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(2022)ThesisDating and hookup platforms have become a popular tool for seeking romantic and sexual relationships. While there are numerous benefits to making connections online, popular media and academic literature have begun to document how these platforms are implicated in the perpetration of sexual harms. Drawing on feminist and queer understandings of sexual violence and technology, this thesis provides a mixed-methods examination of sexual harms experienced in the context of online dating. Data collection included an online survey (N=527) and in-depth interviews (N=25) with adult Australians who use dating and hookup platforms. Findings indicate that experiences of safety and sexual harms and their impacts in the context of dating and hookup platforms can be complex and varied, with many experiences diverging from legal and normative understandings of sexual violence. Participants documented a range of harms, including unwanted requests for sex, unsolicited sexual images, harassment based on gender, sexuality, and race, and unwanted sexual experiences, among others. These harms were gendered and intersectional, with women and sexuality diverse participants disproportionately affected. Minimisation and normalisation of sexual harms appeared to be common, due to the sexualised nature of these platforms and largely unquestioned acceptance of a ‘hookup’ culture in online dating. Cisnormative and heteronormative discourses of gender, sexuality, sexual behaviours, and sexual violence were both (re)produced and resisted by participants, illustrating how socio-cultural and sexual norms may become inscribed within digital platforms, and alternatively how these platforms may be co-opted to resist or reject these norms. Existing reporting and response options from platforms to these harms were viewed as inadequate, with participants calling for greater transparency and accountability in reporting processes and tangible consequences for perpetrators of harmful behaviours. This thesis concludes with recommendations as to how platforms, law enforcement, and communities could better prevent and respond to these harms.
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(2023)ThesisThis thesis uses a Talanoa Research Methodology (TRM) approach to explore the concepts of traditional knowledge, knowledge, custom and customary law in Samoa. TRM uses the principles of fa’asamoa to guide and conduct interviews where participants are collaborators, co-developing the research agenda. Open-ended questions focused on centring participant perspectives to reflect their authentic voices, understand their life experience and recommendations for future directions for reform. Interviews were conducted with Samoan government officers, cultural practitioners, and village individuals across 2019 to 2021. Participants were asked to identify traditional knowledge or knowledge, intellectual property, custom and customary law from their perspective, allowing the terms and examples to demonstrate connections between where knowledge is situated, and how life is lived and practiced, and its day-to-day regulation. A TRM approach was chosen to help make more visible how knowledge is regulated in a pluralist post-colonial legal order. In Samoa, customary law is not inferior or superior to the legislative framework of the state. Customary law plays a crucial role in village governance and regulates how knowledge operates in society. This is not well understood in the international literature about TK and intellectual property and this creates problems in implementing treaty conventions such as the World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Rights of Intellectual Property Rights 1994 (TRIPs), Convention of Biological Diversity 1992 (CBD), Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from the Utilization to the Convention of Biological Diversity 2010 (Nagoya Protocol), and the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage 2003 (Convention on ICH). Participants reflected on their experiences with current regulatory frameworks, including the role of the village fono. Discussion includes reflections on the value and limitations of international legal frameworks and externally funded development initiatives. Recommendations are canvassed for improvement of current regulatory frameworks and alternative mechanisms that could provide practical avenues for the future development for the protection of knowledge or traditional knowledge in Samoa. Recommendations also have potential relevance for other Pacific Islands. This research has wider relevance beyond the Pacific, providing critical insights into the significance of international discussions about traditional knowledge, access and benefit sharing, and other attempts to decolonise intellectual property. Understanding the value of research informed by TRM is particularly relevant to outside researchers, consultants and international agencies who work in the Pacific and are interested in progressing TK and intellectual property reform agendas in ways that benefit and support the local community.
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(2024)ThesisThis thesis examines how values (as goals, priorities, background assumptions) shape, advance, and hinder legal processes to safeguard cultural heritage. I argue that the narrative of international cultural heritage law (ICHL) that eschews economic considerations of cultural heritage in favour of pronouncements about heritage’s intrinsic value disconnects ICHL from some of the other legal regimes that contribute to safeguarding heritage. This disconnection ultimately weakens the mission of ICHL of protecting cultural heritage. The law serves as both the expression of social values and tool for enforcing them, and recalls different values as needed to validate law-making and orient the interpretation and implementation of legislation. Similarly, established values prioritise what international law should regulate, how and for which purposes, with practical consequences regarding the allocation of resources to protect specific interests. My research analyses this role of values in rearranging priorities when international humanitarian law (IHL), anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorism financing (CTF) regimes regulate cultural heritage. I draw on rules of interpretation established by the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties to identify the values that underlie these legal regimes, and develop a much-needed analysis of intrinsic and extrinsic value in ICHL. By analysing how IHL, AML and CTF regimes and cultural heritage studies imagine heritage value as extrinsic, I show that ICHL’s insistence on emphasising the intrinsic value of heritage disconnects it from such regimes. My research advances scholarship by overcoming doctrinal boundaries that isolate ICHL from IHL, AML, and CTF law. By navigating those boundaries, my research impacts legal responses to, and broader management of cultural heritage recovered during criminal proceedings – an under-explored area of the literature. Bringing criminal law into the conversation about heritage through values is significant to scholars because it connects ICHL with disciplines that heritage lawyers and managers engage with only tangentially, widening the scope of areas where the safeguarding of heritage and its enforcement can be prosecuted. This thesis rethinks cultural heritage value so that legal regimes, when recovering cultural items, can better manage these objects for interpreting and addressing the social tensions in which context cultural heritage was taken.