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Village market, Rakatani, Papua New Guinea |
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Supaporn Chalapati
Dean Coldicott
dean.coldicott@rmit.edu.au
Dean began his PhD with the Globalism Institute in 2003. He graduated from Monash Univeristy in 2002 with an Honours Degree of the Bachelor of Arts (Politics). His current research on the World Trade Organisation progressed from an increasing need to understand global economic governance in relation to other spheres of life, particularly international peace and security. He has delivered conference papers on the World Trade Organisation in Australia and overseas.
PhD Topic
Dean’s research focuses on the emergence of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) regime through to the WTO’s now central role in global economic governance. In doing so he concentrates on two key themes: (1) The centralisation of the WTO by external factors and actors, and (2) the decentralisation by the expansion of membership and democratisation occurring internally. The research explores these themes by studying a number of norms that have emerged with varying degrees of strength through the practices of the Organisation. This research is informed by a critical constructivist theoretical framework.
Dean is supervised by Professor Paul James and Dr Christopher Ziguras.
Ruttigone Loh
Gareth Knapman
gareth.knapman@rmit.edu.au
Gareth Knapman completed his Bachelor of Arts with Honours at Monash University in 2002, majoring in politics. Gareth began work on his PhD at RMIT University in 2002. He is currently a part-time lecturer in the School of Humanities, Communications and Social Science at Monash University’s Gippsland Campus.
PhD Topic
Gareth’s research focuses on the naturalisation of nation within the English-speaking tradition and its subsequent propagation throughout the world. In the sixteenth century, nation was an ambiguous term referring to ideas of difference. These ideas of difference did not necessarily relate to community, state or ethnicity; this meant that a person could belong to many different nations, each of which was of a different concept to that of the modern nation. As a word, ‘nation’ meant little more then the modern-day word ‘group’. The transformation of ‘nation’ can be seen in Enlightenment discourses that, through reason, reduced culture and personality into material relationships with the land and biology, thereby transforming the nation into an absolutist notion of territory and race.
Nation became naturalised as a fundamental concept of human nature, and was expressed, as a concept onto Southeast Asian peoples by British colonist and travellers. Recognition of identity is a deep ontological process, steeped in concepts of what is human, occurring at the same time as modern ideas of national identity were being formulated. Scientists and theologians were trying to understand the origins and unity of the human race. Therefore, what was human was being directly questioned. The process of understanding what was human was part of the development of nation as a concept. As the British encountered the peoples of Southeast Asia, these ideas played in their imaginations as they integrated Southeast Asia into their world economy. Therefore, the English-speaking world was actively imagining its concepts of nation as part of the process of encounter in Southeast Asia.
Shanthi Robertson
s3114769@student.rmit.edu.au
Shanthi Robertson is undertaking her PhD candidature with School of International and Community Studies under the supervision of Dr Christopher Ziguras. Her research explores Australia’s recently developed policy of recruiting international students as skilled migrants, focusing in-depth on the experiences and decision-making processes of individuals as they make the transition from student to resident, and on the extent to which they maintain international mobility and transnational networks and connections.
Shanthi has a Bachelor of Arts (European Studies) with Honours from the University of Western Australia, which included a semester exchange in Germany at the Rheinwestphalische Technische Hochschule in Aachen. She has spent the last several years working with international students as an English for Academic Purposes and IELTS teacher in Perth, Melbourne and Berlin.
PhD Topic
Migration has been a highly significant part of Australia’s development since the beginnings of white settlement. Despite the extreme paradigmatic shifts Australia’s migration policy has experienced as it has evolved from the White Australia Policy of Federation to the multiculturalism of the eighties and nineties, all migration strategies throughout Australia’s history have been essentially based on the economic needs of the current labour market. In today’s highly economic rationalist era, and in the context of the nation’s rapidly ageing population and skills shortage, this needs-based conceptualisation of migration policy is more pronounced than ever. Since the mid-nineties, family reunion and humanitarian migration streams have been steadily decreasing, while the intake of young, skilled migrants is increasing rapidly.
Even more recently, DIMIA has concentrated on recruiting these skilled migrants from the large number of international students who complete degrees at Australian universities each year. Various changes to the migration points test from 1998 to 2003 award extra points to applicants who have completed tertiary study in Australia, and allow international students to apply for permanent residency (PR) without leaving the country, thus explicitly linking international students and skilled migration in government policy for the first time. In rationalist terms, these international students represent ‘ideal’ migrants for Australia, as they are young, readily employable, from high socio-economic backgrounds, and, through their period of study in Australia, are presumably already culturally and socially adjusted to Australian life.
However, history has shown that the impact of migrants is never merely economic. While there has been a great deal of academic literature that discusses the adjustment problems or academic satisfaction of international students, as well as literature that examines the labour market effects or experiences of skilled migrants, there has been very little written on the transitional experience of students who become migrants. This research will qualitatively examine their personal narratives, the complex and shifting nature of their identities and their inherently dynamic relationships with multiple nations as reflections on the complexities of modern Australian and global society. Through an in-depth description and analysis of their experiences and opinions, this research hopes to explore the unique elements of this ‘new’ migrant experience and their significance to the individuals’ conceptions of their role and sense of belonging in Australian society, their feelings of connectedness to their countries of origin, and their potential for transnational mobility and transnational interaction.
Barbara Rogalla
listbarb-research@yahoo.com.au
Bio
Barbara Rogalla began her PhD candidature in 2003. She graduated with First Class Honours from Monash University in 1987. Her current academic interest was sparked by working for three months at the Woomera immigration detention centre as a Community Health Nurse during the year 2000. Her research interests delve into the relationship between the delivery of public policy, and the institutions of law and parliament. She has also written several submissions to government and investigative bodies about human rights issues that surround the detention of refugees, and published several articles on the topic.
Professor Paul James and Dr Leanne Reinke supervise her PhD thesis “The Howard Government, Legal Rationalism, and Refugees”.
PhD Topic
Between 1999 and 2003, almost ten thousand “unauthorised” refugees arrived in Australia by boat. During this time, the Howard government made unprecedented changes to its refugee policies, until the boats stopped coming. Barbara analyses how the government legitimated these changes to the electorate as necessary steps to protect Australia’s borders and national sovereignty. In particular, her research analyses the government’s predominant use of legal rationalist arguments during public discourse, in an effort to generate public support for the new policies.
Publications
'Australia’s Little Prisoners'. Australian Children’s Rights News, Number 28, March 2001: 1-4. http://www.dci-au.org/acrn/ACRNMarch2001.pdf
'Nursing behind Razor Wire: A Question of Ethics'. Australian Nursing Journal, Vol 8, Number 9, April 2001: 21.
'Behind the Wire. Inside Australia’s Prison Camps'. Socialist Alternative, Issue 51, June 2001: 18-19.
Charlotte Scarf
charlotte.scarf@rmit.edu.au
Charlotte Scarf is undertaking her PhD candidature with School of International and Community Studies under the supervision of Dr Chris Ziguras and Professor Chris Duke. Her research examines how diverse actors in the international development sector are promoting knowledge networks to facilitate knowledge sharing between people from developed and developing countries and how they are employing new and organic information and communication technologies (ICTs) to support this.
She is also involved in the Smart Internet Technology CRC (SITCRC) (www.smartinternet.com.au) as part of the User Centred Design Project (www.smartinternet.com.au/UCD). Her research is helping to broaden the focus of user studies within the SITCRC by analysing diverse contexts in which people engage with ICTs internationally, the overall objective being to develop new strategies for enhanced human interaction and knowledge sharing, particularly across the North-South divide.
Charlotte has a Bachelor of Economics (Social Sciences) with Honours from the University of Sydney and a Master of Arts (Virtual Communication) from RMIT. Before settling in Melbourne, she spent three years in Taiwan where she worked as a newspaper editor and advertising copywriter. Prior to that, she spent a year travelling extensively through China and parts of Southeast Asia.
PhD Topic
Diverse development actors are actively promoting knowledge networks as a cornerstone of their new approach to knowledge sharing for development. However, some theorists are concerned that the approach adopted by many subjugates local knowledge to Western knowledge and adversely affects the ability of people from developing countries to contribute to the diverse range of perspectives needed to facilitate true knowledge exchange between North and South.
Some theorists offer theoretical frameworks for knowledge networks that in their view empower participants by legitimising diverse knowledges, but conceptual frameworks for the design and implementation of communication infrastructure – consisting of both new and organic ICTs – to facilitate this are scarce.
This research aims to fill this gap in the literature by contributing a conceptual framework for the design and implementation of communication infrastructure that will facilitate the articulation of diverse knowledges. The hope is that this in turn will enhance the ability of people from developing countries to participate in global dialogues to access and contribute knowledge.
The focus is on the iterative development of a soft system prototype that will describe the proposed communication infrastructure. The proposed approach will integrate facts, perspectives, insights, and experiences of diverse stakeholders into a critical analysis of current approaches to knowledge sharing in the international development sector and the potential for qualitatively superior strategies to emerge.
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