School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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ItemDiasporic Namus in Transition: Respectable Women Do Not Only ‘Do Things Right’- Turkish Australian Women and Shifts in Gendered Moral Identity( 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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ItemModernity, Sociality and the Enigma of Justice( 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.
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ItemStructure and event: the politics and poetics of settler colonial critique( 2021)In recent years, the study and critique of settler colonialism has emerged as a distinct and key area of scholarship with a notable presence across the humanities and social sciences. This scholarly field has made a significant contribution to the critical study of race, colonialism, and empire, and many of its concepts and ideas are fairly prevalent and recognisable in both academic and activist spaces. This thesis examines the imaginary of settler colonial critique, highlighting some of its key terms and tendencies in order to reflect on the analytic and political effects, as well as analytic and political potential, of this critical practice. The discussion explores the structure of a critical narrative that gives this practice its efficacy and distinct character, while also generating some persistent questions for its practitioners. One of these questions can be understood as that of the colonial subject or the subject of race, and this thesis suggests that settler colonial critique reintroduces this question in a way that is both problematic and productive. It further suggests that the way in which a critical imaginary stages its subject is consequential for its analytic and political efficacy. To explore these questions, the discussion looks closely at the work of late historian and scholar, Patrick Wolfe, which has been formative for the emergence of settler colonial studies and in the articulation of its critical narrative and vocabulary. It highlights the multiple analytic possibilities in this work and considers the political and pedagogic motivations that shaped its imaginary. It further situates the latter in the onto-epistemic conditions of critique and critical practice, privileging the historical intersection of anthropological and Marxist thought and exploring this as a crucial if contradictory site for reimagining social forms and historical determinacy. I show how Wolfe’s theorising shapes the analytic gaze of settler colonial critique, and how the latter comes to predominantly ‘see’ or understand the social and historical logics of determinacy by which settler colonial practices and subjects are constituted. Critical responses to settler colonial studies have been alert to the problems of determinacy that have emerged as a result. While my argument is in conversation with these responses, it also departs from them by suggesting that Wolfe’s work remains highly instructive for reimagining and renarrating settler colonialism’s logic of social and historical determinacy in ways that can be analytically productive and politically enabling. The emphasis on the notion of the critical imaginary therefore is a way of arguing that settler colonial critique is a practice that participates in realising ethico-political possibilities in the process of imagining them and the subjects that embody them.
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ItemIndigenous relations of health: How Indigenous family life is associated with Indigenous child health and wellbeing in Australia( 2021)In Australia, Indigenous children experience poorer health and wellbeing than their non-Indigenous counterparts. Research on the social determinants of Indigenous health has mostly focused socio-economic factors, but family life is an important determinant, and central to Indigenous conceptualisations of wellbeing, that has been under-researched for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in Australia. Centuries of colonial policies and practices have treated Indigenous families as the problem in Indigenous child health. Furthermore, the small body of empirical research examining the Indigenous family and child health nexus has directed little attention to this colonial history and its influence on how this nexus is understood in contemporary policy and research settings. As a result, academic scholarship provides a limited understanding of how Indigenous families can, and do, shape the wellbeing of their children. This thesis aims to better understand the Indigenous family determinants of child health and wellbeing in Australia, by reflecting the colonial and relational contexts in which they live and thrive. I develop a multidimensional framework of Indigenous family life that captures family dynamics and resources in five dimensions, including: 1) family wellbeing; 2) socio-economic resources; 3) cultural resources; 4) family time and activities; and 5) community social capital. Using data from Footprints in Time: The Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children, I use a range of multiple regression approaches, including ordered logit, quantile, and multinomial logit regressions, to examine children’s physical health (measured in terms of general health and body mass index), social and emotional wellbeing (measured in terms of emotional and behavioural difficulties and prosocial outcomes), and their trajectories of exposure to major life events (MLEs) over time. Results show that each dimension of Indigenous family life is associated with Indigenous child health and wellbeing, but in non-uniform and sometimes unexpected ways. Family wellbeing, socio-economic resources, and community social capital factors were significantly associated with child general health, whereas family wellbeing, cultural resources, and family time and activities factors were significantly associated with child BMI outcomes. Factors from each dimension were significantly associated with child emotional and behavioural difficulties, prosocial outcomes, and trajectories of MLEs, but in differing, and in some cases opposing, ways. These associations are shaped by the relational and colonial contexts in which Indigenous children live. Importantly, extended family, cultural and community relations play important roles in shaping outcomes for children who are faring well and faring poorly, challenging previous assumptions of their detriment to Indigenous child health. Together, these results highlight the importance of taking more comprehensive, careful, and better-targeted approaches to understanding the factors associated with the wellbeing of Indigenous children in Australia. This thesis contributes more nuanced evidence for better understanding the Indigenous family determinants of Indigenous child health in Australia.
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ItemWhitexicans: Structural injustice and moral responsibility in postcolonial societies( 2021)There is abundant research on the political implications of colonialism for citizens of former colonial powers. Not much, however, has been said about how the impacts of colonialism shape the moral landscape within postcolonial societies themselves. This project aims to fill that gap. Using Mexico as a case study, I investigate the wrongful nature of colonialism, and argue that domestic beneficiaries of structural injustice have moral responsibilities to reform unjust social structures, irrespective of their status as victims at the international level. I further prescribe some political remedies through which these beneficiaries can fulfill their responsibilities.
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ItemShopping City: Transience, Consumption and the Urban in Contemporary Japan( 2021)“Shopping City” explores how consumption and mobile lifestyles shape the urban experience. It is based on an ethnography carried out between May 2017 and February 2018 in a newly built shopping mall in a Tokyo suburb that is adjunct to a railway station. The exploration of this railway station shopping mall exhibits two aspects that contribute to our understanding of the relationship between consumption and mobility. Firstly, it serves as a node within the urban public transport network in which activities related to shopping, leisure or child rearing all take place on the move. It is, thus, a place characterised by a constant circulation of people, information, and material culture. Secondly, the shopping mall constitutes a field of experimentation as it allows its visitors to explore a variety of urban cultures in a familiar environment and to experience them vicariously through symbolically loaded commodities. Acknowledging these cultural connections that the shopping mall has with places that are situated beyond its premises the latter chapters of this thesis are aimed at an analysis of those cultural practices and lifeworlds that are emulated and commodified in the shopping mall. Taking on a journeying approach, these chapters consider how Japanese interpretations of urban cultures such as gangsta rap or skateboarding are reflected in the shopping mall’s range of goods. Underlying these parts of the thesis are themes of suburban versus urban consumer culture and of the need for safety versus the desire for experiencing the urban ‘untamed’. The thesis aims to explore these fields not by treating them as fundamentally opposed but as relational. Because the different parts of the ethnography for this thesis were conducted in places that are characterised by constant flux and fleeting encounters the thesis is based on the deployment of mobile research methods that are meant to capture the transience of the consumer experience of urban and suburban dwellers.
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ItemThe Politics of Trade and Environmental Linkages: Vice or Virtue?( 2021)As international environmental problems worsen, scholarly attention has turned to the prospects of leveraging trade agreements. This study examines why and how states include environmental clauses in Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) to understand to what degree they promote environmental protection. Drawing on historical inquiry, econometric, and qualitative case study analysis of the East African Community PTA, the study finds that states have primarily included environmental clauses to mitigate the negative impacts of environmental measures on trade, and avoided sanctions in favour of coordination when promoting environmental protection through the PTAs. The study contributes to understanding the prospects of linkage politics in navigating gridlock in global governance.
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ItemThe uncertain relationship between social capital and inequality in the fields of corporate food production( 2021)In advanced liberal democracies, the state seeks to create a distance between the decisions of formal political institutions and those whom they aim to govern. In doing so, the state devolves governance in ways that align with Foucault’s notion of governmentality; organising things such that people self-govern without necessarily being aware that their conduct is being conducted. The most significant characterisation of this phenomenon has been the dismantling of activities previously undertaken by the state, such as the provision of social support, and transferring responsibility for these activities to civil society. For regional communities that are physically remote from political institutions, one consequence of this reconfiguration is a sense of political abandonment. In these circumstances local elites can emerge whose primary objective is to garner from those whom they regard as ‘outsiders’, the resources they believe their community needs and is entitled to. This research contributes to scholarship within anthropology that challenges the way we think about elites. It also provides ethnographic evidence that challenges the stability of Foucault’s notion of governmentality. I explore how a powerful clique of locals, who are emotionally and economically invested in corporate food production in regional Victoria, mediate resources with other elites engaged in neoliberal philanthropy in order to address the kinds of socio-economic inequalities that appear to have divided their community during their region’s transitioning to this neoliberal form of production. Whilst these two groups initially collaborated, their conflicting narratives regarding disadvantage and the resistance they encountered from other elites who did not regard their involvement as essential, caused them to ‘lock horns’, eventually diminishing the impact of their shared endeavour. This ethnography exposes risks that can compromise efforts to address complex social issues such as rising socio-economic inequality by transferring responsibility for their governance to local elites whose interests may be conflicted and who are largely unaccountable.
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ItemAlternative approaches to governing street-level work in the classroom: Australian tales of entanglement and distance( 2021)The delivery of public schooling is far from straightforward. School education is complex, involving competing interests and an uncertain technology (Labaree 2008, Wilson 2000, Rowan 2006, Kennedy 2016b). Meanwhile, teachers tasked with 'making policy work' experience the acute dilemmas of the street-level bureaucrat (Brodkin 2011, Lipsky 1980). Bannink, Six, and van Wijk (2015) argue this creates a 'double control challenge', as governments lack the control tools to support discretionary action while simultaneously aligning decision-making with (often unclear) policy goals. Further work is required to understand how policy designs can influence street-level bureaucratic action under these conditions. The study of street-level action within a nested and multi-level organisational and institutional context allows for a richer understanding of how policy design and operational control decisions influence policy enactment (Hasenfeld 2010, Hupe, Hill, and Buffat 2015, Winter 2012). This study involves a multi-level, comparative case study of two recent Australian policies—the Professional Learning Communities policy in Victoria and the Early Action for Success policy in New South Wales (NSW). Both policies sought to improve student learning by raising teaching quality. However, they differed significantly in the calibration of the policy tools embedded and the operational control strategies employed. The study incorporates over 100 interviews and 60 school-level observations with participants across the Victorian and NSW education departments and six primary schools in 2018. The study’s findings have significant implications for policy design in school education and other policy fields. The findings suggest different policy design choices can have a significant impact on patterns of policy enactment, including the application of discretionary expertise to tailor services to individual client needs. Importantly, this study suggests that more prescriptive policy and capacity building tools, buttressed by a stronger mix of bureaucratic and professional control strategies, may in fact be more effective in encouraging this shift in discretionary action, than less prescriptive policy tools and weaker control strategies. The study also highlights how street-level organisational contexts can have a significant influence on policy enactment. Despite this, well-calibrated and targeted policies can enable policy enactment even in challenging local contexts. The study also shows that Australian teachers retain considerable scope for discretionary action in government schools and many teachers value opportunities for high quality, classroom-focused professional development, including substantive feedback on their teaching practice. The policy implementation literature is often presented as a tussle between ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ perspectives, with proponents of a ‘synthesis’ view offering an alternate framing recognising the interrelationships between different actors within a policy system (Brodkin 2012, Elmore 1979, Hill and Hupe 2014, Matland 1995). This study contributes strong empirical support for the ‘synthesis’ view as a theoretical and methodological orientation for researchers and a valuable practical perspective for practitioners. Recognising the importance of information, opportunities and constraints generated across multiple levels of a system, in which different actors play distinct but often complementary roles in the joint production of policy and policy outcomes, is critical to charting a path forward to more effective policies.
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ItemReconfigurations of Femininity and Masculinity in and through the National Childcare Policy in Cambodia( 2021)This dissertation critically interrogates the link between the National Childcare Policy in Cambodia, Khmer cultural discourse on care, and young women’s and men’s lived experiences of childcare practices. Situated in the emergent scholarship on care policies in developing countries, this research probes beyond the existing analytical focus on women’s burden of care work. The key contribution of this thesis is the articulation of a new feminist framework for transformative care, which consists of three tools: methodological, evaluative, and conceptual. The methodological tool—critical approaches to childcare policies—scrutinises the cultural and policy contexts of care policies and the assumptions underlying proposed policy representations, while interrogating policy silence on alternative representations. It also analyses the policy consequences of the allocation of care between different actors in the ‘care diamond’ (the state, the private sector, the not-for-profit sector, and the family), and between genders within the family. The evaluative tool of this new feminist framework—the transformative ethics of care—assesses care policies against core ethical criteria: recognition, reduction, redistribution, representation, solidarity between social groups, and women’s autonomy. These criteria determine whether care policies are ‘ethically transformative’ or not, so they are crucial in relation to the moral imperative that requires genuine listening to the voices of family carers and/or women, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, directly or through their representation. Seriously taking these voices into account when designing care policies can lead to the redistribution of care labour and costs from the private sphere to the public arena to enhance both solidarity between social groups and women’s autonomy at the family level. To analyse the distribution of care labour within the family, this new feminist framework deploys two conceptual tools: ‘social care’ and ‘caring masculinities’. The concept of ‘social care’ enables this research to capture women’s lived experiences and practices of childcare and to analyse cultural discourses on childcare. Further, it draws our attention to the role of the state in either weakening or reinforcing such cultural discourses. The concept of ‘caring masculinities’ permits this thesis to examine the extent to which, and how, men have engaged in ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ care alongside their breadwinning role. I define ‘caring masculinities’ along a continuum that encompasses ‘less-caring’ and ‘more-caring’ practices at each extreme, both shaped by men’s conceptions of their intersecting identities as fathers and husbands. The data analysed in this dissertation are from policy texts and from people’s perspectives and/or experiences drawn from in-depth interviews with 104 respondents at the national, preschool, and family levels who have been engaged in and/or affected by the policy. The research data also draws on non-participant observations. The interviews and observations, which were used to understand gendered caring practices, were triangulated with the textual analysis. By applying a new feminist framework for transformative care, this research argues that some Khmer women and men are adopting ‘reflexive reconfigurations’ of care practices, although others are strongly shaped by the interplay between Khmer cultural discourse on care in the Chbab Srey and the Chbab Pros and the state’s role in reconstructing such a discourse through its education textbooks and policies on childcare. By ‘reflexive reconfigurations’ I mean women are renegotiating Khmer cultural discourse on childcare by encouraging their husbands to engage more in care work, with men responding to their spouses’ constant negotiations by adopting ‘more-caring practices’. This suggests the possibility of transforming the gendered division of care labour within the family.