School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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ItemConsuming Chance: The Ethics and Enchantments of Promotional Competitions( 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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ItemInterrupting knowledge, decolonising care: understanding mental health with a refugee-run NGO in Sydney, Australia( 2017)Any expression of medical pluralism will reflect the organisation and hierarchisation of its traditions of knowledge. My thesis attends to moments in which diverse understandings of mental affliction are negotiated, and sometimes even silenced, in the networks and relationships surrounding a Sydney NGO. Here, alongside this NGO run for and by people from Central Africa, I explore approaches to questions of what mental affliction is, various notions of who (mis)understands it, and how afflictions and their percieved misunderstanding are dealt with. In the process, the category of ‘mental health’ emerges and disappears, is challenged and negotiated, within jostling epistemological frames of understanding. To examine this therapeutic landscape, I prioritise modes of analysis that are sensitive to the fluctuating complexities of caring for community through existing, yet not always equitable, structures for such care. I draw on affect theory’s slowness and attunement to the unseen, often unarticulated forces that unfold in encounters, conversations and in what is articulated (Stewart 2017: 192). Affective scenes provide an access point to each chapter's textured study of the refugee-migrant community health assemblage, which is examined in terms of: historical context (Chapter One), NGO sector development (Chapter Two), education (Chapter Three), belief (Chapter Four), faith (Chapter Five), and care (Chapter Six). Through such attention, this thesis asks after what medical pluralism looks like when a group of people with histories of a range of healing traditions—psychiatry, cosmopolitan medicine, religious faith healing, and spiritual cleansing of curses—move to Australia? How were these different knowledge traditions treated and talked about? And how could one meaningfully study these pluralities?—what would anthropological research and ethnographic writing, as modes of knowledge creation, come up against in trying to engage with plural traditions of knowledge? Through representational sensibilities, moments of ethnographic attention and narratives that circle back and interrupt themselves, this thesis builds an argument for ambivalence towards conclusive uses of knowledge. Ambivalence is presented as a counter to the kinds of simplified understandings of diversity that are often salient in the migrant health and community development sector, and that are shown, through this ethnography to beget subtle, structurally violent effects. I frame such ambivalence as an act of care. Part examination of the tensions “between fragmentation and connectedness-in-the-making” (Biehl and McKay 2012: 1210), part portrait of the tensions held in suspense when crafting an ethnography of knowledge(s), my work seeks to contribute to the decolonisation of knowledge and care.
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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.
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ItemProducing Melbourne’s farmers’ markets: local food, farming and 'feel-good' shopping( 2015)This thesis builds upon anthropological theories of modernity, production and consumption through ethnographic research, situated in the cosmopolitan city of Melbourne, the ‘foodie’ capital of post-industrial Australia. It examines how producers sold farming, good food and ‘feel-good’ shopping to their urban customers. Through storytelling about the hard yet idyllic farming way of life, producers also sold ’the good life’, based on aspirational urban constructions of a rural idyll, including attributes of honesty, simplicity, hard work and just reward.
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ItemAwkward engagements: the embodied experience of female converts to Islam( 2015)This thesis examines the phenomena of female conversion to Islam amongst a group of middle class Australian women. Conversion is conceived of as a deeply embodied project in which female converts create a pious and moral self by adhering to Islamic beliefs and practices. Through a detailed analysis of discussions at local mosque groups, I argue that conversion is an ‘awkward engagement’ between the converts desire for a new moral self and the practical conditions of their conversion, which work through, on and in their bodies. This thesis extends existing work on gender and religious conversion by drawing on theories of embodiment and practice, bringing it together with recent anthropological work on women’s participation in religious movements and Muslim piety. Theories of embodiment and practice, bridge the gap between lived experience, practice and discourse, and help complicate notions of the secular and religious, agency and submission.