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Postgraduate Students and Activities

Current Students

Jack Aisbett
Title: Health Aid and its Role in the Creation of Spaces of Social Control
Description: The research is concerned with the (neo) colonial aspects of western health institutions. In the recent past, western health institutions played a vital role in producing a hegemony that justified European occupation of lands in the Southern hemisphere as well as the segregation and control of those possessing non-‘white’ bodies.  This project will explore the contemporary manifestations of these past hegemonic practices. The research will apply critical race theory and Foucauldian medical sociology toDavid Turnbull's (1997) concept of knowledge spaces to investigate if international health aid imposes western ideals about how Pacific Islanders should act. This will involve a case study of Papua New Guinea’s HIV/AIDS Support Project (NHASP). The methodologies employed will be discourse analysis of semi-structured interviews and public health papers as well as landscape analysis of Papua New Guinean bodies and health centres.

Louise Askew
Title: Geographies of social governance: a governmental perspective on enacting interagency human service delivery initiatives
Description: This ARC funded project investigates current social policy settings in Australia through examining the emergence of interagency-based models of human service delivery and their positioning within neoliberal and post-neoliberal frames of governing. The research project takes a case study approach, focusing on a specific interagency strategy in the NSW Government aimed at the improved provision of services to communities and families with young children. Drawing on a governmental and contingent framework, the research takes an ethnographic view on state actors and their role in enacting a particular programme within the strategy. Rather than assuming the realisation of a neoliberalised mode of social governance, the research reveals the ways in which overarching rationalities and techniques of neoliberal governing are simultaneously reinforced, challenged or, indeed, absent from existing institutional policies and from the personal practices and understandings of state actors across different institutional and geographical contexts. The research promotes a view towards complexity, agency and contingency within the state which allows for alternative understandings and enactments of social governance.

Tim Connor
Title: Governance of Labour Practices in the Production Networks of Transnational Corporations: the Case of Nike Inc.
Description: The thesis addresses the future of trade unionism in a global environment in which transnational capital is increasingly mobile and powerful. It considers accounts of new internationalism among worker organisations, and in particular attempts to build global cooperation between workers organisations and civil society movements through the global anti-sweatshop movement. It looks at codes of conduct, multi-stakeholder initiatives and other forms of governance that have arisen in response to anti-sweatshop activism and considers what role they are playing and are likely to play in helping to create space for workers to organise themselves.

Geoff Evans
Title: Transitions to Sustainability in the Hunter Region of NSW: Realising Community Visions and Strategies
Description: The research will identify and critically analyse the concept of sustainability, through in-depth analysis of the Hunter Region of NSW, the site of Australia's largest coal export, fossil fuel power generation and aluminium smelting industries, but also an internationally-famous wine growing, racehorse breeding and surfing area.
The Hunter coal industry constitutes 90% of the Regions exports and because of its economic dominance and high impact of coal mining and coal burning for energy on the local and global environment the research will focus on the roles structure of this industry at the local level.

In a world where the traditional role of coal as a dominant fuel for electricity generation is being challenged - because of the impacts of fossil fuels on climate change and global warming the research will analyse the social, economic and environmental impact of the coal industry and other local heavy industries dependent on it (eg. coal-fired power and aluminium smelting).

Using semi-structured interviews to gather narratives about a wide range of local residents, industry, government experiences of development and visions and strategies for achieving local sustainability the researcher will analyse these from the context of two principles -environmental justice and just transitions to sustainability.
From the perspective of a participant observer, the researcher will engage key stakeholders including activists from community groups, Aboriginal organizations and mineworkers, industry leaders and local, state and national government policy makers and regulators in a series of individual and group interviews to ask them to identify, critically analyse and develop their various visions and strategies.

In doing so it is hoped the research will evaluate the range of visions and strategies and help facilitate more united and effective strategies for a justtransition to sustainability among key players in the Hunter Region.

Paul Hodge
Title: Rethinking development discourse in Fiji - NGOs, donors and contested identities
Description: The rethinking of development orthodoxy is a welcomed insight provided by postdevelopment theorists and their companions is a welcome advance in thinking around 'devleopment'. Drawing on this often diverse critical tradition this thesis unpacks the assumptions underpinning development relations in Fiji between and among NGOs, donors and government departments and ministries. The approach constitutes a 'cultural explanation of development and as such emphasizes local specificity, negotiated identities, and the politics of the postcolonial. In an effort to prioritise geography and identity politics the thesis engages broader questions on the discipline's colonial legacies and the search for 'material' (postcolonial) geographies.

Philip Lane
Title: Comparison of bayesian and classical statistical frameworks to develop indicators of family vulnerability using spatial data sets
Description: This project examines existing statistical techniques to analyse multivariate data sets, and critiques the explanatory power of such methods for social data in terms of its spatial nature. Classical and Bayesian techniques to incorporate this spatial dimension will be assessed and/or developed. From these new and existing techniques, composite indicators will be developed that are utilised to improve the planning of Government intervention programs targeting 0-8 year olds in the Hunter region.

Adam Tyndall
Title: The Shopping Mall as a Public Space?  Consequences for urban citizenship
Description: Traditionally public space has been perceived as an integral part of fully functioning liberal democracy. Yet much research argues that traditional public space is in decline due to regimes of neo-liberal governance paralleled with a growth in new pseudo-public spaces. It is argued that these new public spaces posit a commercialised, sanitised and ultimately exclusionary public in place of a more democratic public form. The focus of this thesis is on analysing the shopping mall as a ‘new public space’, and more particularly the forms of ‘publicness’ which are facilitated by the unique economic and social arrangements it encompasses. This is being undertaken via a case study approach, focusing on the three actors who produce and reproduce the mall as place: the shopping mall itself (represented as a regulated corporate space), the public citizen and the free market tenant. The overarching aim of the research is to determine what implications these new economic and social arrangements, and the publicness these facilitate, have for citizenship in a liberal democracy.

Award:
Best Postgraduate Paper at the Institute of Australia Geographers (IAG) Conference in Armidale, 2005.
Tyndall, A., 2005, Publicness, urban citizenship and the shopping mall, Institute of Australian Geographers, Armidale, 19 - 22 July 2005.

 

Award:
Best Postgraduate Paper at the Institute of Australia Geographers (IAG) Conference in Melbourne, 2007.
Tyndall, A., 2007, A Particular Public: Publicness and the Shopping Mall. Paper presented at the Institute of Australian Geographers Conference (IAG), Melbourne, July 2 – 5.

 

Jill Sweeney
Title: Extra-territoriality, Sovereignty and Ocean-space: The Geography of Whaling in the Twenty-first Century
Description: This thesis seeks to utilise a political ecology framework in an analysis of international ocean geography. The ocean may be understood as a social space in which actors, predominantly nation-states, challenge, enact and extend sovereignty. Contemporary whaling provides a useful example of this, and raises questions regarding resource access, extra-territoriality, and the ways in which these actors take part in and respond to international relations.

Recently Completed

Dr Elissa Sutherland

Title: The representation and governance of outworking in the Australian clothing industry

 

Dr Matthew Kearnes

Title: Matter and the monument: The physical and discursive reconstruction of the Gold Coast

 

Dr Matthews Phillips

Title: The BIS: A history of international financial and monetary governance

 

Dr Nazeeh Almanasyeh

Title: Locational planning for education services using a spatial allocation model and GIS

 

Dr Kristian Ruming
Title: A post-structural analysis of the residential property market