School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications
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ItemGreen Theory(Oxford University Press, 2021)This chapter explores the ways in which environmental concerns have influenced International Relations (IR) theory. It provides a brief introduction to the ecological crisis and the emergence of green theorizing in the social sciences and humanities in general, and then tracks the status and impact of environmental issues and green thinking in IR theory. It shows how mainstream IR theories, such as neorealism and neoliberalism have constructed environmental problems merely as a ‘new issue area’ that can be approached through pre-existing theoretical frameworks. These approaches are contrasted with critical green IR theories, which challenges the state-centric framework, rationalist analysis, and ecological blindness of orthodox IR theories and offer a range of new environmental interpretations of international justice, democracy, development, modernization, and security. In the case study, climate change is explored to highlight the diversity of theoretical approaches, including the distinctiveness of green approaches, in understanding global environmental change.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableSinophobia in the Asian century: race, nation and Othering in Australia and Singapore(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2021)This paper explores public discourses of race and nation in Australia and Singapore, focusing on their historical and contemporary relationship with China and the Chinese. Both countries are governed by a multicultural ideology but are experiencing evolving tensions rooted in their (post)colonial and settler histories, dominated by respective Anglo-Australian and Singaporean-Chinese majorities. To illuminate these issues, we analyse public discourses by politicians and other opinion leaders, as reported in influential media. We discuss how the two nation-states accommodate their rapidly growing mainland Chinese minorities in the context of a rising China as a global power, and in conjunction with their cultural-spatial dislocations. We found a renewed Sinophobia in both countries, but with different historic and contemporary origins and manifestations: in Australia a historically grounded fear of the Chinese as “Yellow Peril”; in Singapore, a co-ethnic anxiety about the incoming mainland Chinese who are construed as “other” to the Singaporean-Chinese.
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ItemRobot death care: A study of funerary practice(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2021-07)Across the globe, human experiences of death, dying, and grief are now shaped by digital technologies and, increasingly, by robotic technologies. This article explores how practices of care for the dead are transformed by the participation of non-human, mechanised agents. We ask what makes a particular robot engagement with death a breach or an affirmation of care for the dead by examining recent entanglements between humans, death, and robotics. In particular, we consider telepresence robots for remote attendance of funerals; semi-humanoid robots officiating in a religious capacity at memorial services; and the conduct of memorial services by robots, for robots. Using the activities of robots to ground our discussion, this article speaks to broader cultural anxieties emerging in an era of high-tech life and high-tech death, which involve tensions between human affect and technological effect, machinic work and artisanal work, humans and non-humans, and subjects and objects.
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ItemCybernetic Funeral Systems(IEEE, 2021)Using Postphenomenology (one of many methods informed by Wiener's cybernetics) as an analytical approach, this paper examines three examples of robot participation in, and mediation of, funerals. The analysis of robot mediation of funerals challenges the idea that death rituals are exclusively human performances and experiences, and instead repositions them as cybernetic systems of entanglement and impact. The paper begins with an introduction to the relevance of postphenomenological theory, then moves to the case of CARL, a robot that enables remote participation in funeral ceremonies. We argue that the [Human-Robot-Funeral] relation and its variants are both engaging and alienating, through revealing-concealing, magnification-reduction and a more generalised enabling-constraining. Technological mediation is also evident in the case of Pepper, a robot that has officiated at funerals as a Buddhist monk. We describe similarities and differences in the way CARL and Pepper manifest the [Human-Robot-Funeral] relation. The final example is AIBO, a companion robot that becomes the locus of a funeral ritual. This offers a radical case that directly challenges humans' self-proclaimed exceptional ontology.
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ItemManaging pandemics as super wicked problems: lessons from, and for, COVID-19 and the climate crisis(SPRINGER, 2021-12)COVID-19 has caused 100s of millions of infections and millions of deaths worldwide, overwhelming health and economic capacities in many countries and at multiple scales. The immediacy and magnitude of this crisis has resulted in government officials, practitioners and applied scholars turning to reflexive learning exercises to generate insights for managing the reverberating effects of this disease as well as the next inevitable pandemic. We contribute to both tasks by assessing COVID-19 as a "super wicked" problem denoted by four features we originally formulated to describe the climate crisis: time is running out, no central authority, those causing the problem also want to solve it, and policies irrationally discount the future (Levin et al. in Playing it forward: path dependency, progressive incrementalism, and the "super wicked" problem of global climate change, 2007; Levin et al. in Playing it forward: Path dependency, progressive incrementalism, and the "super wicked" problem of global climate change, 2009; Levin et al. in Policy Sci 45(2):123-152, 2012). Doing so leads us to identify three overarching imperatives critical for pandemic management. First, similar to requirements to address the climate crisis, policy makers must establish and maintain durable policy objectives. Second, in contrast to climate, management responses must always allow for swift changes in policy settings and calibrations given rapid and evolving knowledge about a particular disease's epidemiology. Third, analogous to, but with swifter effects than climate, wide-ranging global efforts, if well designed, will dramatically reduce domestic costs and resource requirements by curbing the spread of the disease and/or fostering relevant knowledge for managing containment and eradication. Accomplishing these tasks requires building the analytic capacity for engaging in reflexive anticipatory policy design exercises aimed at maintaining, or building, life-saving thermostatic institutions at the global and domestic levels.
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ItemUnpaid Work and Care During COVID-19: Subjective Experiences of Same-Sex Couples and Single Mothers in Australia(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2021-04)This paper draws on data from Work and Care During COVID-19, an online survey of Australians during pandemic lockdown in May 2020 (n = 2,722). It focuses on how subsamples of lesbian, gay, and bisexual mothers and fathers in couples (n = 280) and single mothers (n = 480) subjectively experienced unpaid work and care during lockdown compared with heterosexual mothers and fathers in couples, and with partnered mothers, respectively. During the pandemic, nonheterosexual fathers’ subjective reports were less negative than those of their heterosexual counterparts, but differences between heterosexual and lesbian/bisexual mothers were more mixed. Unlike their partnered counterparts, more single mothers reported feeling satisfied than before with their balance of paid and unpaid work and how they spent their time overall during the pandemic, perhaps because they avoided partnership conflicts and particularly benefited from relaxed commuting and child care deadlines.
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Item'When newspapers took over television'(State Library of New South Wales, 2021)
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ItemAutomating Digital Afterlives(Oxford University Press, 2021-08-26)The question of how the dead “live on” by maintaining a presence and connecting to the living within social networks has garnered the attention of users, entrepreneurs, platforms, and researchers alike. In this chapter we investigate the increasingly ambiguous terrain of posthumous connection and disconnection by focusing on a diverse set of practices implemented by users and offered by commercial services to plan for and manage social media communication, connection, and presence after life. Drawing on theories of self-presentation (Goffman) and technological forms of life (Lash), we argue that moderated and automated performances of posthumous digital presence cannot be understood as a continuation of personal identity or self-presentation. Rather, as forms of mediated human (after)life, posthumous social media presence materializes ambiguities of connection/disconnection and self/identity.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableSocial Sustainability and Ulaanbaatar's 'Ger Districts': Access and Mobility Issues and Opportunities(MDPI, 2021-10)This paper explores the concept of social sustainability in Ulaanbaatar’s ger districts in relation to access and mobility. Although ger districts are well-established in Mongolian culture as ephemeral encampments with transient residents, contemporary ger districts have become large and permanent residential districts that are now home to an estimated one-third of the country’s population. The more recent growth of the ger districts has taken place in three decades since Mongolia embraced market-based liberal economics, coinciding with waves of socially and economically-motivated urbanisation. More recently, difficult environmental conditions in rural Mongolia have created new waves of migration. The unfolding situation means that the ger districts have grown with little of the forward planning present in other built areas of the city. In turn, this has led to significant imbalances in the provision of transport services into the ger districts and the problems of access and mobility that this paper has highlighted. This paper has identified community-based local transport and delivery services as one potential means for addressing existing access and mobility shortcomings. Such approaches could provide temporary or complementary services alongside other public policy approaches.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableGeneration Solidarity? The young (and old) Australians who are rejecting age-related stereotypes(Sociological Review Foundation, 2021-10-05)Generation has become one of the major lenses we use to understand the big issues and challenges of our time, from housing and employment to climate change and the impact of the pandemic. It’s common to read about narcissistic millennials, and more recently about selfish baby boomers, and increasingly anxious, tech-distracted Generation Zs. Often these labels register societal anxieties about social change and are levelled at younger people.