QUT Centre for Justice PhD Scholarship

QUT Centre for Justice has advertised for a QUT Centre for Justice PhD Scholarship.  Read more about the scholarship and how to apply here.

More information about the research projects on offer is below, and also within the advertisement.

Please note that applications close on 30 April 2023, with commencement prior to September 2023.

About the scholarship

QUT Centre for Justice has the following research projects available (one scholarship only on offer):

Project 1:  Women, Emergencies and Natural Disasters

Supervisor:  Professor Belinda Bennett

Project Description: This project will explore the impact on women of the social and economic disruptions caused by natural disasters or public health emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, during disasters and emergencies, women may be at increased risk of experiencing domestic violence. They may also experience increased caring responsibilities when schooling and other activities may be disrupted.  This project will analyse the legal, regulatory and policy responses to recent emergencies and develop policy proposals to reduce the vulnerability and disadvantage of women in Australia during emergencies.

The project would suit a student with a background in Law or Justice.

Project 2:  Conceptualising and understanding consumer resilience – and it’s relevance for social justice

Supervisor/s:  Professor Ross Gordon, Dr Foluke Badejo, Dr Lisa Schuster

Project Description: This project involves conceptualising and understanding consumer resilience. The project will involve a systematic/comprehensive search and analysis of the literature on resilience, and consumer resilience. Primary research using quantitative survey and/or qualitative and ethnographic research methods will be carried out with different consumers groups, across different contexts (e.g., climate change, health, life events such as job loss etc). The findings will help develop our theoretical understanding of consumer resilience and inform policy and practice to support consumers through adversity.

Project 3:  Understanding networks of clergy perpetrators on the Roman Catholic Church of Australia

Supervisor:  Dr Jodi Death

Project Description: Internationally, clergy perpetrated child sexual abuse continues to be recognised as both a historical and contemporary phenomenon. Work completed by public inquiries and academic researchers understands clergy perpetrators as deviant individuals in systems that have ineffectively managed offending and reporting. This project builds on a growing body of work which has sought to better understand how clergy perpetrators functioned as organised networks of offenders sharing skills, victim access, preventing detection, and managing detection when it did occur. Drawing on Dark Networks Theory and utilising Social Network Analysis, we utilise evidence provided to public inquiries and survivor interviews, with the aim to map clergy offending across the Catholic Church of Australia in a series of projects. Understanding organised elements of offending is imperative to developing and maintaining strategies that effectively disrupt offending in Australia and internationally. This work is survivor focussed and builds understanding of the nature of victimisation and offending.

Project 4:  Fear of Crime and Risky Occupations

Supervisor:  Dr Michael Chataway

Project Description: This project aims to examine fear of crime among those who work in high-risk environments (e.g., law enforcement, emergency services, security).  It will focus on understanding how individuals working in these fields perceive and respond to safety concerns. The project will use a mixed-methods approach, including interviews and surveys, to gather information about the impacts of fear of crime on workers. The qualitative component of this study will involve in-depth interviews with workers to explore their experiences and perceptions of safety, the strategies they use to cope with concerns about future victimisations in their workplace, and how these experiences affect their personal lives. The quantitative component of the research will involve a survey to gather data on fear of crime and safety perceptions among workers in high-risk occupations, as well as demographic information and other relevant factors associated with violence in the workplace. The findings from this research will have implications for policy and practice in areas such as occupational health and safety, crime prevention, and worker wellbeing.

Project 5:  Self-Organised and Disaster Ready – developing disaster resilience at the local level

Supervisor/s:  Associate Professor Rowena Maguire, Professor Amanda Kennedy, Associate Professor Bridget Lewis, Professor Melissa Bull

Project Description: Queensland is subject to a range of natural disaster events that are increasing in intensity and frequency. Prolonged recovery timeframes and stretched capacity of formal response efforts heightens the significance of preparedness at the local level. While Government disaster management frameworks recognise the importance of preparedness, such policies fail to provide any detail on how this vision will be realized in practice.   This project will document how neighbourhood centres are currently utilising local knowledge and relationships to support the development of preparedness, response and recovery initiatives designed and delivered by their communities.  The project will identify pathways towards self-organisation disaster preparedness which empowers neighbourhood centre through enhanced government support and explore options for rolling out this model more broadly across the State.

Project 6:  Actioning the Access to Justice Agenda in Least Developed Countries

Supervisor/s:  Associate Professor Danielle Watson, Professor John Scott

Project Description: The issue of access to justice is at the forefront of global discussions about transitioning towards peaceful and just societies across the globe.  Despite the significant attention given to the topic by international bodies, and the emergence of bodies of literature describing the actioning of the justice agenda in the Global North, there continues to be deficiencies in how access to justice is described and understood in non-Western contexts in the Global South. Such definitions remain largely deficient in their understandings of indigenous forms of justice, the nature of such regimes and the interface between state and non-state regimes. Not much has been done to examine local or non-state justice frameworks or describe conceptualisations of access to justice in the least developed countries across the Global South. Our project seeks to expand conceptualisations of access to justice by examining and introducing understandings of ‘access’ and ‘justice’ from the periphery.