School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications
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ItemSex in prisoner power relations: Attitudes and practices in a Ukrainian correctional colony for men(Wiley, 2017-01-01)Most research on prison sex has originated in the global West, often employing quantitative methodology. Building on a semi-ethnographic study of a Ukrainian prison, this article explores how prisoners and officers perceive prisoner sex. Rape was not reported in this prison, despite the relatively young prison population. I argue that the informal prisoner power structure of the prison underworld diminishes sexual abuse. Thus, contrary to much of the literature, masculinity, homophobia, and informal prisoner hierarchies can equally instigate and restrain prison violence and sexual victimisation.
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ItemThe disposition of the destitute(Council to Homeless Persons, 2019)The final disposition is a term used by people in the funeral industry to refer to the burial or cremation of a dead person. The final disposition is a profoundly important event, not simply a pragmatic or material process, and its significance is expressed through ritualised performances. The disposition and its rituals are shared and communal, involving ceremonies attended by the deceased’s family, friends, and community, whilst less indirectly the disposition is shared by wider social norms and values around the proper treatment of the deceased body. Although the disposition is common to us all, then, it is also a personalised event in which the particularity of the life lived is recognised. Similarly, the place of interment, whether body or ashes, is named and marked to recognise the individual life of the deceased. Places of interment are thus not only identified, but are also accessible to family, friends and community, for the purpose of ongoing visitation and remembrance.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableResponse to COVID-19: An Australian behaviour support service perspective(Bild, 2020-09-01)
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ItemNo Preview Available‘Death by Twitter’: Understanding false death announcements on social media and the performance of platform cultural capital(University of Illinois Libraries, 2019)In this paper, we analyse false death announcements of public figures on social media and public responses to them. The analysis draws from a range of public sources to collect and categorise the volume of false death announcements on Twitter and undertakes a case study analysis of representative examples. We classify false death announcements according to five overarching types: accidental; misreported; misunderstood; hacked; and hoaxed. We identify patterns of user responses, which cycle through the sharing of the news, to personal grief, to a sense of uncertainty or disbelief. But we also identify more critical and cultural responses to such death announcements in relation to misinformation and the quality of digital news, or cultures of hoax and disinformation on social media. Here we see the performance of online identity through a form that we describe, following Bourdieu as ‘platform cultural capital’.
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ItemA field experiment on community policing and police legitimacy.(Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2019-10-01)Despite decades of declining crime rates, longstanding tensions between police and the public continue to frustrate the formation of cooperative relationships necessary for the function of the police and the provision of public safety. In response, policy makers continue to promote community-oriented policing (COP) and its emphasis on positive, nonenforcement contact with the public as an effective strategy for enhancing public trust and police legitimacy. Prior research designs, however, have not leveraged the random assignment of police-public contact to identify the causal effect of such interactions on individual-level attitudes toward the police. Therefore, the question remains: Do positive, nonenforcement interactions with uniformed patrol officers actually cause meaningful improvements in attitudes toward the police? Here, we report on a randomized field experiment conducted in New Haven, CT, that sheds light on this question and identifies the individual-level consequences of positive, nonenforcement contact between police and the public. Findings indicate that a single instance of positive contact with a uniformed police officer can substantially improve public attitudes toward police, including legitimacy and willingness to cooperate. These effects persisted for up to 21 d and were not limited to individuals inclined to trust and cooperate with the police prior to the intervention. This study demonstrates that positive nonenforcement contact can improve public attitudes toward police and suggests that police departments would benefit from an increased focus on strategies that promote positive police-public interactions.
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ItemRefining national greenhouse gas inventories(SPRINGER, 2020-01-24)The importance of greenhouse gas inventories cannot be overstated: the process of producing inventories informs strategies that governments will use to meet emissions reduction targets. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) leads an effort to develop and refine internationally agreed upon methodologies for calculating and reporting greenhouse gas emissions and removals. We argue that these guidelines are not equipped to handle the task of developing national greenhouse gas inventories for most countries. Inventory guidelines are vital to implementing climate action, and we highlight opportunities to improve their timeliness and accuracy. Such reforms should provide the means to better understand and advance the progress countries are making toward their Paris commitments. Now is the time to consider challenges posed by the current process to develop the guidelines, and to avail the policy community of recent major advances in quantitative and expert synthesis to overhaul the process and thereby better equip multi-national efforts to limit climate change.
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ItemNews Corporation Tabloids and Press Photography During the 2013 Australian Federal Election(Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2017)Academic attention has often been focused upon analysing words in journalism texts and, consequently, the impact of photographs in newspaper journalism has tended to be overlooked. This is problematic because images are a key method by which news is selected, framed and communicated, particularly in tabloid newspapers. This article focuses upon criticisms that tabloids from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation Australia were biased—against the Kevin Rudd-led Labor government and towards Tony Abbott’s conservative Liberal–National Coalition—during the 2013 federal election in Australia. Through an analysis of front pages, this article explores how photographs contributed to reporting the campaign and expressing the strong political preferences of News Corporation. The article concludes that Murdoch’s Australian tabloids shifted towards a British-style overt partisanship in their reporting of the 2013 election. Images were at the forefront of that shift as they are a powerful tool for conveying messages of newspaper support and opposition, and occupy a central place in how political issues, events and individuals are represented and understood.
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ItemPress Photography and Visual Censorship in the Australian Parliament(WILEY, 2018-03-01)Still photography is an important medium for visually communicating — and scrutinising — the power of elected representatives. However, it has been severely restricted by parliaments. Surprisingly, the photographs taken by press photographers have been viewed as a larger threat to parliamentary dignity than other seemingly more powerful media, such as television. This article analyses parliaments’ “extraordinary sensitivity to photography” by conducting a comparative, historical examination of press photography in five national parliaments — Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. The article discusses historical milestones in media access for each of these parliaments, but focuses particularly upon the unusual case of the Australian Parliament and its rules on still photography. The author draws upon interviews conducted with Australian press photographers, as well as an analysis of primary material — including parliamentary guidelines on media access, photographs, newspaper reports, parliamentary debates, inquiry reports and submissions.
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Item'The struggle isn't over': Shifting aid paradigms and redefining 'development' in eastern Myanmar(Elsevier, 2020-03-01)In recent years, international optimism about Myanmar’s fledgling democratization and peace process has contributed to a shift by many Western donors towards the ‘normalization’ of aid relations with the former pariah state, and from more ‘humanitarian’ to more ‘development’-style approaches. Yet these shifts are not necessarily seen as progress by members of community-based health organizations, which operate under para-state governance systems in the borderlands. Instead, members of these organizations often describe the emerging ‘development’ paradigm in Myanmar as doing more harm than good. This article draws on long-term ethnographic research conducted over a decade-long period with ethnic minority health workers operating in Myanmar’s eastern borderlands. It examines the meanings of ‘humanitarianism’ and ‘development’ – and of the ‘humanitarian-development nexus’ – from the perspective of local-level actors whose voices are still too often ignored in debates about international aid programs and their implementation. It finds that the reactions of the health workers to shifting aid paradigms and programs highlight what is at stake in an evolving politics of aid. These reactions are linked with a politics of suffering; with an ongoing struggle for recognition of non-state governance systems; and with impacts that international aid economies have in designating different socio-political actors as legitimate, and in territorializing border spaces in different ways, at different times. The health workers’ attempts to advance an alternative model for ‘development’ in their communities in turn illustrate how different actors, who are brought together in an unequal ‘aid encounter’, are involved in an ongoing struggle over the legitimacy of competing systems of government and over the territorialization of border areas. Finally, the article contends that, without understanding local perspectives and engaging critically with the political implications of evolving aid interventions, international aid programs risk impacting negatively on conflict dynamics in contested and transitional states.
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ItemHealth as a bridge to peace in Myanmar's Kayin State: 'working encounters' for community development(Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2020-10-15)This article explores ‘health as a bridge to peace’ in Myanmar’s Kayin State. It focuses on an Auxiliary Midwife training programme, which has created partnerships between actors historically divided by decades-long conflict. Drawing on ethnographic research, the article highlights the agency of community-level service providers, who are often overlooked in conventional approaches to peacebuilding. It demonstrates that community health workers are challenging top-down liberal approaches to peacebuilding and advancing an alternative approach to development and peace in their areas–one that emphasises systemic change and recognition of non-state governance systems. The shared lexicon and standardised practices of healthcare create ‘working encounters’–encounters that ‘work’, because they enable actors historically divided by conflict to carve out an ‘apolitical’ space in an otherwise highly politicised context, while still allowing for different perspectives and agendas. These ‘working encounters’ in turn facilitate the development of understanding, trust and collaboration across conflict divides. Yet community-level actors face structural limitations, which are often underestimated by proponents of ‘health as a bridge to peace’. Nevertheless, this case study highlights significant contributions that community-level ‘working encounters’ can make to wider peace processes, as well as the need for hybrid and emancipatory practices of peace formation.