​​In this article, Shaphan Cox and I examine how national television visualized Fremantle City's decision to host an inclusive day of community celebration a few days after Australia Day:

• Cox, S. & Kerr, T. (2018). One Day in Fremantle: TV representation of this alternative to Australia Day. Coolabah, No. 24&25, 229-244.

This co-authored essay came about after two years of work in organizing the Re-imagining Australia Conference in 2016 for the International Australian Studies Association then editing two special editions of Coolabah focusing on critical and creative ways to re-imagine Australia. Here is the reference and link to the article:

• Chan, D. Farquhar, M., Garbutt, R., Kerr, T., Offord, B., Shiosaki, E. & Woldeyes, Y. (2018). A case for reimagining Australia: Dialogic registers of the Other, truth-telling and a will to justice. Coolabah, No. 24&25, 199-212.

 ​Kerr, T. (2017). Roe 8: politics and power in defence of place. The Architect, Spring/Summer 2017, pp. 28-31.

This co-authored article in The Conversation is about the newly elected Western Australia premier, Mark McGowan, appointing the state’s first minister for Asian engagement, Bill Johnston. The appointment shows that McGowan’s administration understands how deeply embedded the state’s interests are in the Asian neighbourhood.

Kalla yarning at Matagarup was appeared in the 'On the Borders of Belonging' issue (21) of Coolabah, published by the Centre d’Estudis Australians at Universitat de Barcelona.

The article aims to further understandings of popular television news reporting on Aboriginal solidarity gatherings at Matagarup on Heirisson Island, a state-registered Aboriginal Heritage Site in Perth, Western Australia. In doing so, it also seeks to identify the practical limits of heritage making in disrupting the legitimization of state action not recognizing such heritage claims. In 2012 and 2015, Aboriginal citizens gathering and camping at the heritage site were subject to police raids legitimized by popular media organizations reporting a breach of municipal bylaws prohibiting camping and fires on Heirisson Island. This paper examines a shift in popular television reporting over the three years towards acknowledging that Aboriginal people should be able to assemble, without police harassment, around a fire at the site. The most radical shift in reporting is observable in Nine News coverage of events. For this reason, eight televised items from Nine News in 2015 are analysed alongside Nine News reporting described in the authors’ previous study of reporting of events at Matagarup in 2012. The paper identifies and discusses the implications of two key dialogical processes in the news production: Firstly, a process of cross-cultural reading and shared understandings of fire as hearth, and secondly a process of reproducing a dominant discursive tradition locating home for Aboriginal people outside the city.

This article in The Journal of Historical Geography was written over a couple of years in collaboration with Dr Shaphan Cox, Dr Christina Birdsall-Jones, Professor Roy Jones and Professor Steve Mickler. The article examines the concept of occupations in relation to gatherings of Noongar people in 1988-1989 and in 2012 at high-profile riverside sites near the centre of Perth, Western Australia.  

This article in the Thesis Eleven journal of critical theory and historical sociology was written in collaboration with Dr Susan Leong and Dr Shaphan Cox. The article focuses on urban space and heritage. Our aim was to understand how ordinary streets in Perth respond to urban change and how much these urban streets represent Western Australia’s heritage. The intention is to eschew the dominant branding of WA as Australia’s mining state and shift the spotlight so that in addition to the economic and material, light is also shed on the socio-cultural in the everyday and the vernacular. This project uses Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis approach to explore a contrapuntal reading of heritage that disrupts the deserving, dominant and fixed histories of High Road in Willetton and High Street in Fremantle. Amid the tides of migration, commerce, and cultures, heritage facades on High Street Fremantle appear singular and fixed, whereas multiple cultures have been extracted for sale on High Road. Superficially High Road seems diverse but the overarching impulse across both sites is commerce—‘Business as usual’ reigns.