Settling in: The Relationship between Information and Social Inclusion

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Abstract
Social exclusion is a process that directly reduces people’s capacity to participate in society. An important factor that contributes to social exclusion is the inability to recognise or understand important sources of information that facilitate social inclusion and participation. Social inclusion requires an ability to develop effective information practices that enable connection to compliance, making available everyday and nuanced information that constitute elements of the information landscape which need to be accessed and understood in order to participate in their adopted community. For refugees who are establishing themselves in Australia, the information landscape appears unfamiliar, complex, and difficult to navigate. To enable them to settle in Australia, new information practices may be required to enable them to find and interpret information, resolve problems, and deal with everyday situations which enable social inclusion and prevent social exclusion. This paper reports the findings of a project that focused on information and its relationship to social inclusion in three phases of settling in (transitioning, settling in, and being settled) to a new community in a regional city of NSW.

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