School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 10 of 10
-
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.
-
ItemYouth, recession, and the buffering role of institutions: a cross-country comparison( 2019)How do labour market and education institutions affect youth’s initial or early labour market outcomes during a recession compared to the pre-recession period? Does the impact of institutions on youth’s labour market outcomes during a recession vary across different types of youth? These questions are at the heart of this dissertation which brings together both economic and sociological literature to develop a model of individual youth adjustment in response to a recession. My central assumption is that youth respond to a recession by trading-off the quality work attained, in terms of occupational status or job security, to reduce time spent in unemployment. Although all individuals are expected to make this trade-off to some extent, both the ability and willingness to trade-off the quality of work as well as the expected benefits from doing so, are likely to be influenced by a range of individual and country level characteristics. At the individual level, characteristics such as gender, family income and, in turn, educational attainment will influence whether individuals have the resources or inclination to extend their job search period and hold out for higher quality work. At the national level, a number of education and labour market characteristics will determine the range and quality of work available to individual youth and the level of competition they will face in securing this work, both generally and in a recession. I bring these individual and institutional components together to compare youth employment outcomes across the pre-recession to post-recession period, considering outcomes such as 1) employment, 2) work type (i.e. full-time or temporary) and 3) occupational status. These outcomes are explored across three chapters using EU-SILC longitudinal data for up to 19 countries, over the period 2003 to 2015 for secondary and postsecondary educated youth. The first chapter explores the impact of labour market institutions on youth employment and full-time work participation, considering the effect of adaptive (i.e. collective bargaining) compared to static (i.e. Employment Protection Legislation) forms regulation over the business cycle. The second analysis chapter considers the role of family income on initial full-time work attainment, exploring how these family income effects vary according to the level of tracking and education quality within an education system. Finally, I examine the impact of gender on full-time and non-standard work attainment, considering the moderating role of education tracking and gender empowerment, both generally and during a recession. Institutions are shown to play a key role in shaping youth responses to a recession, with these effects moderated by individual characteristics. Chapter 2 illustrates the adaptive nature of collective bargaining institutions, with significantly different institutional effects observed between the pre- and post-recession periods. This results in benefits to youth in terms of employment and full-time work attainment where bargaining coverage is broader. Family income is found to play an important role in youth responses to a recession, as shown in Chapter 3, with family income effects increasing where the level of tracking in education is high, particularly during a recession. At the same time, increasing education quality weakens, the effect of family income, benefiting youth from lower-income backgrounds. Chapter 4 lends support to demand-side theories of gender segregation, with male youth appearing to hold a stronger position in the labour market. This is used to trade-down into traditionally female roles during a recession, crowding-out women from full-time work. Additionally, both Chapters 3 and 4 highlight the role of vocation-specific education in segmenting the labour market, with the differential skills provided creating an effective barrier to ‘trading-down’ during a recession, protecting those with weaker positions within the jobs queue.
-
ItemReframing graffiti writing as a community practice: sites of youth learning and social engagement( 2018)This study investigates how graffiti writing is learnt and how graffiti writers experience this learning. Drawing on the concept of communities of practice, it frames graffiti as a skillful and aesthetic practice that is learned in a communally- situated context. This shifts the focus from graffiti as a stigmatised practice to a demonstration of the expert knowledge that young men develop over time through their engagement with a learning community. The research consisted of semi-structured interviews and observations of graffiti practice with eleven male graffiti writers. The thesis argues that graffiti writing involves a wide range of cognitive, social, emotional and bodily skills. These skills coalesce at the site of practice where they in turn inform the learning of novice graffiti writers. This thesis shows that the way writers experience the learning of graffiti occurs within a highly masculine space that can serve to exclude women’s participation. By developing an understanding of the lived experiences of male graffiti writers, this research contributes new knowledge about youth cultural practice as a site of learning and production.
-
ItemThe youth of Panama: everyday negotiations of neoliberal development in an urban context( 2018)This thesis provides an ethnographic analysis of how young lower middle-class urban Panamanians navigate and negotiate neoliberal macro-economic transformations that have accelerated since the 1990s, from increasingly precarious and marginalised positions in society. Unlike much of Latin America which has gained global interest through the turn to centre-left and leftist governments in recent years, Panama has consistently adopted market-oriented policies following structural adjustments programs. Particularly under the administration of former right-wing president, Ricardo Martinelli, the nation has capitalised on its geographic position as a global and regional hub to market itself to the global community through economic goals that seek to attract flows of international capital and foreign investment. It has subsequently focused its attention on developing Panama as an ideal site for luxury tourism, residential migration, and for multinational corporation regional headquarters, leading it to often be described as the most cosmopolitan metropolis in Central America. In spite of this, Panama remains greatly overlooked by anthropologists as a site of study for urban neoliberal development. From within the deepening of Panama’s global market integration, young Panamanians have found themselves navigating the intricacies of everyday urban life within structural conditions that increasingly favour the interests of the international and national elite. Their experiences in this thesis thus emerge as precarious, as known certainties of everyday activities like travelling to and from work, utilising or simply having linguistic or racial autonomy, or transitioning from education into stable waged-labour, are slowly eroded in favour of free market ethics of competition, austerity, and self-responsibilisation. This thesis seeks to capture the more surprising and unexpected ways in which market-oriented policies take shape in the Panamanian context. It pays heed to many unintended consequences of these market-led reforms such as traffic congestion and growing racial divides, and it posits that young Panamanians in this study emerge as important prisms through which various neoliberally-related social ills in Panama City become apparent. At the same time, it elucidates how young Panamanians quietly resist neoliberalism from subject positions in society. It posits that Panamanian youth uphold and create particular values and cultural practices such as interdependence and togetherness, that work against the needs of the Panamanian state.
-
ItemReconfiguring racism: youthful dynamics of conflict and conviviality in a culturally diverse, working-class high school( 2017)Youth, diversity and disadvantage are rendered a dangerous mix in contemporary Australia, with concern focused in particular on youth living in Australia’s most multicultural and disadvantaged neighbourhoods. In this milieu, young people, and schools as ‘micropublics’, are often scrutinised as indicators of the health of multicultural societies with schools targeted as sites of intervention. Yet in the shadow of such moral panic, how does racialisation and racism actually feature in the lives of young people as they negotiate culturally diverse shared spaces? Do young people’s practices call for antiracist intervention or is there evidence of transformative ways of living with difference, which unsettles and advances current understandings of racism and conviviality in young lives? Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this thesis explores these questions in the context of peer sociality at Greendale High in Melbourne – a school located in the heartland of current social anxieties about youth, multiculturalism and divisive population growth. While racism and conflict within a social cohesion rubric are positioned as anathema to successful multicultural living, research at the intersections of youth studies and urban multiculture increasingly shows that both conviviality and conflict can co-exist relatively easily within culturally diverse youth spaces. This literature further posits that young people shift between racist and convivial modes of relationality to navigate their complex social worlds. In this thesis I argue that this racism-conviviality binary framing fails to capture some of the diverse logics and practices within a multicultural peer culture. Through tracing when, where and how racialisation emerged in schoolyard conversations, social spaces, friendship dynamics and classroom discussions, this thesis illuminates how expressions of everyday racism and conviviality can be enmeshed in complex, relational, sophisticated and uneven ways. Reconciling dichotomous conceptual frames that position young people as moving back-and-forth between practices of exclusion and openness, I propose an alternative frame – a perverse form of everyday cosmopolitanism – through which to consider young people’s intercultural relations. Evolving from sustained ethnographic attention to Greendale student life, the concept of ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ compels engaged scrutiny of the concepts of – and relationships between – ‘racism’, ‘conviviality’ and ‘conflict’ for understanding youth sociality. In doing so, I call attention to the limitations of current youth multiculture research, which commonly assumes a racism-conviviality binary a priori. If we are to work against racism, scholars and educators require more flexible and expansive conceptual tools that engage seriously with youth perspectives and young people’s situated rules of play in high school sociality.
-
ItemFrom everyday life to the long-term future: young adults’ plans, hopes, and future imaginaries( 2016)Research considering how the long-term future of society is perceived has generally focused on governance of the future, as well as on single issues that have acted as proxy categories for this temporal horizon. As a result, in-depth consideration of how the future of society is perceived on an individual, rather than institutional, level has received comparatively little scholarly attention. This thesis seeks to address this shortcoming by studying how individuals perceive the long-term future of their society. Specifically, the thesis responds to recent claims that young adults focus on short-term, personal issues to the exclusion of long-term, societal concerns by questioning how members of this demographic relate to the long-term future in a general sense, rather than in relation to specific concerns. In order to address this question, data collected from in-depth interviews conducted with 28 members of an 18-34 year-old demographic is placed into dialogue with existing research conducted in the sociology of time, youth and the environment. Beginning with considerations of the short-term, personal future, it is found that the ways in which the respondents related to the personal and societal future were interconnected due to their use of congruent strategies while perceiving each of these horizons. This claim, when placed alongside the finding that their perceptions of the societal future were also related to aspects of their personal identities and subjectivities, is used to contend that the respondents’ perceptions of the long-term future form part of the intersubjective lifeworlds that constitute their everyday domains of experience. Although the respondents displayed varying abilities and inclinations while relating to, and planning for, the short-term future – with some forming concrete plans for their lives and others avoiding dwelling on future concerns whenever possible – their perceptions of the long-term future did not reflect these tendencies. Instead, although some of the respondents struggled to engage with the long-term issues that concerned them in meaningful ways, they were all nevertheless able to form coherent imaginings of this future horizon. Moreover, their imaginings conformed to markedly similar themes across the sample, and were largely divisible into two distinct social or future imaginaries: one based on a narrative of decline, the other premised on a sense of hope. While the decline-based imaginary resonated with a number of prevalent sociological theories concerned with individuals’ perceptions of the contemporary future horizon, the more hopeful narratives presented a challenge to many of their claims. In response to this finding the thesis presents a critique of accounts that depict societal imaginaries in an overly homogenous or unified manner, and which thereby tend to underplay the diverse range of historical, cultural, and personal resources from which imaginaries are formed and through which they may be individuated. Drawing these findings together, this thesis ultimately concludes that although the short-term and long-term future are inexorably related, the latter dimension nevertheless has a distinct character, and cannot be understood when it is treated simply as a mere extension of the former.
-
ItemEmployment and durable peace in the conflict affected region of Sri Lanka( 2015)The thesis analyses the complex nexus between employment and peace in the conflict-affected region of Sri Lanka since the end of the war. Based primarily on in-depth interviews and using a multi-disciplinary theoretical framework, it identifies several factors that have created a disadvantageous employment situation for small businesses, youth, ex-combatants and war-widows, despite perceptions that improved employment is essential for durable peace. It concludes that the government, private sector and other stakeholders must alter their approaches and commitment to create employment-based peace-dividends.
-
ItemWill dreams become true? Young people negotiating aspirations and uncertainties in contemporary Cambodia( 2014)The post-conflict reinvention of Cambodia based on democratic reform and market liberalization has brought about phenomenal social change in the past twenty years, entailing novel opportunities as well as risks and uncertainties for the mass of young people growing up in recent years. In this context, Cambodian youth are inventing not only themselves and their future but also the new Cambodia through their everyday action and aspirations. I examined how two contrasting groups of young people – rural-urban migrant labor workers (n=20) and university students (n=31) in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh – negotiate their aspirations and the emerging opportunity structures as they manage the transition into the world of work. I took a “life course sensitized approach” (Zinn 2013) that allowed for analytical sensitivity toward the various individual and contextual factors influencing the life course, and employed common procedures of grounded theory methodology for the investigation. Based on biographically-oriented interviews conducted with the young people from 2011 to 2012, I analyzed how they understand and organize their experiences and expectations based on their agency, resources and social positions. For many poor rural youth, faced with Cambodia‟s flagging rural economy, they find new “opportunities” through their networks of family and friends in the expanding industrial and service economy in the city, where jobs are poorly paid, labor-intensive, and insecure. Labor work migration is increasingly seen as a “normal” status passage toward attaining a good life mostly seen in terms of a future return to a traditionally known but generally improved rural livelihood. However, not only is this good life inaccessible to those lacking family resources, especially land and other assets, but a prolonged working biography in the city is also becoming increasingly necessary or desired for many because of the economic opportunity it provides. For young people from a relatively well resourced family, university education has become a desirable or, for some, “normal” status passage because it provides a generalized resource for upward mobility and an unprecedented range of career possibilities in the new Cambodia. However, with few established career paths available and many university programs of doubtful quality, possessing formal qualifications does not guarantee a successful career and a good life, and often additional social and material resources accessible through the family are required to insure the future against failure. As these young people are pursuing their dreams of a good life, their everyday action and sense making are contributing to the transforming structures of inequality in contemporary Cambodia through the emerging working and educated middle classes. In general, Cambodia‟s recent social transformation has supported expectations of increasing opportunities for upward social mobility and a good life through work and education, but the lack of institutionalized social support and the pace and scale of social change have also generated a lot of uncertainties and risks. This goes to show that not only risks and insecurities, the attention to which has preoccupied recent empirical research in mainstream youth sociology, but also opportunities for young people‟s lives are embedded in social change and ensuing uncertainty. Unlike the Western experience of modernization, whereby the passing of the “golden age” of the welfare state (Taylor-Gooby 2004) has translated into heightened risks and insecurities for individuals, the Cambodian experience of modernization, especially the absence of a welfare state and recent cataclysmic events, has offered hopes and expectations for a good life amidst new uncertainties.
-
ItemGeneration Y: re-writing the rules on sex, love and consent( 2007-10)This thesis explores the love/sex relationships of 117 young people (aged 14 to 24) of diverse sexualities from rural and urban Victoria. Drawing significantly on the sociological theory of Pierre Bourdieu and engaging with postmodern feminist and gender theorists, young people’s negotiation of sexual consent is examined. In-depth interview and focus group data depict a world of unwritten and persistent, but not unchangeable, ‘rules’ regarding sex, love and consent. For the young people participating in this research, the negotiation of safe and consensual sex means navigating these multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings. Young people are simultaneously positioned within social structures and in relation to gendered discourse, resulting in varying opportunity for active reflection and communication of what they and a partner might want from a sexual encounter. This thesis argues for reform of policy and educative responses to youth sex and sexual violence, in order to reinforce young people’s ability to actively negotiate safe and consensual sex.
-
ItemYugonostalgic against all odds: nostalgia for Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia among young leftist activists in contemporary Serbia( 2013)This thesis examines yugonostalgia – nostalgia for the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) – in contemporary Serbia. Yugonostalgia often has a negative reputation – both in academia and in everyday life – as an ‘unhealthy’ or even debilitating fixation on the socialist past. However, this thesis argues that yugonostalgia tells us not only about nostalgic subjects’ attitude towards the past but also about their current concerns. Contemporary Serbia is permeated by discourses privileging nationalistic and neoliberal values. This thesis explores how young people can develop nostalgic attitudes towards the socialist past, even in such an unlikely context. Yugonostalgia is an ambiguous phenomenon, and this ambiguity allows for positive dimensions and uses. To highlight the emancipatory potential of yugonostalgia, this thesis utilises ethnographic fieldwork among young leftist activists in Serbia’s capital, Belgrade. The focus on this milieu demonstrates how yugonostalgia is not simply reactionary but can overlap with and even energize a critical stance towards both nationalistic and neoliberal projects in contemporary Serbia. Additionally, this focus on young activists helps to counter popular negative stereotypes about Serbian youth as either passive victims of their situation or as a violent negative force. Finally, the thesis also adds to our understanding of how the meaning of the ‘left’ is negotiated in post-socialist conditions. Drawing on concept of lieux de mémoire developed by the French historian Pierre Nora, I examine four broad clusters of recurring themes that appear in the yugonostalgic narratives of my Serbian informants. These four themes of national unity, international cooperation, economic prosperity and cultural achievements once constituted the ideological foundations of the Yugoslav state. Today, they take on new significance among young leftist activists. The state ideology of the brotherhood and unity of the Yugoslav nations and the anti-fascist struggle was relevant for my informants in the context of the rise of nationalism in contemporary Serbia. Yugoslav internationalism took on a new significance in the context of Serbia’s relative international isolation and the loss of mobility for its citizens. The ‘Yugoslav dream’, the socio-economic comfort that the citizens of SFRY enjoyed, was attractive in the context of the increased precariousness of life in contemporary Serbia but for my leftist informants also provided a compelling example of a fairer and more prosperous economic model than what has resulted from current neoliberal reforms. Yugoslav culture was often portrayed as superior to the cultural life of contemporary Serbia, which has deteriorated under the influence of both nationalism and neoliberalism. Yugonostalgia, then, represents not a retreat from the present, but a rich cultural repertoire for progressive re-engagement with current political questions. In the imagination of these Serbian activists, remembering Yugoslavia is a selective process that reconstructs alternatives to both parochial Serb nationalist identity-making and to the supposedly inevitable and universal logic of neoliberal economic restructuring.