School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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ItemThe women on the hill : an ethnographic study of deinstitutionalization(University of Melbourne, 1995)
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ItemFeels like home : young people's lived experiences and meanings of home(University of Melbourne, 2008)
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ItemFactors affecting the utilization of post acute care by the elderly in Singapore(University of Melbourne, 2007)
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ItemRegulating the risks of elder abuse in Australia : the changing nature of government responses(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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ItemHere, you can live well: Pollution, rural livelihood and the hardness of place on Lake Titicaca, Bolivia( 2022-11)This thesis gives an ethnographic account of how Quehuaya, an Aymara community on Lake Titicaca, Bolivia, is navigating a future circumscribed by water pollution, climate change and the policies of the Movement toward Socialism (MAS) government. As rural livelihoods such as fishing and agriculture become increasingly unviable, a collective life lived in dialogue with the landscape is coming under threat. In response, community members make use of emerging opportunities presented by the MAS indigenist-developmentalist program, the burgeoning urban economy of the nearby city of El Alto, and ongoing opportunities for migration. I develop an account of the hardness of place itself – its solidity in the face of flux – to foreground the dynamics underlying its ongoing but shifting role in this turbulent and threatening context. To unravel the dynamics underlying the hardness of Quehuaya as a place, I demonstrate how the community is reproduced through an Andean collectivism built on practices of livelihood, landscape ritual and syndical political organisation. I analyse how these express Andean ontologies of place, as enmeshed with collectivity and the non-human. Central to my argument is a dialogic theory of agency, which accounts for both individual and collective forms of agency as emergent from a prior intersubjectivity. The hardness of place in Quehuaya rests on the dialogue between the collective will and authorities responsible for establishing relations with the exterior worlds of both landscape and the institutional sphere. This is key to reproducing a cosmology of circulation that constitutes the community in place. This attention to dynamics enables an analysis of ontologies of place that avoids an excessive constructivism that would elide their determining power, without collapsing into essentialism. I demonstrate how in Quehuaya, the cosmology of circulation and the modes of personhood associated with it are threatened as its constitutive relations are disrupted. This is affecting the role of place as an anchor for collective identity and the political possibilities of response to the pollution crisis. I further demonstrate how community members strive to re-establish the stability of place through innovation in livelihood and engagements with state and development actors. These efforts promise to use the material, cultural and relational resources of place to renew the circulatory flows on which it depends, and thereby re-establish the authority of landscape. However, this pursuit of increased articulation with a wider world through novel forms of engagement with the global economy – such as tourism – and the contradictions of the MAS state exacerbates fundamental tensions between individual and collective forms of agency. While the scale of changes threatens to overwhelm the community’s ability to integrate them, I argue that the techniques of Andean collectivism are fundamentally oriented towards the maintenance and steering of collective trajectories in an inherently unpredictable and dangerous world, and a recognition of the unavoidable limits of human agency. This thesis thus offers a contribution to the theorisation of collective life in the context of a shared world becoming increasingly uncertain for all of us.
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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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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.