School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses

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    Democratic constitutions, disobedient citizens: conflict and culture in Habermas’ political theory
    Field, James Arthur ( 2023-12)
    This thesis reads Habermas’ political theory in light of his arguments about civil disobedience. I argue that the concept of civil disobedience stands in as a model of democratic conflictuality that is otherwise absent from Habermas’ formal political theory. The idea of social conflict within boundaries, formed not by legality but by a democratic ethos, is the basis of what I term ‘disobedient citizenship’, a concept implicit in Habermas’ theory that nonetheless displaces his model of procedural civic patriotism as the cultural centre of democratic politics. I argue that Habermas' central programmatic claim that ‘democracy and the rule of law are internally related’ can be revisited from this perspective. In addition, his writings on religion and interstate relations indicate that the notion of disobedient citizenship is central to spaces of ‘complementary freedoms’ that are constituted by a culture of tolerance, rather than procedural secularism or international law. The thesis argues that both conflict and tolerance are core values in his democratic theory. The thesis therefore presents a critical but sympathetic reading of Habermas’ ‘unwritten monograph’ on political theory. It argues that the modernity of democracy emerges in Habermas’ work not primarily through epistemic or cognitive rationality, but rather through the openness with which the democratic imagination approaches disagreement and conflict, evaluates and sets limits to it.
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    Decoding Discrimination: Unraveling Gender Bias in Semi-Automated Recruitment
    Njoto, Sheilla Marcelina ( 2023-08)
    This thesis examines the complex issue of gender bias in recruitment, focusing on the potential discrimination perpetuated by predictive technologies. It investigates the extent to which semi-automated hiring systems discriminate against women and the use of feminine language in recruitment settings, highlighting the ethical implications and accountability for potential discriminatory outcomes. While previous studies have explored subconscious biases and the effectiveness of anonymizing applicant names (i.e., blind hiring - Goldin & Rouse, 2000), this research goes beyond surface-level indicators to investigate the discrimination arising from subtle cues, feminine indicators and language usage in CVs. The study is grounded in classic sociological perspectives, highlighting scholarly works of Goffman (1998), West and Zimmerman (1987), Correll, Benard and Paik (2007) as well as Acker (1990), and couples them with computational approaches to unbox the algorithms and analyze gender discrimination within the hiring process. It examines how recruitment algorithms replicate prevailing gender biases and scrutinizes the construction of gender in curriculum vitae (CVs) using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. Additionally, the study explores the effects of caregiving gaps in men and women's CVs and examines the interplay between gender composition in occupations and gender bias in semi-automated recruitment processes. The research findings presented in this study yield noteworthy scholarly contributions on several fronts. Firstly, they provide compelling evidence to substantiate the claim that semi-automated hiring systems can exhibit discriminatory tendencies when evaluating CVs, when confronted with gender indicators such as gender-indicating names. This empirical insight serves to underscore the potential biases inherent in such systems and highlights the need for proactive measures to identify, mitigate, and rectify these discriminatory practices. Secondly, the study effectively elucidates and categorizes gendered keywords that algorithms tend to prioritize as predictive markers of gender. This identification and classification of key linguistic elements employed by algorithms offer valuable insights into the underlying mechanisms driving gender-based discrimination within semi-automated hiring processes. Furthermore, the research findings shed light on how susceptible semi-automated hiring systems are, not only to the effects of gendered names, but also to feminine traits. This observation underscores the nuanced nature of discriminatory biases embedded within these systems, extending beyond mere gender identifiers to encompass broader societal expectations and stereotypes associated with femininity. Importantly, the study uncovers how the presence of caregiving roles, traditionally considered feminine responsibilities, can adversely impact job candidates, particularly when observed in men applicants. This reveals the intersectionality between gender, caregiving roles, and employment prospects to illuminate the challenges faced by individuals who do not conform to traditional gender norms and underscores the barriers they encounter in the hiring process. Lastly, the research findings dispel the notion that semi-automated hiring systems inherently discriminate against women and feminine language. Rather, these systems tend to perpetuate and replicate existing gender imbalances observed within occupations characterized by different gender compositions. This insight emphasizes the crucial role of these automated systems in perpetuating societal disparities and underscores the imperative for interventions aimed at fostering more equitable hiring practices.
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    Beyond the clinical dichotomy: a phenomenological examination of echolalia from the parent perspective to inform educational and clinical policy and practice
    Cohn, Eli Gabriel ( 2023-12)
    Historically, echolalia has been defined as the repetition of words, phrases, sounds and noises. In practice, echolalia has predominantly been siloed within the fields of speech pathology and behavioural psychology. This form of speech has been frequently reported in Autistic school-aged children (and is observed in other conditions such as Downs Syndrome, certain speech aphasias, dementia, and Giles De La Tourettes, amongst others) but has also been observed to occur in adulthood. Within the literature are two paradigms that have sought to examine echolalia. One paradigm, termed “developmentalism”, understands echolalia to hold important communicative and non-communicative functions. This perspective seeks to develop communicative echolalia towards more self-generated speech while maintaining that non-communicative echolalia holds important emotional-regulatory purposes. The alternative paradigm, termed “behaviourism”, perceives echolalia to be non-communicative and seeks to supress or abate echolalia. Behaviourism also seeks to modify instances of echolalia for emotional-regulatory purposes because of the perceived negative social factors. These paradigms, which are clinically orientated and academically constructed, have created a dichotomous literature. That is to say, the literature has given little consideration to any alternative perspectives that may exist. So, too, is the literature relatively silent on those who experience echolalia across a variety of different environments and contexts, such as parents, teachers, and other caregivers. Practice wise, clinicians, largely guided by literature, come to approach echolalia through either one of the two paradigms. Ironically, parents, who arguably have the greatest exposure to the echolalia of their children and who are intimately involved in intervention programs, have rarely been asked their perspectives in a research context to contribute to inform policy and practice. This research sought to step outside of the clinical dichotomy to provide a voice to parents and develop new insights to inform educational policy and clinical practice based on their experiences of echolalia. Employing a hermeneutical phenomenological methodology, 133 parents (of 134 people with echolalia) undertook semi-structured interviews. These data were subject to multiple analyses, such as thematic analysis, hermeneutic and transcendental phenomenological analysis, and grounded theory. The program of inquiry presents a series of studies which, using the same participants and their responses, analyse the data in different ways. Across all studies, it was found that not all parents experience echolalia in the same way as clinicians. That is, the parent experience is different. Specifically, some parents understand echolalia as something that fuses current perspectives, while others are not yet able to ascribe to a particular understanding due to their child’s relatively young age. It was also found that some parents describe and define echolalia in a different way than that proposed in clinically orientated literature. Here, parents shared six concepts they understand as essential to use when formulating a definition of echolalia from within the parental perspective. The proposed definition is one that does not align itself with any prevailing dichotomous perspective and instead broadens our understanding of what might constitute the possible functions, structures and contexts surrounding echolalia. Essentially, the proposed parent-informed definition means that echolalia can be defined in a variety of different ways, with parents experiencing these different ways within the ecosystem of echolalia. In addition to proposing a new definition of echolalia, experiences of echolalia emerged from the research inquiry whereby some parents have clear roles to play, such as advocating for their child in the community, as a part of their experience. Alongside this, some parents viewed their child’s echolalia through a neurodiversity-affirming lens in which they pushed back against any therapeutic approaches in favour of celebrating their child’s individual difference. The parent experience provided new ways of thinking about echolalia in such a manner that a new parent-informed taxonomy of echolalia is proposed. Essentially, the prevailing clinically orientated, and academically constructed understandings of echolalia, were not sufficient in scope to explain the multifaceted, complex parent experience of echolalia. The new ways of thinking about echolalia informed by parents have important implications for policy and professional practice. In practice, when consulting with parents (and people with echolalia), clinicians and teachers need to be open to a wide variety of different perspectives on echolalia and seek to incorporate these in a collaborative approach. Further, practitioners need to be aware of refraining from delivering discipline-driven intervention (either behavioural or developmental) in the first instance, and instead seek to understand the totality of the parent experience and consider these in their practice, be it in the formulation and delivery of therapy in a clinic setting, or the design of pedagogy and implementation of curriculum for the classroom.
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    Governing spirits: A poststructural analysis of the formation of Vietnamese alcohol policy
    Pham, Hung Hau ( 2023-09)
    This thesis examines how alcohol is problematised and sought to be governed in Vietnamese policy. As both a commodity and a cultural symbol, alcohol has provided a space in which different modes, discourses, and institutions of power (from the French colonial administration in the first half of the twentieth century to the current government) have come to organise themselves and justify the need to govern in a certain way. Spearheaded by the Ministry of Health, an alcohol policy framework to control alcohol use, production, and dissemination in Viet Nam was promulgated in 2019 with a policy-building process that can be traced back to 2008. This thesis draws from the poststructural conceptual lens and analytical tools of the What’s the Problem Represented to be framework developed by Carol Bacchi, combining document analysis (official policy texts together with policy-building and lobbying materials) and semi-structured interview data with experts from various sectors to interrogate the representations of alcohol problems in policy discourses and how they make possible ‘unexamined ways’ of knowing and being. The analysis aims to highlight the instabilities, contradictions, and contingencies in the constitution of alcohol discourses and subjects in this policy space and consider how they can be thought about differently. The discourses that emerge in this policy space rely on the stabilisation and containment of volatile concepts like addiction and risk, as well as the reduction of heterogenous imaginings of alcohol-related realities and experiences into rigid ways of thinking and being for the sake of control. These discourses constitute individuals as singular and self-enterprising subjects with biomechanical bodies and an innate efficacy for free choice and control. This constitution responsibilises the subjects for the management of conducts and relations around alcohol-related risks, conceived as inherently harmful, anterior to knowledge and discourse, and exogenous to the body. This empirical investigation offers original insights into the enactment of postcolonial social reality in Viet Nam at the intersection of power, subjectivity, and social policy. While the hegemony of the Western public health framework on alcohol control was largely reproduced in Vietnamese policy, findings suggest that local subjugated knowledges persist and inform modern understandings of alcohol realities, experiences, and subjectivities as multiple, flux, and becoming. Emic notions of nhau and ma men are introduced as conceptual openings from which alternative meanings, relations, and subjectivities can be arranged around alcohol in contemporary Viet Nam.
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    Beyond Consent: Queer Insights on Negotiating Sex
    Hindes, Sophie Louise ( 2023-11)
    Sexual consent is receiving increased attention at the centre of debates about sexual violence. It not only serves as the legal line between sex and sexual violence, but also a crucial factor in establishing ethical sexual relationships. However, dominant understandings of sexual consent have primarily been understood in the context of heterosexual relationships, and heteronormative and cisnormative understandings of sexual violence, erasing and obscuring queer experiences. Dominant understandings of sexual consent can also be seen as sex-negative because they prioritise the regulation of sexual communication without thoroughly considering whether consent communication leads to non-harmful sexual experiences. Indeed, positive constructs of sexuality in the field of criminology and broader sexual violence research field are lacking, with sex typically seen as a site of danger and something that needs to be controlled and managed. In this thesis, I address these critical gaps through a ‘queering’ of consent. I do this by including queer participants, disrupting heteronormative, cisnormative and sex-negative frameworks, and thinking about what possibilities for a better sexual future we can gain from queer perspectives and a strengths-based approach. Building on the work of feminist and queer theorists, I challenge the prevailing emphasis on individual responsibility and autonomy in understanding sexual violence and consent, urging a deeper consideration of how bodies and choices are shaped by social, cultural and historical contexts. Through exploration of 33 in-depth interviews and three friendship focus groups, I examine how bi+ individuals in Australia negotiate sexual encounters with partners of diverse genders. I focus on experiences where they felt they have been able to negotiate sex well, which I explore through a queer phenomenological framework of comfort and discomfort. This framework delves into the complex interplay between sexual negotiation, gendered norms and sexual scripts, and subjectivity. I argue that hetero and queer norms and scripts can both constrain and give possibility to sexual negotiation. Additionally, I propose that queer bodies and queer sex can disrupt normative constraints in ways that positively impact sexual negotiation. I advocate for a deeper understanding of the nuanced ways our choices are shaped during sexual encounters beyond dominant consent frameworks. I suggest that we must look beyond heterosexuality and violence prevention going forward.
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    Pulling back the cloak: A study of women’s election campaign leadership in Australia and the US
    Cooper, Stefani ( 2023-08)
    Election campaigns are supposed to provide voters with a choice of quality candidates and policies. However, the experiences of those who run the day-to-day operations of parties are largely unknown. While women’s participation in election campaign management is increasing, the field remains male-dominated. Using feminist, qualitative methods to contrast the Australian and US cases, this thesis reveals election campaigns as highly gendered and racialised spaces. The informal nature of the campaign system, combined with an at-times hostile culture, mean gender inequalities persist.
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    Justice in Crisis: Pursuing community-based liberation in Eastern Myanmar, its borderlands, and beyond
    Burgess, Bethia Jean ( 2023-09)
    This thesis explores the gaps between community aspirations for justice and the possibilities offered through international law, development, and justice interventions in Eastern Myanmar and its borderlands. Grounded in collaborative and reciprocal community-engaged principles, this research was undertaken with contributions from ethnic community-based organisations (CBOs) in Eastern Myanmar and Northern Thailand. Qualitative interviews (21) and small group discussions (SGDs) (9) with 51 individuals of Karen, Karenni, and Ta’ang CBOs explored questions of identity, justice, and development from the perspective of CBOs, activists, and the communities that they worked for. I applied a grounded theory approach to the thematic analysis of transcribed interviews and SGDs, holding discussions with contributing CBOs before finalising two key findings. Firstly, this research found that activists and CBOs approached community justice needs through the specificity and groundedness of injustices that they experienced, and by exploring a holistic and interconnected conceptualisation of how justice could be achieved. Secondly, while international responses were found to enable justice through the mobilisation of resources towards, and the legitimation of, justice demands, they could also hinder justice by approaching it from an abstracted and universal perspective and through siloed approaches. These findings are explored in this thesis through a detailed discussion of how activists and CBOs conceptualise injustice, the opportunities and limitations they experience in invoking international frameworks to address these injustices, and the potential for their own conceptions of justice to form part of a liberatory justice that is not simply of local relevance but could transform the coloniality of current hegemonic approaches. By engaging with anticolonial and critical theories through a post-disciplinary approach, I seek to explain the ‘justice gap’ that emerges between activist/CBO-based justice goals and the opportunities for justice that are enabled by international frameworks of human rights, international development, and transitional justice. This thesis builds upon critical, community-engaged research on ethnicity, development, and justice in Myanmar, while bringing in wider theoretical critiques of the coloniality of international frameworks that can offer explanations for the ‘justice gap’ discussed above. In doing so, I consider how these frameworks might actively and passively uphold the very structures of violence against which CBOs work. In identifying such limitations in advancing struggles for justice, this thesis offers a compelling argument for supporting community-driven futures in Myanmar and beyond.
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    True Blue: An Exploration of Loneliness in Australian Youth
    Vanderharst, Amy Leigh ( 2023-09)
    Recently, increased research and media attention has been given to the apparent epidemic of loneliness spreading across Australia that is bringing with it devastating consequences, including depression, reduced life expectancy, and social ennui (Davis, 2013; J. de Jong-Gierveld, 1998, 2004; Franklin, 2009, 2012; Griffin, 2010; Hidaka, 2012; Moskalewicz, 2008). Discussions surrounding the loneliness epidemic often frame young people as both victims and contributors to the crisis: Young people are said to be nearly four times as likely to feel lonely than their middle-aged counterparts but prioritise their individual freedom at the cost of maintaining stable, enduring social relationships that would protect them from this lonely fate (Baker, 2012; Franklin, 2009, 2012; Franklin et al., 2018; Franklin & Tranter, 2021; Hookway et al., 2019). Yet much of our current knowledge about young people’s experiences of loneliness and its causes has been developed deductively without their insight. Within the relatively limited field of youth loneliness research, studies are predominantly quantitative (Yang, 2019), adopt inconsistent definitions (Valtorta et al., 2016), focus on loneliness’ causal relationship with digital technology (Turkle, 2011), or are based on grand theorisations of modernity that lack an empirical basis (Adams, 2007; Jamieson, 1998; May & Nordqvist, 2019; Rattansi, 2017; Smart, 2007). As a result, a notable gap emerges in our knowledge of how young people themselves understand, experience, and view the causes of loneliness (Mansfield et al., 2021; Verity et al., 2021). In turn, this deficit hinders our ability to assess the prevailing conceptualisation and framing of youth loneliness adequately. My PhD research took an inductive, qualitative approach that reconnects understandings of loneliness with the everyday by exploring the lived experiences of loneliness in 20 young adults aged 18-25 years. Drawing on insights shared during 40 in-depth interviews and diary entries, I depart from existing sociological approaches to conceptualise loneliness as a fundamentally layered and relational experience. I argue that loneliness experiences were layered with multiple meanings, emotions, and senses of belonging that often existed simultaneously. Negotiations with legitimacy significantly shaped how participants defined and experienced loneliness, suggesting that social, cultural, and structural dynamics play a greater role in everyday definitions than existing research accounts for. Furthermore, I argue that loneliness is relational in the sense that the experience frequently evoked negotiations about the self and one’s place among others. Indeed, developing enduring, stable, and quality social relationships remained a significant priority that these young people worked hard to achieve. Rather than preserving individual freedom, it was busyness, conflicting schedules, and exhaustion from meeting the demands of daily life that featured heavily in young people’s causal explanations of loneliness. More specifically, I developed the concept of relational loneliness as a broad definition to encompass the social, cultural, structural, and emotional dynamics that frequently emerged during interviews, and to extend the scope of social ties involved in experiences of loneliness to broader collectives. Taken together, these findings challenge the usefulness of prevailing sociological frameworks adopted to conceptualise loneliness in Australia, underscoring the need to incorporate the perspectives of young people in future sociological research on loneliness.
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    Consuming Chance: The Ethics and Enchantments of Promotional Competitions
    Sear, Cynthia Jane Claire ( 2023-09)
    Promotional competitions are a ubiquitous form of marketing in Australia and Britain, employed to incite sales, increase brand consideration, and build market research databases. While the lure of prizes such as cash, cars, holidays, and free products encourage millions of people to enter these competitions casually and infrequently, some people, known as ‘compers’, enter regularly and diligently. This thesis explores and analyses the ethics and enchantments of compers and the broader historical, commercial, and cultural context in which this practice occurs. Based on ethnography amongst compers from Australia and Britain between late 2017 and early 2023, interviews with marketers and advertisers, and auto-ethnography, I propose that regularly entering promotions competitions is akin to ‘consuming chance’. In other words, through entering competitions compers invite possibility and magic into their lives and, in effect, ingest chance. As an omnipresent yet often unrecognised feature of contemporary capitalist life, I argue that chance is a distinctly modern construct, which can suspend, widen, and absorb ideas about how the future is made, influenced, and decided. Consuming Chance is intended as an intervention into dominant anthropological ways of understanding chance, consumerism, and capitalist life. Rather than evidence of millenarian capitalist trends of abundance without effort (cf. Comaroff and Comaroff 2000) I demonstrate how compers conceive of their practice in terms of vocation, duty, and responsibility. This Weberian reading is then subverted, and I argue that far from disenchantment, opportunities to consume chance can provide magico-religious experiences. Rather than an ‘iron cage’ of rationality, modernity has become re-enchanted, due to the prevalence of chance in everyday life (cf. Weber 2005 [1904]).
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    From the Riot to the Ballot Box: Political Realism in Anarchist Theory
    Brinn, Gearoid ( 2023-08)
    Anarchism is subject to many misrepresentations. Leaving aside popular images of anarchism as violent lawlessness, serious academic treatments as well as ostensibly sympathetic radical accounts, perpetuate a simplistic stereotype of anarchism as the most naively idealistic of radical perspectives. The standard representations in political theory cast anarchism as committed to an overly optimistic view of human nature, a simplistic view of sudden, total revolution, and a purist rejection of the state and any interaction with political institutions. This thesis demonstrates, however, that within the diverse field of anarchist thought there exist tendencies and thinkers which together reveal the inaccuracy of this representation of anarchism as a whole. Drawing on examples from across the modern and contemporary eras of anarchism it shows that, rather than a universally moralist, idealist, and unrealistic perspective, there are expressions of anarchism which should be considered politically realist. Anarchists who are realists broadly hold the collection of positions commonly employed to define the realist disposition, though their interpretations of these ‘central tenets of realism’ often differ to those of other realist theorists, (such as those of a liberal or conservative orientation). The recent revival of realism in political philosophy has also included attempts to defend the potential of a radical form. This thesis argues that a radical conception of realism is best appreciated by consideration of the application of a realist perspective within an existing radical ideology. Though frequently alluded to in the realist discourse through the use of classic anarchist slogans and occasional citation of anarchist thinkers, anarchism is still usually represented as paradigmatically non-realist. Therefore, recognition of this ‘realist anarchism’ is useful for appreciating the true scope of anarchist thought, action, and potential and to contextualise other contemporary radical theoretical discourses, especially radical strains of political realism and radical democratic theory. Beyond radical theory it also contributes to clarification of the scope and possibilities of both anarchism and realism in contemporary political theory.