School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses

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2020 - 2022 3
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Subject: Australia × Start date: 2020 × End date: 2022 ×

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    After the Empire - Governance, Planning and Sustainable Indigenous Development in Australia
    Sheldon, William Stafford ( 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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    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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    Preserving Turkishness in the daily life of Broadmeadows
    Karagoz, Orhan ( 2020)
    This dissertation investigates how Turks endeavour to preserve their cultural identity while living in Australia. Based on research carried out between 2013 and 2017 in Broadmeadows, a suburb of Melbourne and historic centre for the resettlement of Turkish immigrants, the dissertation explores a number of themes which frame each chapter: nostalgia for the homeland and for the earlier times of arrival; overseas marriages; gossip and rumour; Turkish film and television; return visits to Turkey; multiculturalism and integration; and homeland politics. Consonant with the ethnographic approach deployed, these themes were selected on the bases of what research informants identified as being especially important and meaningful aspects of their lives in diaspora. However, while eschewing a central argument, the thesis reflects on how these themes relate directly or indirectly to matters of cultural preservation and very widespread anxieties that Turkish-Australians have about losing their culture. The dissertation’s author is clinically blind. So, whilst the issue of blindness is not a conscious concern in the dissertation, it is framed by a blind sensibility. It relies upon the author’s capacity for listening, rather than being, as per convention for anthropological work, observational. And, its data and findings are conditioned significantly by the way Turkish people conceptualise and treat blind people and this author in particular.