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Centre for Asia Pacific Social Transformation Studies (CAPSTRANS)

Research Students Topics

Bokhtiar Ahmed 

Beyond Checkpoints: Minority Relations, Development and Power in the Chittagong Hill Tracts 

The primary objective of this research is to develop an ethnographic understanding of a specific case of minority relations in a given time and space. Using the Pangkhuas as a subgroup among the CHT tribes, this thesis seeks to understand the practices and politics of minority relations between a post-colonial/liberal nation-state in transition and indigenous minorities at its territorial and cultural margins. With the assumption that the development, displacement and a complex politics of identity are the main domains where this relationship is historically embedded, it aims to recount how the political practices in these domains constantly reproduce the CHT people as minorities. It also draws attention to the nature of the state’s presence at its margin, constructions of minority identity through practices relating ethnicity, nationalism and citizenship and the decisive role development plays in such nexus of relationships. In this sense, my thesis is an ethnography of people at a margin of the state and it aims to explore the intersections of development, identity and notions of power in anthropology. 

Seori Choi 

Reassessing the Migration-Development Nexus: A Case study of Filipino(-origin) nurses and IT/computer professionals in Singapore 

This research is a case study aimed at reassessing the existing body of knowledge about the nexus between international migration and the development of the country of origin. Taking Filipino nurses and IT/computer professionals in Singapore as the case, my thesis will explore an area that has been neglected in the literature: the migration-development nexus seen through the eyes of skilled migrant workers, who have immigrated and are sustaining transnational ties to their home country. 

Nichole Georgeou 

Australian Volunteers Abroad in the Asia Pacific. 

Based on an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Grant, the Project involves a partnership between the University of Wollongong and, Palms Australia (Opening our Hands to the World), an International Volunteer Sending Association (IVSA). The Project is conducting research into the nature and character of long term community based cross-national volunteer programs and the role they have in contributing to Australia’s regional linkages in the Asia/Pacific Region. The aim of the research is to develop a study on the experience of volunteering. It studies the impact of the ‘exchange model’ (Palms model) of preparation for the long term cross-national volunteer and is concerned with the way this model impacts on the way in which the volunteer undertakes their development project rather than general hypotheses in the relationship between particular characteristics and changing role perceptions. The methodological approach used will be a qualitative one. The research utilises ethnographic techniques as I will be a participant observer to some degree. Additionally document analysis will be deployed. 

Belinda Green 

Riding the Global Wave: Male Youth, Tourist Encounters and Subcultural Formation in Kerala, South India 

This thesis argues for globalization theory and sociology of youth studies to extend their command of a phenomenon which has now entered both the postcolonial and neo liberal worlds. The formation of subcultures of youth, who are involved in processes of neo liberalism and globalization in the postcolonial world, has yet to be fully accounted for in the social sciences. Although there is a backlog of sociological sources and ethnographic studies referring to the presence of young gangs or groups of men in so called First world settings there has yet to be a full extension of the ways in which processes of globalization and neo liberalism are influencing groups of youth and their social relations, forms of identity, consumption and production in postcolonial settings. 

Therefore my study based on ethnographic research among youth in the Pulayar community in the southern Indian state of Kerala serves as a reference to begin articulating the ways in which subcultural youth formations; in my case a group of lower class young men from this postcolonial setting mediate the former processes in their everyday lives. Incorporating the historical myriad of literature on the presence of young men both in the so-called first and in more studies, third world contexts, I will reveal the way in which the young men in this study share characteristics with first world men and other groups of male youth in the postcolonial world. Therefore my thesis argues that the articulation of male subcultural youth formations and their association with the processes of globalization and neo liberalism are fast becoming apart of a global phenomenon. 

Susheela Pandian

Globalisation, Gender and Development:A study of call centres in Chennai- India. 

The main aim of this project is to do a in-depth, extensive, exploratory study of the experiences of young women in the city of Chennai who work in the call centres, which is a direct outcome of being drawn into the global economy. This work will study the workplace experiences of these women and its impact on the gender equalities and social constraints they face in their everyday life. What role do factors like wages, mobility, employer-employee relations, nature of work, peer groups, exposure western value system through TV’s and magazines play in their lives. The struggle between tradition and modernity in Chennai creates its own set of social problem for these women. When the economic and social freedom they enjoy in their workplace is challenged by the traditional, conservative and patriarchal elements in society how do they answer the challenge? Have these experiences helped them to progress and shape their modernity or have they walked away without a fight? These women are short of time due to their out of the ordinary working hours and this does not allow the to network or form collective groups to fight for their rights, each one has to define their individual idea of modernity and enrich their lives however small it might be. 

John Robinson 

The social and political environment of the “aspirational class”: changing attitudes to Australian taxation 

The proposed thesis is primarily, although not exclusively, concerned with the present arrangements in Australian taxation policy and how this is interpreted by “taxpayers”. The major aims of the study are to not only determine the attitudes of a specific group of taxpayers to these arrangements but also to elaborate the linkages these attitudes have with discursive constructions of policy. Furthermore, to assess the relationship between these attitudes and policy with the particular political philosophy on which this is seemingly predicated. And indeed, most importantly, to see what implications the results of this investigation may have for the future direction of taxation policy if current developing trends in community attitudes and government policy continues. 

Whilst there is a disciplinary overlap with political science, the study is sociological insofar as it concerns itself with a discursively manifest social group and its relationship to a seminal social issue. In fact, what is central to the dissertation is an endeavour to ascertain whether this social group can indeed be addressed as a ‘class’ in terms of the debates surrounding this concept in sociology, or rather as an ideological category for political ends.The empirical focus of the study will be directed towards this group, namely, the so-called aspirational class. Through a limited series of in-depth qualitative interviews in two western Sydney electorates answers will be sought on a range themes regarding taxation policy and the role of government. Furthermore, through the developments that emerge from the theoretical, existing analysis and empirical material it is hoped to answer the supplementary question of whether what has been examined has exemplified neo-liberalism or Stuart Hall’s notion of authoritarian populism?

Patrick Brownlee 

Australia’s Multiculturalism and Asia Pacific Regionalism 

This thesis will redefine historical assumptions about multiculturalism under the Hawke and Keating governments and its importance for Australia’s regional polity. While the thesis focuses on a landmark period in Australian and regional debates about national and regional identity, it is not a study about Australian identity making. It is about how and why multiculturalism was commodified as a tool for Australia’s engagement with Asia in the 1980s and 1990s. 

A central pursuit will be the critique of Productive Diversity, a notion enshrined in policy with the National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia (OMA, 1989) and later evinced as a new epoch in organisational culture by Cope and Kalantzis (1997). Productive Diversity emerged from workplace research into labour migration trends and supply and demand of skills being sourced from overseas. It countered the more economic rationalist approaches of the Bureau of Immigration and Population research (BIMPR) which saw value in the trade in skilled labour, but not the socio-cultural and managerial consequences of a highly diverse workforce. Conceptually, Productive Diversity has undergone various interpretations and uses and remains in Federal Government policymaking. However, this thesis will argue how Productive Diversity and the commodification of culture provided the bridge connecting the political economy of Australia’s engagement with Asia. 

Aim: 

• To explain how multiculturalism was commodified as a tool for Australia’s engagement with Asia in the 1980s and 1990s. 

Approach: 

• To locate this within the political economy discourse on neoliberalism and globalisation by critiquing Productive Diversity as commodification of Australian multiculturalism.

Significance:

• Literature linking multiculturalism with productive diversity to serve the political economy of engagement with Asia is virtually non-existent
• Literature on commodification of multiculturalism is limited to conservative critics fearful of a ‘multicultural industry’ linked to the welfare economy. This thesis marks a new turn in scholarly research about multiculturalism by arguing that multiculturalism grew in and out of the crucible of contemporary globalisation, not Australia’s internal history.