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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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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ItemRitual and Ritualism in a Contested Sea: Scalar Distortions of Space and Time(Springer International Publishing, 2021)The ground of mutual understanding between locals and migrants in the Mediterranean Sea emerges through the performance of ritual activities. These should be distinguished from the formalistic or incantatory sense of “ritualism.” They include the socially engaged practices of hospitality—a virtuous tradition that governments, even as they claim it for the nation-state, violate in local eyes by confining migrants to impersonal spaces and uncertain futures. Passages across the sea also partake of a pervasive sense of ritual, which thereby offers rich metaphorical material for considering the scalar shifts at play—shifts that entrain such conversions of social interaction into the asocial frameworks of neoliberal management (which in turn encourage aridly scientistic modes of inquiry) but conversely also domesticate cultural distance through a subtle apperception of shared habits of gesture and generosity, made accessible by the close vision of ethnography as described in these essays.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableAbuse as Artefact: Understanding Digital Abuse of Women as Cultural Informant(Springer International Publishing, 2021)From slut-shaming to “revenge porn”, from harassment to the emerging concern of deepfake pornography, the internet can be a distinctly hostile place for women. While much problematic online activity mimics abuses perpetrated offline, others—like deepfakes, for example—have been made possible because of the technology. In this chapter I examine online abuse as an artefact that is richly revealing about our culture. I begin with a discussion of abuse as artefact. I then explore women’s sexual objectification as a central undercurrent of their abuse, and I use the objectification lens to examine some specific forms of abuse disproportionately directed at women—from slut-shaming to image-based sexual abuse—to investigate what online behaviour reveals about sexual politics.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableIdeology and social and cultural theory(Routledge, 2021)The Handbook, edited by acclaimed sociologist Anthony Elliott, develops a powerful argument for bringing together social and cultural theory more systematically than ever before. Key social and cultural theories, ranging from classical approaches to postmodern, psychoanalytic and post-feminist approaches, are drawn together and critically appraised. There are also new chapters on mobilities and migrations, as well as posthumanism.
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ItemAyahuasca and Childhood Trauma: Potential Therapeutic Applications(Springer International Publishing, 2021)The last 20 years have seen major developments in the understanding of how childhood trauma (negative events that cause distress and overwhelm a person’s ability to cope) can have long-term effects on the health and well-being of adults who have experienced this. Child sexual abuse was first included in global burden of disease and disability estimates in 2004, and there has been a steady accumulation of research and evidence identifying the public health issues and costs associated with various traumatic childhood experiences. Much of this research has used the framework of adverse childhood experiences or ACEs, which encompass emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, as well as various other adverse events, including growing up in a household in which there is domestic violence, alcohol or drug abuse, or a member with mental illness; criminal behavior or incarceration of a family member; caregiver separation or divorce; and neglect, both physical and emotional. Such experiences have been found to be associated with higher rates of physical and mental illness, disability, and premature death in adulthood.
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ItemCorrection To: God and the Virus in Papua New Guinea: Outsourcing Risk, Living with Uncertainty and (Re)creating a Niupela Pasin(Springer Nature Singapore, 2021)In Papua New Guinea COVID-19 has been experienced in various ways. The public statements of Prime Minister James Marape evolved within his strategy of outsourcing the country’s response and risk from the virus to God. In a remote area of Western Province, people learned that western science could not cure COVID-19, while their Christian beliefs were challenged by the re-appearance of practices that purported to identify sorcerers who might harness the power of the virus. Some people in East New Britain Province revived the use of shell money. Confronted by collapsing certainties, local people resurrected the past as a means of creating an apparently ‘new normal’. Living with uncertainty, people sought a knowable future, grappling with issues of trust and authority, and resuscitating older truths and practices.
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ItemForever “Falling Apart”: Semiotics and Rhetorics of Decay(Duke University Press, 2021-10-08)In eleven sharp essays, the contributors to Decay attend to the processes and experiences of symbolic and material decay in a variety of sociopolitical contexts across the globe. They examine decay in its myriad manifestations—biological, physical, organizational, moral, political, personal, and social and in numerous contexts, including colonialism and imperialism, governments and the state, racism, the environment, and infrastructure. The volume's topics are wide in scope, ranging from the discourse of social decay in contemporary Australian settler colonialism and the ways infrastructures both create and experience decay to cultural decay in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war and the relations among individual, institutional, and societal decay in an American high-security prison. By using decay as a problematic and expounding its mechanisms, conditions, and temporalities, the contributors provide nuanced and rigorous means to more fully grapple with the exigencies of the current sociopolitical moment.
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ItemThe waterfall at the end of the world: Earthquakes, entropy and explanation(Duke University Press, 2021)In February 2018, a magnitude 7.5 earthquake had devastating consequences for thousands of people living in remote mountainous areas of Papua New Guinea. As the physical world around them collapsed and decayed, many sought to understand what had happened within ontological frames grounded in science and Christianity. Both these speak of decay in physical or moral order, and an inexorable end that is without human cause. The ultimate effect of these new schemas negated the possibility that earthquake-affected local people might view themselves as agents of cause and control with respect to natural disasters, contrasting profoundly with traditional beliefs and practices.
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ItemGod and the Virus in Papua New Guinea: Outsourcing Risk, Living with Uncertainty and (Re)creating a Niupela Pasin(Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)In Papua New Guinea COVID-19 has been experienced in various ways. The public statements of Prime Minister James Marape evolved within his strategy of outsourcing the country’s response to and risk from the virus to God. In a remote area of Western Province, people learned that western science could not cure COVID-19, while their Christian beliefs were challenged by the re-appearance of practices that purported to identify sorcerers who might harness the power of the virus. Some people in East New Britain Province revived the use of shell money. Confronted by collapsing certainties, local people resurrected the past as a means of creating an apparently ‘new normal’. Living with uncertainty, people sought a knowable future, grappling with issues of trust and authority, and resuscitating older truths and practices.