School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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ItemHungry for Peace: Food and Posthumanist Peacebuilding in an Entangled World( 2023-04)Hungry for Peace explores some of the extraordinary and ordinary, but valuable, ways young people’s food practices in Melbourne, Australia produce and sustain conflict and peacebuilding. Food touches all aspects of life, yet its metabolical, political, and ecological impacts on conflict can be easily overlooked. Recent food shortages and unstable food supply chains – caused by pandemic lockdowns, economic volatility, and climate extremities – are stark reminders of how human survival and livelihood depend upon food. Drawing on peacebuilding, feminist peace studies, food research, and agential realism, this thesis considers how food affects peace and conflict. Over eight chapters, it develops a ‘posthumanist peacebuilding’ framework and adopts a ‘peace-led diffractive methodology’ whereby the understandings of peacebuilding and the foci of peace research are not restricted to human activities alone. Rather, food, bodies, animals, and other more-than-humans are envisioned as contributing agentically towards ‘becoming-peace’ as well. Informed by two years of participatory fieldwork with young people that included cooking, eating together, and interviews at food spaces like kitchens and supermarkets, this research investigates some of the ways that food facilitates ‘food peacebuilding’ and ‘food violence’. In adopting a posthumanist peacebuilding framework, Hungry for Peace’s unique intervention in peacebuilding is the foregrounding of food’s affordances in everyday peacebuilding. The central argument pivots on the notion that more-than-humans can become both instruments and active agents of peace and conflict (or ‘peace-conflict’) in a highly connected world. In advancing this conceptual shift, this thesis moves the locus of understanding peacebuilding beyond human actors to demonstrate how more-than-humans (like food, smells, tables, and atmospheres) are more than contextual features of food-related conflicts; they are, instead, key characters directly shaping how peace-conflict unfold. From this perspective, peace-conflict are more-than-human acts. Importantly, humans are not always positioned as perpetrators of violence and more-than-humans are not always situated as victims entitled to claims of innocence (and vice versa). This thesis invites peacebuilders to re-imagine more-than-humans as collaborators in peace work, resisting and producing peace-conflict beyond human consciousness. ‘We’ are all intra-connected and ordinary practices, like eating, hold opportunities for everyday forms of peacebuilding.
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ItemAfter the Empire - Governance, Planning and Sustainable Indigenous Development in Australia( 2022-08)This transdisciplinary thesis identifies six planning systems significantly impacting the Indigenous community in the Mid-West region of Western Australia to consider their compatibility with the community’s aspirations for self-determined sustainable development. Assessments are based on each planning system’s procedural and development theories and practices as well as their track record in producing desired outcomes. With their interactions conceptualised as a planning supra-system, this is also assessed on its ability to produce congruent outcomes. While some planning systems are found to be better than others in supporting Indigenous aspirations for sustainable development, none are assessed as adequately compatible or resourced to make sustainable Indigenous development probable. Five of the six fail to adequately involve the region’s Indigenous communities in the normative aspects of their planning, with other inadequacies varying between systems. Shortcomings include narrow planning scopes, reactivity rather than proactivity, analytical reductionism, fragmented strategies, and inadequate evaluation, learning and adaptation. Conclusions include the need for a structure of planning subsidiarity, with the regional level determined as the most appropriate scale for holistic self-determined, sustainable Indigenous development planning that covers its economic, social, cultural, environmental and governance dimensions. Optimally, Indigenous regional planning would provide a point of orientation for government sectoral policies and a point of articulation for associated and appropriately reformed planning structures. These conclusions about planning system redesign are potentially synergistic with current proposals for the establishment of Regional Indigenous Voices across Australia.
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ItemThe abuse of parents by their children: violence, silence, and complexity( 2022-12)Child-to-parent abuse (CPA) is a serious form of violence that diminishes families’ capacity to engage in day-to-day social life, causes harm to individuals, and can fracture family relationships. This research aims to understand how families experience this form of violence; how parents, siblings, young people, and support practitioners conceptualise it; the contexts in which it appears; and its effects on individuals and relationships. I use mixed qualitative methods: data gathered through in-depth narrative interviews and anonymous online public message board posts. In total, 156 individual narratives of CPA were gathered between 2019-2020. This data was supplemented with interviews and focus groups with 20 practitioners who encountered CPA in their work. I apply Urie Bronfenbrenner’s social ecological theory to explore the complexity of the CPA phenomenon, its multiple layers, and the interactions between a range of interconnected factors. A feminist lens complements this approach and elucidates the gendered experiences of CPA, a range of invisible forms of harm, and situates the experiences within the broader scholarly knowledge about domestic family violence. This research finds that CPA is indeed a serious issue that encompasses a spectrum of physical and non-physical harmful behaviours. Contemporary beliefs about adolescence as a period characterised by impulsive and unruly behaviour can result in abusive behaviours being minimised. Left unchecked, CPA has the potential to escalate in severity over a period of years, by which time the situation becomes a crisis. Families and practitioners contextualised CPA within a broad range of interconnected adverse life experiences and troubling behaviour (e.g., psychological disorders, school exclusion, and self-harm). This made it difficult for family members to live with the CPA and to know how to respond. Parents and siblings described living in fear of the young person’s violence, resulting in a significant loss of individuality and autonomy in the home, as family members constrained their own behaviour to reduce the risk of prospective violence. This research makes a novel contribution in the discovery that some parents experience ‘extreme exhaustion’, evident in their expressing a desire to run away or die. Another important contribution of this thesis is the finding that while shame and stigma are pervasive in the experience of CPA, many parents proactively seek external support to address the violence and their child’s interlinked wellbeing issues. Despite such extensive efforts to obtain help, the thesis shows that meaningful support was extremely difficult to obtain. In families’ interactions with the service sector, friends, and extended family, pervasive attitudes of blame were evident, conceptualising children’s violence to be indicative of a child’s abnormality or the result of ‘poor-parenting’. Such beliefs, combined with limited service provision and a lack of community awareness about CPA, reinforces families’ isolation.
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ItemWho is a Liberian Anyway? The claim for formalised identity by diaspora Liberians( 2022)This thesis examines Liberia’s complex history as a unique settler colony and the ramifications of this history for current attempts at constructing a collective identity. More specifically, it analyses diaspora Liberians’ claim for formalised identity and how Liberians in-country perceive these claims. I use the country’s dual citizenship debate as a lens through which to interpret the intricate narratives around how identity and belonging are being constructed in the post-war era. The project draws on document analysis and in-depth interviews with respondents from civil society, academia, government, media, and other professionals living in Liberia and the diaspora. The thesis contributes to knowledge by re-theorising Liberia’s formation as a settler colonial project and argues for the recognition of Americo-Liberians as colonisers. Liberia is often seen as yet another conflict-ridden African country that was never colonised. In fact, Liberia was colonised by Black settlers from America who established the nation-state in 1847. I draw on settler colonial theory to show that when the Americo-Liberians dispossessed and marginalised the Africans they met upon arrival, they established the antagonisms and enduring unequal structures that ultimately led to Liberia’s civil wars. I argue that the systemic inequality established by the settler regime continues to inform and shape contemporary debates over who can legitimately claim Liberian identity. The second part of the thesis seeks to understand a long, contentious debate about dual citizenship. Many Liberians recognise the economic benefits of allowing dual citizenship. They welcome the potential investments and skilled labour that dual citizens might contribute to Liberia’s post-conflict reconstruction and development agenda. And yet, there is widespread resistance to dual citizenship. This apparently illogical opposition is understandable in light of Liberia’s history as a settler society that entrenched inequalities to privilege the settler class. At the heart of the debate are conceptions of Liberianness. Diaspora Liberians are marginalised in both their home and host countries. They consider dual citizenship a practical strategy that formalises their Liberianness and provides them and their children a route back to their real home. In-country Liberians fear being colonised by a small, privileged group and purposefully conceptualise Liberianness as an exclusionary tool. I argue that structural inequality due to historical injustices and current poverty levels have eroded conditions of trust in Liberia’s political systems. Thus, the shifting and contested meanings of Liberianness that play out in the debate result from this lack of trust, generating conflictual and unstable expectations about the future behaviour of elites and the implications of this for the ordinary Liberian. Ultimately, when we consider the invisibility and enduring nature of settler colonialism, even in a supposedly post-colonial Liberia, we can understand the anxieties of in-country Liberians and why they may see dual citizenship as a recolonising tool and diaspora Liberians as the new settler-colonisers.
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ItemCultural Historical China: The Colonial Roots of Nationalism and Identity in Hong Kong( 2023)Based on four months of ethnographic fieldwork from April to July 2019 involving participant observation, in-depth interviews, walking ethnography, and autoethnography, this dissertation explores and examines the ideological, discursive, and psychological influences of British colonisation on Hong Kong people's sense of belonging to China. It reappraises the role of Cold War politics in shaping individual Hong Kongers' subjectivity and proposes a critical perspective of Chinese historiography for Hong Kong Studies and beyond.
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ItemTowards an Immunopolitics of Social Government and Understanding Its Traces in Media and Policy Representations of Single-Parent Families in Australia( 2023)Since the late 1990s, the primary objective of the Australian welfare state has shifted from alleviating poverty to ‘reducing intergenerational welfare dependency’. The Australian Government’s development of punitive and paternalistic ‘pre-employment’ programs accompanies this shift. These programs include ParentsNext (2016-present), which predominantly targets ‘welfare-dependent’ single-parent families. This thesis contends that to better understand this reconfiguration of social welfare and the mistreatment of single-parent families requires an analytic of immunopolitical government. That is, an account of government centred on how the (settler) state represents and ‘immunises’ against social insecurity and risk. The thesis elaborates on this sensitising groundwork through critical discursive and genealogical analyses of policy and media representations associated with these families. It considers policy materials (n = 127) that relate to ParentsNext, and media articles (n = 35,840) drawn from the most-read print media in Australia (2000-2020). The thesis’ explications reveal how interrelated discourses of dependency, endemicity, exposure, intergenerationality, resilience, risk, and vulnerability sustain the immunopolitical government imposed on single-parent families. Significantly, the thesis finds that the control of these families is often framed in policy and media materials as serving ‘social’ objectives. The thesis locates that underpinning this framing is the spectre of a patriarchal white state form that enforces ‘curative’ interventions like ParentsNext. These interventions increasingly foreground ‘social risks’ that are metaphorised as endemic and spreading from the ‘welfare-dependent margin’ to the ‘productive centre’ of settler society. By tracing these dynamics, the thesis also establishes the necessity of concepts and practices of care that can counterpose immunopolitical government and its representational constellations. Specifically, the thesis argues that reimagining care requires movements beyond productivist and paternalistic logics. Towards these ends, critical and anti-productivist currents of thought are drawn upon to propose a typology of care that can support future excavations and political projects. The thesis contributes an analytical strategy, genealogies, and empirical insights to investigate further the social government of ‘at-risk’ and ‘welfare-dependent’ groups. It also identifies pathways for critical social policy scholars to reconceptualise and contest dominant social (in)security and risk framings.
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Item‘Captain Cook was a S**t C**t’ or ‘a nation less divided’? Indigenous Sovereignty, Settler Common Sense and Australian Media( 2022)The Australian settler state's claim to political legitimacy relies on the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty, alongside a constant renewal of possessive investments in the nation. However, the persistence of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ sovereign relationships to the lands and waters across Australia continues to unsettle the dominant narrative of a singular, justified settler authority. This thesis investigates competing claims to Indigenous and settler sovereignties made in relation to Australia's national day, January 26, which marks the advent of forcible appropriation of Indigenous land by the British in 1788. The thesis employs a mixed-methods analysis of public discourse around January 26, as captured across 895 mainstream and independent media items and 25 instances of official communication from political figures, to explore how claims to sovereignty are embedded in discussions about history, time, identity and nationhood in Australia. Informed by a theoretical framework attuned to relationships between epistemology, race and representation, the thesis’ analysis reveals that settler claims to sovereignty and representations of Indigenous peoples’ political incapacity circulate discursively as taken-for-granted, common sense components of contemporary Australian nationalism. Despite Australia’s shift in self-representation from a white ethno-state to a liberal multicultural democracy over the past four decades, its existence continues to rely the suppression of unceded Indigenous sovereignty. Rather than engaging with the substance of Indigenous peoples’ political claims, liberal multiculturalist nationalism is oriented towards the development of a more inclusive form of settler coloniality through processes of recognition. Against this, a subset of Indigenous activists and commentators across both mainstream and independent media continue to challenge reductive representations of their resistance against nationalist celebrations on January 26 as being primarily about insufficient recognition by the state and settler polity. Maintaining a focus on the fundamental illegitimacy of the Australian settler state, these individuals articulate comprehensive but frequently sidelined political analyses of sovereignty, race and resistance against ongoing colonisation.
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ItemWorkers’ risk rationales, life experiences and insurance decision: paving Indonesia’s path to universal social security coverage?( 2022)Insurance as a ‘risk technology’ and social insurance as a social policy form must be understood as product of specific socio-structural context. When capitalism and industrialisation were predominant in late 19th century Germany, social insurance reconciled workers’ risk and class conflicts. In 2014 and 2015, the Indonesian National Social Security System (SJSN) was launched through years of domestic political negotiations between political parties, trade unions, business, civil society groups as well as consultations with donor countries and multilateral and bilateral international development agencies. The implementation of the social insurance schemes has been beleaguered by low enrolment and high dropout rates. This thesis investigates whether decision to insure makes sense for Indonesian workers considering their everyday life conditions and the historical institutional arrangements that shaped social insurance and labour market in Indonesia since colonial era until today. The thesis argues that Indonesian workers deal with risk and uncertainty using different rationales and social insurance model may only make sense for some but not for others. Through empirically grounded research, the thesis presents three different types of risk rationales workers employ to deal with health, employment and old-age risks. These are mainly shaped by their social relations with others, perceived resources and perspective about future. The three types are Surviving the Present, Protecting the Family and Flexibly Shaping the Future. Each type leads to different action modes that explain under what conditions they decide to insure or not. These typology and action modes show that workers use different risk rationales that are neither superior nor inferior to rational thinking, but a sort of amalgamation of different rationales, informed by their life experience and socio-structural contexts. They are dynamics and might change over time as their biographical experience and contexts change. This research may inform future social policy to have a more nuanced policy design that considers people’s life situation and everyday strategies by providing some degrees of flexibility.
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ItemModest expectations: masculinity, marriage, and the good life in urban China( 2022)There is a sense that there is a crisis unfolding in China. Marriage rates are dropping, divorce rates are rising, the birth rate is in decline, and a new population of rural ‘bachelors’ and urban ‘leftover women’ has surfaced. This new culture of singlehood is perceived as a ‘crisis of marriage’, precipitating a moral panic over how to address a problem that is often described by the state as a threat to social stability and order, as well as the advancement of the nation. This thesis explores the intersection of these so-called ‘crises’ facing Chinese society: a crisis of marriage, a crisis of masculinity, and a crisis of mobility. Since China’s ‘opening up and reform’ in 1978, extraordinary social, economic, and political change have occurred. Gender and sexual relations have also undergone significant transformation, subsequently contributing to this ‘marriage crisis’ in China today. How single rural men living in the city respond to this marriage crisis is a core concern of this thesis. In the gendered aspects of this crisis and the associated moral panic, single rural men have become a flash point in China for discussions about marriage, social organisation, the rural–urban divide, gender relations, class, and mobility. The demise of the rural economy and the rapid transformation of the urban economy have produced significant changes in gender roles and institutions in contemporary China. This thesis focuses on the impact of these socio-economic shifts on rural men who migrate to cities. Rural to urban migration has a long and well-documented history in China. The most recent wave of migration has been accompanied by changes in the nature of work and social organisation that have exacerbated the ‘marriage crisis’ particularly for rural men in urban settings. For rural men living in urban China, marriage represents a modest aspiration for a good life, expressed through the concept guo rizi (passing the days). The desire to marry and have children is however constrained by rural men’s experiences in the city. Their occupations, lack of social networks, new forms of dating and matchmaking and increasingly unattainable ‘bride-price’ demands, work together to undermine their desirability as potential husbands and fathers and entrench inequalities of wealth and power between rural and urban men. The ways rural men struggle with, negotiate, and imagine their futures is the subject of this thesis. I argue that the increasing socio-economic precarity of rural men and their largely unrealised desires to marry and have children demonstrate a fundamental reconfiguration of Chinese masculinity and mobility in urban China today and the social impact on central Chinese institutions. This thesis explores the lives of migrant delivery drivers (kuaidi and waimai) and tertiary-educated professionals who have migrated from the countryside to the city. In this thesis, I endeavour to make these men visible by investigating how they navigate the urban marriage market and avoid becoming ‘leftover’. What I have found is that their shared struggles in the marriage market and efforts to fulfill the ideals of manhood are indicative of how rurality continues to be experienced as an inhibiting factor for single rural men in Chinese cities, regardless of their education, income, or material assets. The nature of these men’s lives led me to question how such men are affected by changing social, cultural, and economic structures within the marriage market and the broader context of crisis that currently pervades Chinese society.
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ItemBig companies, small communities and the Government: Exploring the way public participation is conceptualised and practiced in coal mining in New South Wales( 2022)This thesis’ central challenge is to understand why rural communities located close to mining and extractive operations struggle to have the impacts of mining remedied despite consultative processes being in place. In response, this thesis adopts a three-layered approach to the data analysis. Drawing firstly from literatures examining resource extraction and public participation, the thesis identifies key constraints hampering community engagement. These constraints are then used to extend criteria from procedural fairness literature to frame and understand further, community conceptualisations of why the avenues provided to have their concerns heard and addressed so often fail. Secondly, the use of field theory isolates decision-making processes into action-fields, facilitating an in-depth, actor-centric focus. Thirdly, critical realism’s three-level model of reality demonstrates how action-fields are structured in terms of external influence, including the structures constraining community action and the strategies employed to create advantage in decision-making events. This analytical model allows the thesis to build upon and extend existing academic knowledge relating to community involvement in decision-making processes, public participation and procedural fairness in the mining and resource sector. The empirical component comprises a case study of two Australian mining communities, with data drawn from thirty-six interviews. Analysis of legislation, regulations and policy documents facilitate examination of how legislative processes are employed at community level, the potential sources of failure and the significance of procedural fairness.