School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses

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1997 - 1999 1 2020 - 2022 1
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Type: Masters Coursework thesis × Subject: Australia ×

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    The Life of Human Rights: An Everyday Approach to Understanding Human Rights in an Australian Parliamentary Enquiry on the Involuntary Sterilisation of People with Disabilities
    Hernandez Ruiz, Maria Paula ( 2022)
    This research questions how ‘human rights’ are used in a parliamentary inquiry on the coercive or involuntary sterilisation of people with disabilities in Australia. Throughout three chapters, the thesis breaks down ‘human rights’ as a concept and as a practical approach in development programming. Chapter two delves into the multiple understandings of rights in the development literature and incorporates contributions from legal anthropology and the field of the social studies of science and technology to understand human rights in the development context. Chapter three proposes an “ethnography in the archives” as a methodological design that pushes disciplinary boundaries to understand the value of documents and arguments in how different stakeholders inside and outside of the development field engage with issues such as the coercive sterilisation of people with disabilities. Finally, chapter four offers an analysis derived from 82 documents presented in the parliamentary inquiry in Australia. This chapter shows this thesis’s main argument: That human rights differ from what this research calls ‘everyday rights’, which are the claims articulated by people drawing upon their lived experiences rather than human rights treaties or arguments. This argument sheds light on how development practice often faces a gap between what the stated outcomes are in terms of Human Rights-Based Approaches and the practical realities of rights claims.
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    How the NCA conceptualises organized crime
    Elliott, Victoria ( 1997)
    The National Crime Authority (NCA) was established to both investigate and disrupt organized criminal activity. Within the NCA, a Strategic Intelligence Unit (SIU) has been established to undertake assessments of the criminal environment and assist in prioritising areas of work for the Authority. However, there has been an enduring debate in both academic and law enforcement fields about the most appropriate conceptualisation of organized crime. The present thesis has investigated the ways in which personnel within the NCA conceptualise organized crime and apply those conceptualisations to management and investigative tasks. In particular, the definition of organized crime and the associated conceptualisation of that crime developed by the SIU has been compared with the perspectives of a range of other Authority personnel emerging from a series of 21 in-depth interviews. Analysis of the interviews reveal that while the SIU's conceptualisation of organized crime is close to that of the academic community, operational and management personnel adopt conceptualisations which arise from the specific work environments in which they operate. The thesis concludes that the needs of strategic planning, management of complex inter-agency investigations, and operational prioritisation will be better met by closer communication and co-operation between the operational and strategic areas of the Authority.