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(2022)ThesisFor decades, feminists at Australian universities have fought to publicise and politicise the issue of campus sexual violence. These efforts have recently come to fruition, with universities publicly acknowledging the problem and undertaking various institutional reforms. However, there has been little scholarly attention paid to political struggles over sexual violence within universities. This thesis critically examines the politics of feminist activism against sexual violence at Australian university campuses. It situates this activism against the backdrop of the neoliberalisation of Australian universities, to reveal how feminists have challenged – and at times, acted in complicity with – these transformations in the landscape of Australian higher education. This analysis is both historical, drawing on archival material relating to the history of campus feminist politics, and contemporary, using data from interviews with students currently engaged in organising against sexual violence. It explores the strategies and tactics adopted by feminist collectives, the constraints on feminist mobilisation in the neoliberal university, and the shortcomings of these movements. This thesis makes two original contributions to knowledge. Firstly, it extends existing analyses of university sexual violence and contributes to the growing body of scholarship on this topic. Research on campus sexual violence in Australia has so far focused on policy analysis and prevalence data. While this provides an important basis for evaluating the scope of the problem and potential remedies, it is largely disconnected from political struggles over institutional responses to sexual violence, a gap this thesis seeks to fill. I offer an analysis of the historical and contemporary struggles that have created the conditions for institutional change, as well as the complex ways in which the neoliberal university undermines and constrains oppositional movements. Secondly, this thesis makes a theoretical contribution to the field of New and Feminist Institutionalism. It critically intervenes in the institutionalist field, drawing greater attention to the roles of macro-social contexts and actors in the form of social movements in processes of institutional change and proposing a framework that foregrounds these aspects of institutional politics. The findings of this research reveal significant limitations in Australian universities’ responses to sexual violence, with their actions falling short of both student demands and expert recommendations. I argue that these actions have largely functioned to consolidate managerial power and mitigate reputational risk, in doing so narrowing the space of political contestation. My analysis further illuminates the specific institutional constraints that bear upon student feminist organisers within the neoliberal university. This analysis offers strategic insights into feminist engagement with institutions, suggesting that student movements must develop the capacity to disrupt processes of institutional reproduction and challenge the reformist approach adopted by universities. A transformative response to campus sexual violence, I argue, will require broader and better-organised coalitions of staff and students in order to collectively challenge and overcome these constraints.
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(2022)ThesisThis thesis investigates the meaning of racial profiling and its application in Australia. Drawing on the conceptualisation developed by Epp, Maynard-Moody and Haider-Markel that racial profiling is the disproportionate use of unjustified police power against racial and ethnic minorities, this thesis asks: does racial profiling exist in Australia? I develop three methodologies to answer this question. In the first, I apply four concepts developed by Canadian courts to existing Australian cases to determine whether they enable the disclosure of racial profiling. For the second strategy, I conduct a survey of 981 people from Victoria, Australia who the police have subjected to a vehicle, pedestrian or cyclist stop. Drawing again on Epp, Maynard-Moody and Haider-Markel, I classify their experiences into variables that, through regression analysis, I can use examine whether police engage in racial profiling. My third strategy, using the same survey data, tests whether police more frequently use particular tactics on specific racial groups. If so, these tactics could be said to correspond to racial profiling under a test devised by Canadian judge Morden JA. in R v Brown [2003] OJ 1251. The result of each strategy discloses the existence of racial profiling in Australia. Firstly, I find that racial profiling is likely to have impacted 12 Australian cases I examine through the lens of the Canadian common law framework. Consequently, to make racial profiling more visible, this framework provides a useful guide for the development of police powers law in Australia. Secondly, I find strong evidence (p<0.05) that police in Victoria subject people of Aboriginal, African, Pasifika and Middle-Eastern/Muslim appearance to unjustified police stops and unjustified post-stop conduct more frequently than white people. This finding demonstrates that pro-active policing methodologies in Victoria are racially discriminatory. My third finding is that there is strong exploratory evidence (p<0.05) that police use 12 tactics against specific racial groups more frequently than white people. These findings start to reveal the institutionalised mechanisms that police use to target racial groups in Australia. As the first study of this kind in Australia, this thesis makes a major contribution to understanding racial profiling in Australia and how it may be evidenced.
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(2022)ThesisChinese listed companies are struggling to meet the continuous disclosure requirements of the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) and have even been depicted as having poor corporate governance and transparency. Many get delisted from the ASX due to non-compliance in continuous disclosure or are rejected from listing because of continuous disclosure compliance concerns. This thesis addresses one overarching research question: What are the challenges faced by Chinese lawmakers, Chinese listed companies, Chinese companies’ external advisers and securities regulators in dealing with Chinese cross-border listed companies’ continuous disclosure in Australia — and how can these challenges be addressed? This thesis is theoretically founded on the divergent evolution and rationales for continuous disclosure requirements in Australia and China. The evolution of listed companies’ continuous disclosure requirements in Australia can be described as a market-driven process, the most theoretical underpinnings of which are market integrity and investor protection. In contrast, the fundamental rationale behind the presence or absence of continuous disclosure requirements throughout the history of the Chinese securities market is the service of the political economy in the corresponding period. This thesis investigates the research question through the following four dimensions based on such a theoretical framework. First, the application of continuous disclosure requirements for listed companies is composed of three elements in Australia and China: the non-general availability criteria, materiality thresholds, and timeliness requirements. Divergences regarding each element reflect weaknesses of the Chinese continuous disclosure rules. Second, deficiencies exist regarding the continuous disclosure compliance management regime within Chinese listed companies. Third, the obligation of due diligence surrounding external advisers’ monitoring role in Chinese listed companies’ continuous disclosure compliance has limitations. These limitations are manifested in two aspects of the due diligence obligation: the duty of care and the independence requirements. Last, there are also difficulties in respect of the Chinese securities cross-border supervision regime. This thesis thus proposes corresponding reform suggestions in respect of each of these challenges, with relevant experiences in Australia taken into consideration.
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(2022)ThesisThe adoption of the United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances 1988 (“the 1988 Convention”) has been widely viewed as the final step in establishing global drug prohibition. This thesis provides an examination of Australia’s decision to support and sign the Convention which has not been analysied before. It also provides a detailed history of the development of the Convention as Australia was a key participant in UN drug meetings at the time. This thesis is based on the first research to access archival files, primarily from Foreign Affairs but also from the AFP and Department of Health. Nearly 180 folders, totalling approximately 35,000 pages, were copied from the Australian archives. These files provide detailed reports of almost all meetings and drafts that progressed the 1988 Convention. Interviews with key participants were also conducted. It provides an interdisciplinary legal history of Australia’s involvement in the 1988 Convention using the lens of the international relations theory of neorealism and the political theory of historical institutionalism. Through process tracing, it uses the theories to examine whether neorealist geopolitical forces and institutional forces caused Australia to support and sign the Convention. The analysis finds that geopolitical considerations trumped early concerns that a third convention was not necessary. The analysis also demonstrates that institutional forces within the UN benefitted financially from drug prohibition and played an unusually strong role in encouraging the development of the 1988 Convention. It also finds that institutional forces within the Australian government, such as the AFP and Foreign Affairs, supported the new Convention to increase their own jurisdiction and powers. Lastly, it looks at whether alternative policies such as regulation or decriminalization were considered by key policymakers. It finds that key individuals did support decriminalization but were overpowered by institutional and geopolitical forces. The significance of the dissertation includes: large amounts of new data to explain the development of the 1988 Convention; it increases knowledge around the institutional forces of criminalization and global criminalization; it significantly increases our knowledge of the role of the United Nations in waging the War on Drugs; and it increases knowledge around how mid-level nations interact with global institutions.
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(2022)ThesisThis creative practice thesis investigates the relationship between the comic moment and comic works to ask how the need to make people laugh, time and time again, impacts the forms and subject-matters of comic works. Together, the two components of the thesis—the dissertation and the creative work—ultimately offer new insights into the comic form. Drawing on an analysis of comic moments in P.G. Wodehouse’s Crime Wave At Blandings (1936), the dissertation component of the thesis posits that understanding the comic as the result of a safe and sudden incongruity is an appropriate basis from which to start a study of the relationship between the single comic moment and comic works. This is because such an understanding aptly characterises the comic moments I study, and because it is possible to follow the expectations that are at the heart of one incongruity across many incongruities. Using the comic theories of Henri Bergson and Arthur Koestler, I propose that the comic author is fruitfully viewed as a weaver of incongruities, with the expectations being threads and the comic moments being knots. I investigate the usefulness of this paradigm through the analysis of two different comic sequences in Michael Frayn’s stage farce, Noises Off (1982). Turning to a sitcom, Steven Moffat’s highly inventive Coupling (2000), I then argue that Moffat’s many comic devices serve to create patterns of expectations that can be turned into patterns of incongruities. From this insight, I propose a theory of comic structure according to which comic works first set up the expectations that they then weave into a dense pattern of knots. This form, I then argue, helps characterise the elusive genre of farce, because it describes the structure of works that are recognised to be central to the genre. The creative component, a stage farce titled The Play That Explodes, seeks to demonstrate that the weaving paradigm can lead to new ways in which to densify the weave, and can encourage the exploration of fraught but meaningful societal debates. For the purposes of this demonstration, the creative component depicts four drama students tasked with devising a ten- minute play for their graduation show, and combines in a novel way a number of comic devices explored in the dissertation (e.g., a play-within-a-play and sharply delineated characters), with a new device based on a comic acting technique called orthogonality.
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(2022)ThesisTime series models are used to model, simulate, and forecast the behaviour of a phenomenon over time based on data recorded over consistent intervals. The digital era has resulted in data being captured and archived in unprecedented amounts, such that vast amounts of information are available for analysis. Feature-rich time-series datasets are one of the data sets that have become available due to the expanding trend of data collection technologies worldwide. With the application of time series analysis to support financial and managerial decision-making, the development and advancement of time series models in the transportation domain are unavoidable. As a result, this thesis redefines time series models for transportation planning use with the following three aims: (1) To combine parametric and bootstrapping techniques within time series models; (2) to develop a time series model capable of modelling both temporal and spatial dependencies in time-series data; and (3) to leverage the hierarchical Bayesian modelling paradigm to accommodate flexible representations of heterogeneity in data. The first main chapter introduces an ensemble of ARIMA models. It compares its performance against conventional ARIMA (a parametric method) and LSTM models (a non-parametric method) for short-term traffic volume prediction. The second main chapter introduces a copula time series model that describes correlations between variables through time and space. Temporal correlations are modelled by an ARMA-GARCH model which enables a modeller to describe heteroscedastic data. The copula model has a flexible correlation structure and is used to model spatial correlations with the ability to model nonlinear, tailed and asymmetric correlations. The third main chapter provides a Bayesian modelling framework to raise awareness about using hierarchical Bayesian approaches for transport time series data. In addition, this chapter presents a Bayesian copula model. The combination of the two models provides a fully Bayesian approach to modelling both temporal and spatial correlations. Compared with frequentist models, the proposed modelling structures can incorporate prior knowledge. In the fourth main chapter, the fully Bayesian model is used to investigate mobility patterns before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic using social media data. A more focused analysis is conducted on the mobility patterns of Twitter users from different zones and land use types.
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(2022)ThesisThe 2016 vice-presidential election in the Philippines was contested on Facebook, the nation’s most prominent social media platform. Among the contenders was Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos, son of former president Ferdinand Marcos Sr, who ruled between 1965 and 1986. Memes played a significant role in the election. They potentially enriched participatory engagement and information dissemination to a broader public. Through them, opposing camps worked through different versions of the Philippines’ past, present, and future. This case presents a novel opportunity to contribute to the growing scholarly debate about the relationship between social media and democratic politics. This study asks, “Can social media contribute to strengthening democracy in the Philippines?” It approaches this question through a conceptual framework that integrates work on democracy and political memory while also taking seriously the propensity of social media to be enlisted in information campaigns of a propagandist nature. Having analysed a sample of Facebook memes for their form and content, the study comes to an ambivalent conclusion. As immensely pliable and flexible texts, created and circulated with ease, the thesis finds that memes play a dual role in democratic politics. In the 2016 Philippine election, they (a) allowed for the inclusion of competing perspectives, narratives, and voices about Marcos Sr’s past regime and his son’s electoral bid. Rational and passionate voices, as one would expect from models of deliberative and agonistic democracy, were visible in this study. Enabled by digital platforms, memes became an important medium for the creative, potentially deliberative, and agonistic (if not outwardly antagonistic) articulation of sidelined memories about the regime of Marcos Sr. At the same time, (b) memes served as instruments for persuasive networked influence. While this may seem contrary to democratic communication, such propagandistic communication carries the potential to enrich reasoned argumentations in the broader public sphere when viewed from the lens of the wider literature on deliberative democracy. This potential, however, also depends on other factors, which include the techno-discursive platform in which propagandistic content circulates and the characteristics of the electorate.
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(2022)ThesisThe fundamental aim of this thesis is to test three things. First, whether there can be a ‘rule of law’ in the international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law (IHRL) rules that regulate the use of lethal force by state militaries (Rules of Targeting). Second, whether there should be such a rule of law, and third, whether there is one. These questions matter because they allow us to consider what is important about the rule of law and whether and, if so, how the rule of law can be applied within the context of an armed conflict. I have chosen to focus on targeting decisions by state militaries, in the context of international armed conflicts (IAC) – conflicts between two or more states. This is because it forms the paradigm case for which the law in question is designed. In this thesis I set out why there can be a rule of law regulating the use of lethal force in IACs, why – to a limited but non-trivial extent – there currently is such a rule of law, and why it is a worthwhile endeavour to attempt to apply the rule of law to such exercises of power.
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Postsecular Pilgrimages: Civil Religion and Mystical Anarchism in the American Novel after the 1960s(2022)ThesisThis thesis contends that key leftist social movements of the 1960s and the canonical American novels that responded to them are best understood through a postsecular critical lens. Where scholars like Berlant opposed the secularism of sixties progressives to the religiosity of American conservatives, I instead interpret the dissident politics of the sixties, and the literature it inspired, as a heterogeneous blend of sacred and secular ideas. In doing so, I draw upon work in postsecular literary studies that insists modernity did not banish religion so much as make possible new spiritual experiences of emancipation. In formal terms, I argue that there exists a variant of the historical novel named the postsecular pilgrimage. A hybrid of Derrida’s spectral philosophy of history and Lukács’s theory of the classic historical novel, the postsecular pilgrimage figures popular uprisings as insurrections animated by faith in the messianic promises of past resistance movements. In postsecular pilgrimages, outsiders are summoned by a numinous call to obtain justice and journey to the sacred sites of democratic traditions to do battle with reactionary social forces. When successful, postsecular pilgrims attest to the power of militant faith to remake American society. When unsuccessful, postsecular pilgrims become martyrs whose defeats demand the creation of new modes of democratic struggle and survival. At the level of literary periodization, I argue that postsecular pilgrimages written by novelists active in sixties social movements retained a commitment to the discourse Bellah named American civil religion, while postsecular pilgrimages published by later generations of writers represent what I have called mystical anarchism. Where proselytes of civil religion remained convinced that outcast uprisings could radicalize the ideals and institutions of the American republic, adherents of mystical anarchism insisted that internal secession from the American state was the only path for radical democracy. If civil religion was celebrated in the novels of sixties icons like Mailer and Baldwin, it was opposed as an oppressive force in the texts of McCarthy, Morrison, and Pynchon. Yet, both generations of writers sought to embed contemporary rebellions in sacred traditions and all grounded secular resistance movements in experiences of spiritual awakening.
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(2022)ThesisSinglet fission is a photo-physical process that generates two triplet excitons from one singlet exciton and can potentially enhance efficiency in photovoltaic systems. The combination of photovoltaics and singlet fission is a novel field for solar energy conversion when there is much interest in renewable, non-destructive, and continuously available energy sources. Singlet fission can also overcome thermalization losses in photovoltaics, which happens in traditional cells when the incident photon energy is higher than the silicon bandgap energy, using a carrier multiplication mechanism. This thesis will design, construct, and characterize photovoltaic devices incorporating singlet fission materials to study singlet fission in practical application. The research focuses on materials characterization, spin dynamics, and electron transfers between acene and the semiconductor layer in Au/TiO2 ballistic cells, and the incorporation of singlet fission layers on silicon-based cell structures. In detail, a set of investigations was developed and summarized by implementing singlet fission materials into a state-of-the-art ballistic photovoltaic device and silicon-based solar cell. The studies demonstrate proof of concept and rationally explain the process. The first part of the thesis investigates thin films of pentacene, TIPS-pentacene, and tetracene via crystallinity, morphology, absorption, and thickness characterization. Additionally, Au and TiO2 layers in Schottky device structures were optimized to achieve the best performance for energy transfer from an applied dye layer (merbromin). The drop-casted dye layer influences the device performance by increasing short-circuit current and open-circuit voltage, demonstrating the ability of charge transfer between the device and the applied film. This device structure provides a test bed for studying charge and energy transfer from singlet fission films. The latter part of the thesis describes several investigations to understand singlet fission in a thin film using this architecture. Magneto-photoconductivity measurements were primarily used to observe the spin dynamics via photoconductivity under an external magnetic field. Control experiments with bare Au/TiO2 devices showed no observable magneto-photoconductivity signal. In contrast, devices with pentacene and tetracene singlet fission layers showed a strong magnetoconductivity effect caused by ballistic electron transfer from the singlet fission layer into the TiO2 n-type semiconductor through an ultra-thin gold layer inserted between the layers. A qualitatively different behavior is seen between the pentacene and tetracene, which reveals that the energy alignment plays a crucial part in the charge transfer between the singlet fission layer and the device. The last section investigates the application of pentacene and tetracene evaporated thin-films as sensitizer layers to a silicon-based solar cell. The optimized Si cell structure with the annealing treatment improved the cell's performance by increasing short-circuit current and open-circuit voltage. The deposition of pentacene and tetracene as sensitizer layers into the device showed some results but posed several challenges that need to be addressed. As the current-voltage and external quantum efficiency measurements were taken, it was observed that material interfaces need to be designed to fully achieve the singlet fission of the acene layer into the Si devices.