School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 385
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    The women on the hill : an ethnographic study of deinstitutionalization
    Johnson, Kelley. (University of Melbourne, 1995)
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    Feels like home : young people's lived experiences and meanings of home
    Chiao, Yuan-Ling. (University of Melbourne, 2008)
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    The status of women in Islam : a case study of Pakistan
    Rashid, Tahmina. (University of Melbourne, 1999)
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    The status of women in Islam : a case study of Pakistan
    Rashid, Tahmina. (University of Melbourne, 1999)
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    Regulating the risks of elder abuse in Australia : the changing nature of government responses
    Naughtin, Gerard Michael. (University of Melbourne, 2008)
    This thesis presents a policy analysis of Federal and State Government responses to elder abuse utilising three data sources, an extensive literature review, analysis of key government documents and interviews with expert stakeholders. Historical, sociological and criminological frameworks are used to explore contemporary responses to the abuse and neglect of older Australians. Modelling undertaken to estimate the current and projected scale of elder abuse predicted that there were 87,000 cases in 2007, that there would be 120,000 by 2017 and 200,000 by 2037. The ageing of the Australian population justifies the development of a more concerted and nationally co-ordinated strategy. Despite considerable contest between prevention and protection advocates, Australian Governments since the mid 1990s have adopted a fairly comprehensive and consistent policy framework involving prevention, investigation and case management, access to justice, legal and financial protections for older people without mental capacity, regulation and sanctions. This thesis argues that these six elements are likely to form the basis of future development and explores the utility of the responsive regulation thesis in such development. Several gaps in existing responses are identified, namely the lack of victim support services, the inadequate funding base, the low level of community and professional education and ambiguities about agency response responsibilities. Reforms needed over the next decade to address these gaps are identified.
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    Diasporic Namus in Transition: Respectable Women Do Not Only ‘Do Things Right’- Turkish Australian Women and Shifts in Gendered Moral Identity
    Hadravová, Lenka ( 2021)
    Based on fieldwork among three generations of Turkish women in Australia, the thesis investigates nuances of collective and individual shifts in understandings of worth attached to self and other through the prism of namus. The persistence of and discernible shifts in the spheres of youth sexual morality, gendered and parent-child relationality highlight how narratives of namus serve as a crucial point of existential reference for women negotiating, resisting, and accommodating self and their place in the world. Considering the evolving interethnic dynamics in multicultural Australia, which have influenced Turkish immigrants’ perceptions of identity, the aim is to capture the shifts in collective and personal moral ideals attached to sexuality and intimate life in the diaspora. While the importance of Islam and the participants’ sense of Muslimness has been acknowledged, the collective Muslim identity was not the primary focus of the inquiry. The thesis speaks to the anthropological discourse that problematises morality as a fixed attribute of sociality whose norms people uphold and follow. It contributes with conceptualising namus morality as existential strategising, moral modalities that encompass both social reproduction and social change, moral agency, and moral identity. In addition, it adds to the literature on diasporic (Australian) Turks who reside outside areas of ethnic concentration (communities).
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    Modernity, Sociality and the Enigma of Justice
    Nyblom, Claire ( 2020)
    This thesis is an inquiry into the enigmatic idea of Justice. Like all foundational ideas, justice is subject to increasing tension as a result of competing interpretations of the ‘good’ in modernity and sociality and plurality in all its forms. This creates the enigmatic quality of justice which resides on the one hand in a proliferation of theories of justice which are irreducible and incommensurate and on the other, a hollowing out or fraying of any overarching idea of justice. Justice for this thesis is theorised within broader social rather than usual political frameworks and is situated between formal and contextual approaches and always contains an ethical orientation. This idea of justice is inclusive of both transcendent foundational and immanent regulative moments, which ultimately are not resolvable, which informs the enigmatic quality of justice, related finally to the openness of justice. In drawing out this enigmatic quality, this thesis focuses on early modern and contemporary approaches from Kant and Hegel to Heller and Honneth. The choice of theorists is related to the conceptual dialogue between their varying interpretations of modernity, sociality and their relationship to the idea of justice. This dialogue highlights key theoretical architecture from the earlier theorists, which resonates in the contemporary theories. Most notably, the continuum between form and context and between what I refer to as the ‘pivot points’ of justice, including the subject and their sociality, the right and the good, form and content, contingency and teleology framed within the overarching concepts of western modernity, freedom and value plurality. In developing this dialogue, I identify a number of under-theorised elements, leading to the argument that justice in contemporary modernity must include regulative moments or elements which allow for the negotiation of immanent empirical problems. The idea of justice is however, neither exhausted nor limited to the horizon of the present and always gestures beyond immanence to the immediate future or the distant future. I argue this immanent and transcendent dimension is internal to the idea of justice itself. I also argue that while the enigmatic quality of justice will remain, it may be mediated by mobilising key concepts from both Kant and Hegel which have been updated and modified by Heller and Honneth. The outcome of these updated ideas is that justice as an idea in contemporary modernity can be theorised as 'open', closely aligned to freedom and positioned between and drawing upon immanence and transcendence.