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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)ThesisThis thesis juxtaposes Indigenous Australian literature and Adivasi/tribal literature—two self-governing bodies of Indigenous literature differently situated: one in an Anglophone, white settler-nation in the Pacific region and the other in a non-Anglophone, postcolonial nation-state in Asia. Studies exploring critical connections between Indigenous writing from Australia and Adivasi/tribal writing from India are rare. A considerable amount of scholarship brings together the literatures of Indigenous Australians, Māori, Native American and First Nations peoples of Canada, who share much in their responses to European settler-colonialism, but little ventures into comparative study of the literatures of the Indigenous peoples of Australia and India. This thesis is guided by Native American scholar Chadwick Allen’s trans-Indigenous methodologies, which open up possibilities for global Indigenous literary studies by building from specificities and across, through and beyond differences in diverse Indigenous contexts. Beginning from a place of accepted difference and distance, this thesis thus seeks connection and comparability, framing similarities through identifying a shared set of issues/themes and genres. This study finds the following literary and thematic concerns are shared between Indigenous Australian and Adivasi/tribal writing: (a) land and labour, (b) bilanguaging, (c) editorial negotiations in cross-cultural, collaborative life writing, (d) gender and sexuality as sites of decolonial critique, and (e) responses to over-policing and death in police custody. These shared concerns structure and organise the thesis. They also form the basis for trans-Indigenous analysis of a selection of illuminating case studies. In each case, analysis seeks to yield Indigenous-centred, productive readings of juxtaposed Indigenous Australian and Adivasi/tribal texts, resulting from the tension generated between their distinctiveness and shared (post)colonial concerns. Ultimately, this study disrupts familiar patterns of comparison and encourages new models of critical thought in global Indigenous literary studies.
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(2022)ThesisFollowing the 1857-1858 Mutiny and its expression of Indian hostility to British rule, the British response included the formal transition of power, in 1858, from the British East India Company to the Crown. A significant increase in the size of the British population - driven by an increase in the number of British soldiers stationed in India - accompanied this shift in governance. The Mutiny, for the first time, required British authorities and the British public to deal with a significant number of British widows. These women were a stark visual reminder of personal and national vulnerability and of Britain's military failure. The subsequent four decades saw the consolidation of, and the growth in opposition to, British authority in India, and the fashioning of Britain's imperial narrative. Articulations of the purpose of British rule of India focused on Britain's advanced status, its strength (economically, legally, politically, educationally, and morally), and on the benefits India, in turn, would derive from British rule. The success of the narrative required the British in India to exemplify this purpose, status, and strength. This thesis argues that British women widowed in India between 1860 and 1900 were emblematic of the vulnerability, failure, and cost of Britain's presence in India. The fact of their widowhood and their behaviour while in India could tarnish, if not threaten, Britain's narrative of superiority by their critique of British rule, and by their indigence, lack of industry or immorality. An analysis is made of the cultural expectations of widows and the manner in which fiction, advice manuals, consolatory literature and policy marked the boundaries of acceptable behaviour and set the parameters to 'manage' widows. This is complemented by close research of the experiences of a cohort of 260 British women widowed in India between 1860 and 1900. The exploration of the interplay between societal expectations and the ways in which widows accepted, accommodated, adapted, or exploited these expectations illuminates our understanding of gender in British imperialism. This study concludes that while a few widows openly challenged societal expectations and conventions, or simply operated outside them feeling little obligation to model imperial behaviour, most widows found elements of the conventions sufficiently useful and elastic to forge lives of purpose and meaning.
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(2020)ThesisAs China becomes wealthier and more powerful, the giant is taking further steps toward expanding its interests and influence, as well as a pursuing a greater global role. This is most evident in the Southeast Asia region, and in Cambodia in particular. Over the past two decades, China’s influence in Cambodia has increased significantly, especially in the realms of political, economic and defence cooperation. The two countries raised their bilateral ties to a Comprehensive Partnership for Cooperation in April 2006 and upgraded this to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership of Cooperation in 2010 – both are significant milestones. In recent years Beijing has become Cambodia’s most important foreign aid donor, its largest source of foreign direct investment, and one of its largest trading partners. China has also become the largest source of assistance to the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces. Cambodia has undeniably come under China’s economic and political influence and has become one of China’s closest international partners and diplomatic allies. However, China’s development approach in Cambodia conflicts with that of the traditional donors that have also played an important role in Cambodia’s national development since 1993. Because China’s policy of development assistance operates outside the traditional aid system, it is not clear if the consequences of China’s style of development actually supports governance in Cambodia. Also, the broader social problems confronted by the ordinary people in Cambodia arising from rapid economic growth are often related to Chinese aid and investment projects. Through an examination of how China’s foreign aid has contributed to sustainable development in Cambodia, this thesis demonstrates that the impact of Chinese development aid is mixed. As Cambodia’s largest economic benefactor, China has played a significantly large part in the foundation of economic growth in Cambodia. Economic support from China has helped Cambodia with its national development, especially in the infrastructure sector, and hence has contributed to sustainable development in Cambodia. However, the negative impacts from China’s foreign aid on local communities, the environment, and on the development of democracy, have gravely hindered the commitment of the Cambodian government and impeded the international community in strengthening sustainable development in Cambodia. This thesis investigates these questions through qualitative methods, including interviews, discourse analysis, participant observation and field visits to Chinese investment projects in Cambodia.
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(2023)ThesisBetween 1945 and 1975, the Australian Army was committed to various operations ranging from supporting war crimes trials, occupation duties in Japan, and WWI-like warfare in Korea to counterinsurgency deployments in Malaya, Borneo, and South Vietnam. While official historians, respected academics, and popular authors cover these operations well, the role of the army’s combat intelligence during this period has been seriously neglected. Consequently, the paucity of serious research on the army’s intelligence during the Cold War means that numerous gaps remain in our understanding of how it operated and supported force commanders on operations. This thesis corrects this deficiency by defining and evaluating the Australian Army’s combat intelligence contribution during the Cold War in the 1945-75 period. Using official archival records and new individual evidence from veterans, much of which had not been publicly available before, and some that were not accessible by the official historians, it explores the organisation, administration, training, doctrine, and effectiveness of army combat intelligence operations. It also examines their ability to adapt to the changes in warfare and technology after the Second World War. Several myths, criticisms, and misremembered ‘facts’ that have grown around the Australian Army’s intelligence operations in the post-war period are explored, and the record corrected regarding several inaccuracies in our official history. While small compared to the US or the British Army’s contribution of battlefield intelligence resources during the Cold War, the Australian Army’s support was both meaningful and significant. It was meaningful because it helped establish the post-war Australian Intelligence Corps' professional foundation and was significant as it provided essential support to Australian and allied commanders on operations in Japan, Korea, Malaya, Borneo, and Vietnam.
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(2023)ThesisThis research offers an in-depth analysis of higher education admission practices in Afghanistan and examines their ensuing (in)equities. It employs an historical approach to contextualise and explain the origin(s) of competitive admission exams known as Kankor and to analyse how the liberal state-building and constitutional market economy impacted the function, design, and delivery of higher education admissions from the fall of the first Taliban regime in 2001 until their return to power in August 2021. It uses qualitative evidence from semi-structured interviews and focus groups with diverse higher education stakeholders and qualitative content analysis of state-administered and private-administered admission exams. The thesis makes three scholarly contributions. First, it improves the nascent scholarship on higher education admissions in Afghanistan by examining admission practices in state- administered higher education institutions (SAHEIs) and, for the first time, in diverse privately administered higher education institutions (PAHEIs). Second, it offers a unique example of a higher education admission model from a fragile or conflict affected society to enhance the growing literature on higher education admission models across the world and explains its ensuing and context-specific (in)equities. Third, this research contributes to scholarly knowledge on education and higher education in Afghanistan (and, more broadly, higher education in emergencies). It demonstrates that imbalances at all levels of education and wider socio-economic inequalities have historically contributed to gender, geographic, and socio- economic inequities in higher education admissions in Afghanistan. It further argues that marketised Kankor preparation, delivery of centralised Kankor exams in SAHEIs, market-led admission practices in PAHEIs, and the design and content of Kankor questions contributed to absolute and relative (in)equities in higher education admissions over the past two decades. The fall of Kabul to the Taliban last year disrupted some of the education and higher education gains of the past 20 years and raised renewed fears especially for the education rights of girls and women in this country. This research presents a nuanced analysis of how girls and women and other social cohorts were (or were not) admitted in higher education institutions under different regimes in Afghanistan. There are many lessons from past triumphs and failures for future rulers in Afghanistan.