School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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ItemA fair way to go: criminal justice for victim/survivors of sexual assault( 2011)There is increasing emphasis on responding to the needs of victim/survivors of sexual assault within Australian criminal justice systems. This has been demonstrated through myriad procedural and substantive law reforms that have been introduced over the past 40 years and through sustained government investment in offering justice and safety for victims and the community. Nonetheless research continues to demonstrate that prosecution and conviction rates for sexual offences are not increasing, and that the criminal justice system procedures are distressing and traumatising for victim/survivors. Understanding what victim/survivors see as justice and what they consider to be fair procedures are key to developing responses that meet their needs. Drawing on narratives of 22 victim/survivors of sexual assault, this thesis identifies what justice means to these victim/survivors and discusses key aspects that relate to their procedural justice needs. This includes aspects of validation, retribution, safety, accountability, voice and control, and the importance of achieving outcomes that are just through procedures that are fair and valuable. The significance of symbolic aspects of the justice process and ritualised procedures in producing justice for victim/survivors through system responses are also considered by examining the setting within which formal process take place, style of interpersonal interactions and the impact of judicial demeanour in courts. The research links individual and system responses to broader social justice issues, and considers how key justice needs can be integrated into system procedures to provide meaningful and worthwhile justice system responses for victim/survivors of sexual assault. These aspects are incorporated into an accessible reform agenda that addresses power dynamics on individual, system and societal levels.
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ItemGoverning depression in Australia: a Foucauldian analysis of policy documents, mental health literacy materials, and self-help books( 2010)This thesis investigates the government of depression in Australia from 1980 to 2007 via a Foucauldian discourse analysis of a selection of dominant texts from the Australian discourse on depression. Drawing on Foucault, I use the term ‘government’ in its broadest sense, where ‘to govern is to structure the possible field of action of others’ (Foucault 1982, p. 221). By adopting Foucault’s approach to government, this thesis aims to investigate the multiple practices for governing depression in Australia that are carried out in a variety of different settings, by a variety of different actors. Discourse occupies an important role in the Foucauldian method and thus this thesis explores how a selection of dominant texts from the Australian discourse on depression produce a framework for the government of depression. More specifically, this thesis provides a Foucauldian discourse analysis of a selection of government policy documents, mental health literacy materials and self-help books on depression. The discourse analysis focuses on how these key texts represent depression, how the subject is represented in the key texts, and the power relations underpinning these representations. The central argument of this thesis is that the government of depression in Australia from 1980 to 2007 needs to be understood with relation to the normative demand in neoliberal societies for individuals and populations to be enterprising. This argument is developed by demonstrating how the key texts under analysis combine individualising and totalising knowledge of depression to enable neoliberal techniques that are focused on governing depression by regulating the autonomy of enterprising individuals. At the individual level, recognising and overcoming one’s depression becomes the rational and ethical thing to do, both for one’s own sake and for the sake of family, friends and society at large. Individuals are encouraged to combat their depression by performing certain ‘technologies of the self’ as prescribed in self-help books and mental health literacy materials, which are in turn endorsed by government policy documents. Importantly, the types of conduct promoted in the key texts tend to encourage neoliberal ideals about choice, productivity and enterprise. At the population level, overcoming depression is represented as being essential for the security of the nation. Workforce participation, economic productivity and social stability are all seen as being threatened by a depressed population. On this basis, the state and its institutions deploy new technologies of government over populations, such as screening ‘at risk’ groups for depressive symptoms, parenting programs for high-risk families, promoting self-help strategies for high-risk groups, management plans for patients with high-risk personalities or cultural backgrounds, and subsidised counselling services for high-risk individuals. These new technologies are seen as legitimate, as they are focused on enhancing the health, happiness and prosperity of the population, which is essential for the security of the nation. However, by targeting high-risk populations these new technologies of government cause problems for some groups more than others. Women, the elderly, and ethnic minority groups (i.e. all those deemed to be at ‘high risk’ of developing depression) are especially affected by the new regimes of rule. The use of governing technologies for calculating, measuring and addressing depression also expand the limits of what it means to be healthy. In the process, alternative approaches to depression are silenced or sidelined, and the complexities of the depression experience are obscured.
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ItemThe role of family and friends when responding to domestic violence( 2011)This study uses a cross-national, comparative approach between Melbourne (Australia) and Bogota (Colombia) to investigate the role of family and friends when responding to domestic violence. It draws on the ecological approach proposed by Bronfenbrenner (1979; 1986) and Dutton (1996) to examine the interactions of family and friends at two levels: the microsystem, which focuses on interactions between an individual and her/his personal relations; and the mesosystem, which focuses on interactions between two or more groups belonging to an individual's microsystem. At the microsystem level, this study explores family and friends' views and experiences of their involvement in domestic violence matters. At the mesosytem level, it examines the interactions between supporting groups of family and friends and the interactions between these informal helpers and domestic violence agencies. This study uses contextual variables and Hofstede's cultural dimensions approach to examine differences between Melbourne and Bogota. Qualitative data was collected from interviews and questionnaires conducted with agencies' staff and family and friends in both cities. Archival data including each country's legislation and national and local policy, statistical data on economic and social characteristics of each society, and information on each country's cultural values provided the context for the analysis. The research participants were family and friends of domestic violence victims attending court (in Melbourne, Australia) or the Family Commissions (in Bogota, Colombia), and staff members from domestic violence support agencies in each city. Fifty-eight (58) family members or friends (28 from Colombia, 30 from Australia) were interviewed about their relationship with victims and their experiences of offering and providing support. Thirty-nine (39) staff members (21 from Colombia, 18 from Australia) participated in the study by completing a survey or an interview about their views on different sources of support and their interactions with family and friends in helping victims deal with the violence. Findings from both countries showed that responses from victims, family and friends, and service agencies are interdependent, which suggests that the current approach may overestimate the importance of individual characteristics when looking at the role of family and friends. Family and friends responded to victims denying or minimising violence by refraining from making enquiries about the abuse, or limiting their offers of support to listening. Similarly, they increased or renewed offers of support when they observed `active' responses from victims, such as contacting an agency. Rather than responding to their own perceptions of the situation of abuse, family and friends responded to direct requests of help from the victim. Offers of support were also influenced by interactions between members of supportive groups of family and friends. When supportive people were strongly connected with each other, they organised themselves to offer the victim constant and varied types of support. When they had been singled out as confidantes of the abuse or had no connection with other informal helpers, offers of support were restricted. Although the interactions between support people and agencies was found to be very limited, in the few instances where family and friends had had professional contact with domestic violence workers, their interaction had positive effects on their offers of support. There were a few differences between the two countries. Many mothers, sisters, and female friends in both countries reported psychological consequences (e.g., fear, anxiousness) and sometimes physical consequences (e.g., insomnia, loss of appetite) from the situation of violence. However, more support people in Bogota than Melbourne reported feeling affected by the violence and involved in finding a solution. Similarly, in more than half the sample in both countries, family and friends reported that they were verbally abused, threatened, or intimidated by the abusive partner. However, verbal and physical confrontation between support people and an abusive partner was more frequent in Colombia than Australia. Finally, although most domestic violence workers in both countries held a negative view of family and friends, workers in Australia were slightly more positive about their current and future role in situations of domestic violence. Contextual factors and dimensions of national culture can provide an explanation for differences in family and friends' experiences, and domestic violence workers' acceptance or rejection of informal helpers' involvement in situations of family violence. These findings have implications for theory and intervention. Studying responses to domestic violence and the involvement of family and friends from an ecological approach provides valuable insight into the views, motivation, and experiences of these informal helpers, and allows to identify important factors that shape their responses. Services should consider these groups as resources to decrease victims' isolation and examine their own role in guiding family and friends' responses to domestic violence matters.
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ItemStitching spear-grass sinew and skin: crafting new social memories at the Koorie Heritage Trust( 2012)This thesis explores the relationship between the revival of Aboriginal craft practices and the crafting of social memory among artists at the Koorie Heritage Trust in Melbourne. ‘Koorie’, or ‘Koori’, is a collective term used to describe the Aboriginal people of south eastern Australia – an area made up of approximately thirty-eight discrete language groups. Although the languages themselves are no longer widely spoken, individuals identify with these bounded groups. Each of the language groups are tied to a specific region or ‘Country’, set of totems, and collection of creation stories, all of which contribute to how individuals identify themselves within the wider Koorie community. Since the mid-Nineteenth century, Koorie cultural practices had been systematically eroded by the pressures of European colonialism. Until the late 1960's and early 1970's, it appeared that the only craft practices surviving were to service tourism and the tastes and whims of white Australians. The 1970's saw the emergence of an Aboriginal cultural, political, and artistic movement which was the beginning of changing perceptions of what made aboriginal art 'authentic'. The Koorie Heritage Trust was established in 1985 in an effort to preserve, protect, and promote Aboriginal culture of south eastern Australia. This began with the establishment of a ‘Keeping Place’, where material culture could be collected, housed, and cared for in culturally appropriate ways. This thesis examines more recent examples of craft revival by Koorie artists, which include possum skin cloaks, kangaroo tooth necklaces, and grass baskets. Each of these items emerged from their creators’ bringing together of information sources through museum and archival records, the artists’ existing understanding of cultural practices, and their innate, intuitive, ‘Ancestral knowledge’. The exploration of these sites and means of cultural production requires the consideration of three central themes: the concept of time, which informs how the artists comprehend their past; knowledge, which is concerned with how these artists come to be proficient in their ‘know-how’; and finally, how this knowledge is understood to be embodied and enacted in the lived in world. This thesis demonstrates how, as these artists engage in the revival of craft practices, notions of time, knowledge and the role of the body transform, and so too does an understanding of social memory.
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ItemReconsidering Orientalism/Occidentalism: representations of a Japanese martial art in Melbourne( 2012)My research analysed a small Melbourne community of non-Japanese practitioners of a Japanese martial art (kendō), and I focused on their understanding of their practice, of their community, and of Japan and Japanese culture. In particular, I focused on the way non-Japanese practitioners represent a practice of the Other and the way they interact with that otherness. More specifically, three key points are suggested in my research. (1) While Orientalist stereotypes locate the Other from the spectator’s objective perspective, I would suggest the way Melbourne kendō practitioners interact with the Other is through a process of creating ‘familiarity’; locating oneself within surrounding differences and building subjective involvement into a practice of the Other. Such subjective involvement is further emphasised by their preference towards ‘something new’ and ‘something different’. By selecting kendō as a thing to ‘add’ to their everyday life, they structure this everyday life by appropriating a new phenomenon as an activity to make their life enjoyable. (2) Through participating in this practice of the Other, Melbourne practitioners recognise kendō as a form for ‘expressing the self’, ‘developing the self’, and ‘challenging the self’. Kendō practice provides them a space to explore a different self which is somehow restricted in daily life. In contrast to Orientalist representations which seek ‘authentic otherness’, Melbourne practitioners are interested in self cultivation in which they seek a sense of the authentic moment of expressing their being ‘here and now’ through finding alternative belongingness in the kendō community. (3) The practitioners’ subjective involvement is further complicated by their recognition of themselves. The narratives of some practitioners show the way they interact with the Japanese Other by building the eyes to see themselves from the perspective of the Japanese Other, and thus they have a ‘two-way’ interaction in which their identities as kendō practitioners are constantly challenged, reflecting their foreign position among a minority of Japanese practitioners. In other words, their identities as kendō practitioners traverse the borderline between the Self and the Other.
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ItemAnti-development and the 'anthropological puzzle': integrated conservation and development in northwest Yunnan( 2012)This thesis constitutes a critical investigation of contemporary shifts in the meaning and purpose of the international development mission. It explores how development priorities have responded to a convergence of environmental and economic crises and evolved into new formations that have reversed the original charter established in the middle of the 20th century. At the same time this thesis argues that the long historical relationship between the North and South - geographies which are admittedly over determined - is essentially a complex and evolving political struggle that has been recast as developmental. The contemporary developmental agenda has largely focused on economic modernisation and the insertion of marketization into all spheres of human existence. It has determined that differences in social, cultural and economic formations as well as inequalities that result in poverty are largely developmental. With the delegitimisation of this economic program, the development platform, using a variety of stabilising mechanisms, has transitioned to new categories that redefine the meaning and purpose of development. In particular, the move to sustainable development and its articulation through a mode of programming entitled Integrated Conservation and Development has evolved into a new formation known as neoliberal conservation. Taking a multi-dimensional approach, this thesis establishes the historical background for contemporary technologies of environmental governance, the broader political economy of development, and examines the micro-practice of project discourse and implementation in a remote rural location in Yunnan province. This thesis is an anthropology of development approach about a particular culture of discourse and practice. This culture of development is also simultaneously co-extensive with the priorities of capital accumulation and a platform for emancipatory narratives that struggle against capital formations. I argue that the convergence of the crises of the environment and economy is a means to critique capital accumulation and is also the source of renewal through the development of environmental products and services.
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ItemInside/Outside: migrants' construction of home in the domestic kitchen( 2012)This thesis explores the everyday lives of middle class, inner suburban first- and second-generation migrants to Melbourne through their activities in the kitchen. It speaks to current and past work on multiculturalism, food culture and identity in order to develop an exploration of the ways in which migrants create senses of belonging, self, and home in the contexts of cultural difference and diversity. It looks at the ways in which migrants use the kitchen as a space of becoming. It also addresses how a migrant constructs personal ideas of what it means to be Australian in order to place him or herself in relation to it. The process of migration often engenders both a fragmentation of identity and a fragmentation of sense of belonging - the ways in which migrants return to totalities of self through activities in the kitchen are the main focus of this thesis. Additionally, it shall be looking at the influence of the outside world on the home and how this affects the process of becoming that a migrant goes through in his or her new country. This process requires pragmatism with regards to identity construction and performance – a negotiation between the home and host nation and between the past and present. Migrants often use activities in the kitchen to creatively recreate the past and, in doing so construct a sense of ‘homeliness’. This involves developing and reaffirming networks and relations through which a migrant can develop a space in which to belong. Furthermore, it shall be exploring ideas surrounding individualism and agency in creating identity as well as how the negotiation between creativity and reproduction in producing meals speaks to the creativity of identity performance that exists within an individualist framework. Additionally it shall look at what happens when control over identity performance and self-representation on the part of the individual is lost.
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Item'West side' stories: visible difference, gender, class and young people( 2012)The impetus for this thesis emerged from my job as a youth worker and my dissatisfaction with the dominant ways in which young people are discussed and managed as ‘at risk’ and ‘disengaged’. I argue that, far from being disengaged, young people in Melbourne’s western suburbs are engaged in reading the power structures that influence their lives and have developed a range of strategies to operate within and against these classed, ‘raced’ and gendered structures. Throughout this thesis I contend that young people have agency (that is, the ability to act), and argue for young people to be recognised as astute social actors, from whom we can learn much about the way power operates and the strategies people use to live with social inequality. ‘West side’ stories explores how young people experiencing social disadvantage are ‘managed’ in public policy and how they are represented in academia. The qualitative research presented in this thesis problematises the dominant representations, by illustrating the ways in which visible difference, gender and class intersect and how these social divisions shape the lives of young people living in the west – a culturally diverse and economically disadvantaged region of Melbourne. It is argued here that whiteness is marked in the western suburbs and that Anglo-Saxon Australians are also visibly different because of their class location.
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ItemRe-visualising new arrivals in Australia: journey narratives of pre-migration and settlement( 2012)Prior to migration, migrants and refugees have complex and diverse lived experiences. These experiences form an intrinsic part of their migration journeys, affecting their settlement pathways and shaping their identities. In re-visualising migrants and refugees as ‘new arrivals’, I focus on their migratory journeys as part of a continuum spanning departure, journey and settlement. Honing in on pre-migration I contextualise the sites of departure that two groups of new arrivals, South Sudanese Australian former refugees and Indian Australian former migrants, have inhabited prior to arrival. In doing this I bring attention to the uniqueness of pre-migration and the important place it has in people’s lives. Drawing on qualitative interviews with twenty-five research participants I illustrate the significant resources, agency and networks that new arrivals bring with them from sites of departure. I highlight how issues of mobility; the maintenance of family links as expressed through remittances, transnational marriages and the desire to return; and community transformation, influence the settlement terrain in ways not previously understood. This thesis connects pre-migration with settlement to show the ways in which pre-migration remains a continuous presence in people’s lives as they settle in Australia. Re-visualising new arrivals demands reciprocity, recognition and improved understandings of the unique role and prevailing influence of pre-migration.
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ItemRed hot hydropolitics: human and state security implications of water scarcity in Chile( 2012)The relationship between environment and security is generally approached from either a state security framework, in so far environmental problems are a source of intra-state or inter-state violent conflict, or from a human security perspective, focusing on the impacts of these problems on people’s livelihoods. To date, that I am aware, there is no research that considers the effects of an environmental problem on these two dimensions of security simultaneously. This thesis bridges this gap by studying the security implications of water scarcity in Chile. It examines the two main drivers of water scarcity, droughts and socioeconomic development, to determine the exposure and vulnerability of Chile to this environmental problem. Based on the work of the Copenhagen School, it develops a framework that disaggregates and locates the impacts of droughts in analytical levels and security sectors. Additionally, it develops a typology of environment related problems as security issues, according to the sectors and analytical levels affected. Through the application of this framework and typology this research determines that in Chile water scarcity is a source of human insecurity, because it alters the livelihoods and the access to livelihood resources for a significant part of the population. It is also a source of strategic insecurity, as it jeopardizes the generation of energy, affecting the overall capabilities of the country, and thereby limiting the policy options of the authorities and the potential to give material responses to any given crisis. Finally, water scarcity is a source of strategic vulnerability, since a neighboring country uses the subsequent energy insecurity as leverage in a long-lasting bilateral territorial dispute. This thesis uses the Regional Security Complex and the Hydropolitical Security Complex theories to assess the effects of water scarcity in the sub-system level. This research makes two relevant contributions to the security debate. First, an analytical framework that facilitates studying the security implications of droughts in any given nation-state. Second, it establishes a nexus between human and State security: if a non-traditional security problem, such as water scarcity, can become a source of State insecurity, then non-traditional security measures, originally aimed at improving human security, can be a source of State security. Although the context of this security analysis is Chile, a nation-state in which water is a relatively scarce resource and whose regional security complex is determined by patterns of enmity, two conditions that are not shared by every nation-State, the findings of this research are relevant nonetheless for the security debate, since it establishes that human and State security are not necessarily competing articulations, but two narratives with common fields in which they can strengthen each other.
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