School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications

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    Sinophobia in the Asian century: race, nation and Othering in Australia and Singapore
    Ang, S ; Colic-Peisker, V (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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    Robot death care: A study of funerary practice
    Gould, H ; Arnold, M ; Kohn, T ; Nansen, B ; Gibbs, M (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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    Managing pandemics as super wicked problems: lessons from, and for, COVID-19 and the climate crisis
    Auld, G ; Bernstein, S ; Cashore, B ; Levin, K (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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    Unpaid Work and Care During COVID-19: Subjective Experiences of Same-Sex Couples and Single Mothers in Australia
    Craig, L ; Churchill, B (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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    Social Sustainability and Ulaanbaatar's 'Ger Districts': Access and Mobility Issues and Opportunities
    Hamiduddin, I ; Fitzpatrick, D ; Plueckhahn, R ; Sangi, U ; Batjargal, E ; Sumiyasuren, E (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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    Generation Solidarity? The young (and old) Australians who are rejecting age-related stereotypes
    Hookway, N ; Woodman, D (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.
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    Medicinal cannabis and driving: the intersection of health and road safety policy
    Perkins, D ; Brophy, H ; McGregor, I ; O'Brien, P ; Quilter, J ; McNamara, L ; Sarris, J ; Stevenson, M ; Glesson, P ; Sinclair, J ; Dietze, P (Elsevier, 2021-11-01)
    Background Recent shifting attitudes towards the medical use of cannabis has seen legal access pathways established in many jurisdictions in North America, Europe and Australasia. However, the positioning of cannabis as a legitimate medical product produces some tensions with other regulatory frameworks. A notable example of this is the so-called ‘zero tolerance’ drug driving legal frameworks, which criminalise the presence of THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) in a driver's bodily fluids irrespective of impairment. Here we undertake an analysis of this policy issue based on a case study of the introduction of medicinal cannabis in Australia. Methods We examine the regulatory approaches used for managing road safety risks associated with potentially impairing prescription medicines and illicit drugs in Australian jurisdictions, as well as providing an overview of evidence relating to cannabis and road safety risk, unintended impacts of the ‘zero-tolerance’ approach on patients, and the regulation of medicinal cannabis and driving in comparable jurisdictions. Results Road safety risks associated with medicinal cannabis appear similar or lower than numerous other potentially impairing prescription medications. The application of presence-based offences to medicinal cannabis patients appears to derive from the historical status of cannabis as a prohibited drug with no legitimate medical application. This approach is resulting in patient harms including criminal sanctions when not impaired and using the drug as directed by their doctor, or the forfeiting of car use and related mobility. Others who need to drive are excluded from accessing a needed medication and associated therapeutic benefit. ‘Medical exemptions’ for medicinal cannabis in comparable jurisdictions and other drugs included in presence offences in Australia (e.g. methadone) demonstrate a feasible alternative approach. Conclusion We conclude that in medical-only access models there is little evidence to justify the differential treatment of medicinal cannabis patients, compared with those taking other prescription medications with potentially impairing effects.
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    The Pat Jasan drug eradication social movement in Northern Myanmar, part one: Origins & reactions
    Dan, SL ; Maran, JHP ; Sadan, M ; Meehan, P ; Goodhand, J (ELSEVIER, 2021-03)
    This commentary provides an introduction to the origins and emergence of Pat Jasan, a social movement that emerged amongst the Kachin population of northern Myanmar in response to a perceived crisis of illicit drug production and consumption. Although frequently presented as a case of drug vigilantism, we seek move beyond this stereotype by providing a granular account of the historical, political, and cultural conditions that lay the ground for the movement's emergence. Pat Jasan arose in the context of intersecting crises linked to protracted armed violence, extractive development and the 'slow violence' associated with widespread drug use. It was a response to a perceived vacuum of policing and the limitations of internationally supported harmed reduction measures to recognize or address the magnitude of the problem. Taking seriously the socially embedded foundations of the Pat Jasan movement provides an entry point for exploring how notions of harm reduction are constructed and understood locally and how movements like Pat Jasan emerge in response to societal concerns surrounding drugs.
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    Children & Migration: Political Constructions and Contestations
    Pruitt, LJ (WILEY, 2021-11)
    Abstract This article demonstrates the importance of paying attention to the roles children and childhood play in policy making relating to migration, especially since the outcomes of these debates have serious implications for children and for migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers of all ages. The article considers a case study examining political representations of migrant, asylum seeker, and refugee children from 2015 to 2016 in the United Kingdom Parliament. Applying discourse analysis to Hansard records, the article demonstrates how across significant political differences, policy makers come together in painting children as victims in need of urgent protection while situating themselves and the UK as best placed to determine how to provide this security to the children in question – historically, currently, and in the future. In doing so, policy makers contribute to inaccurate essentialisations of children, and simultaneously situate the UK as a global protector of children, even when limited agreement on policy approaches exists.