's PhD was on the geographies and governmentalities of Housing Assistance:
a study of rural Public Housing in New South Wales, Australia
Applying a Foucaultian approach to the analysis of power relations and the government of rural public housing communities, this research has two main aims. First, it seeks to build a historical and contemporary analysis of how housing assistance has been and is currently used to govern rural communities in Australia and the state of New South Wales (NSW). Second, focussing on four rural communities in south-western NSW, it aims to assess how effective are the advanced liberal governmental strategies that used housing assistance as technology of government in governing rural public housing tenants ‘at-a-distance’. The success of government-at-a-distance processes are assessed in two ways: first, according to how tenants are subjectified, that is how they self-govern, or may potentially self-govern; and, second, analysis focuses on how tenants are objectified or governed by ‘others’ that is by ‘experts’/NSW Department of Housing staff, the broader community and by each other.
This study employs a mixed-methods approach including: archival research of policy documents on housing assistance and regional development, using the periods 1935-1955 and 1985-2005; a postal questionnaire conducted with rural public housing tenants from the four case study areas ins south-western NSW, Griffith, Cootamundra, Junee and Tumut; and a series of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with rural public housing tenants and NSW Department of Housing staff from the same four areas.
- Rae Dufty, February 2007
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