SHAPS Digest (August 2023)

Mark Edele (Hansen Chair in History, and Deputy Dean, Faculty of Arts) published an article, ‘Russia’s War on Ukraine: an eighteen-month stocktake’, for Inside Story; discussed the causes of the war on ABC Sunday Extra; and set out his views on the war’s possible outcomes for ABC News.

Louise Hitchcock (Classics and Archaeology) discussed the role of the Classics in Ukraine’s independence struggle, in an article in Neos Kosmos.

An article about the historian Margaret Kiddle (1914-58) was published on the University Archives and Special Collection blog. Margaret Kiddle was one of the earliest Australian female academics, who was appointed Tutor in the then School of History at the University of Melbourne in 1946. Margaret Kiddle left a generous bequest to the History program at Melbourne, funding the annual Margaret Kiddle Prize for the best History Honours thesis.

Zoë Laidlaw (History) published an article about the Bodleian Library’s Anti-Slavery Society and Aborigines’ Protection Society collections, to mark the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade (23 August).

Ancient Lives: Insights from the Classics and Archaeology Collection, the exhibition curated by Classics and Archaeology Honorary Fellows Tamara Lewit and Caroline J Tully was featured in the Australian-Greek newspaper, Neos Kosmos.

Mia Martin Hobbs (PhD in History, 2016, now Deakin University) was interviewed for the ABC series ‘Our Vietnam War‘, on the history of Australian involvement in the war. Mia also reflected on ‘The Myths and Meaning behind Long Tan Day, in Australia – and Vietnam‘, for Australian Policy and History.

History alumnus Jordan Mochi (@mochiJD) developed a World War One-themed video game Conscript, in which the player takes on the role of a French soldier navigating life in the trenches. He has now concluded a publishing deal with Team17, under which Conscript will be released in 2024. Jordan taught himself coding and game development by watching YouTube tutorials and experimenting. Last year, he was also interviewed by Channel 9 about how his interest in history inspired him to create the game.

Final-year History major Luci Nicholson published an article in Farrago based on her essay for City Visions: Melbourne Intensive (HIST20087) on the history of Batman’s Hill.

David Palmer (Honorary, History) spoke to ABC Radio Hobart about the story of Private Alan Chick of Saint Helens, who found himself just two kilometres from the hypocentre of the Nagasaki atomic bomb during World War Two.

Andonis Piperoglou delivered a talk entitled ‘Launching “Little Greece”: Transcultural Place Naming and Narratives of Migration’ as part of the Greek History and Culture Seminars, hosted by the Greek Community of Melbourne, at the Greek Centre. The talk delves into the history of place naming within the context of Greek migration, with a particular focus on the recent naming of a precinct as ‘Little Greece’ in Marrickville, Sydney.

Andonis Piperoglou also reviewed the Museum of Australian Photography’s exhibition ZAHALKAWORLD – An Artist’s Archive, for Sheila Foundation.

Frederik Vervaet‘s recent conference ‘How Republics Die: Creeping Authoritarianism from the Ancient to the Modern World’ was discussed in the Australian by Paul Monk. Monk described the conference discussions as ‘cutting-edge analysis of constitutional and political crises strikingly similar to those we face today, but viewed with the advantages of long hindsight and centuries of critical analysis…. T’his, surely, is the university environment at its best.’

Fay Woodhouse (Honorary Principal Fellow, History) co-authored with Alex Butler an article for ABC Alumni on new evidence offering insight into the forced government closure of Radio 3ZZ in Melbourne in July 1977.

Academic Publications

Holly Lawford-Smith (Philosophy), Sex Matters: Essays in Gender Critical Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2023)

Sex Matters addresses a cluster of related questions that arise from the conflict of interests between rights based on sex and rights based on gender identity. Some of these questions are theoretical, including: who has the more ambitious vision for women’s liberation, gender-critical feminists or proponents of gender identity? How does each understand what gender is? What are the arguments for the refrain that ‘trans women are women!’, and do they succeed? Other questions taken up in the book are more applied to specific issues in law and policy including: should there be a right to exclude people who are biologically male from women-only spaces? How do the interests of all stakeholders to bathrooms, in particular, trade off when it comes to moving from sex to gender identity as the basis for self-inclusion? If we think about types of transition, or gatekeeping requirements on transition, as providing assurance to women who are asked to accept the opening up of women-only spaces to transwomen, are any such assurances sufficient? Is ‘TERF’ a slur, as some radical and gender-critical feminists have claimed? And finally, is gender-critical speech ‘hate speech’, as it has been classified by some social media platforms, or at least harmful speech?

Holly Lawford-Smith discusses these issues in a series of essays, all but one of them previously unpublished. She takes an analytic philosophical approach to these issues, drawing on ideas from political philosophy, philosophy of biology, and philosophy of language, as well as second-wave feminist theory and empirical literature, to defend a gender-critical position in response to all of these questions.

Dang Nguyen (PhD in HPS, 2022; now RMIT), ‘Seeing With Transparency: Mapping the Privacy-Security Controversy Over Digital Contact Tracing in Vietnam’, International Journal of Communication

Tracing the debates among technical experts across GitHub, social media, blogging platforms, and diasporic and state news media, this article examines a public controversy surrounding user privacy and app security regarding Bluezone, Vietnam’s national digital contact tracing app. Using controversy mapping, a method rooted in the actor-network theory, the article approaches what appears to be a highly technical debate among experts and displays the various actor associations through which the controversy is fought and social arrangements established. Arguing that the technical transparency produced through open-source architecture is incompatible with the epistemic transparency conducive to transformative politics, the article demonstrates the kind of work that transparency is made to do in a conspicuously nontransparent governmental context through an open-source architecture. It also argues that transparency can neither be relied on as a framework for legitimacy nor welcomed as a substitute for formal institutional structures that ensure accountable governance of public socio-technical systems.

Eden Smith, Martin Bush, Fallon Mody, Daniel Hamilton and Fiona Fidler (MetaMelb Research Initiative, SHAPS), along with lead author Bonnie Winter and others associated with the repliCats project, ‘Predicting and Reasoning about Replicability Using Structured Groups‘, Royal Society Open Science 

This paper explores judgements about the replicability of social and behavioural sciences research and what drives those judgements. Using a mixed methods approach, it draws on qualitative and quantitative data elicited from groups using a structured approach called the IDEA protocol (‘investigate’, ‘discuss’, ‘estimate’ and ‘aggregate’). Five groups of five people with relevant domain expertise evaluated 25 research claims that were subject to at least one replication study. Participants assessed the probability that each of the 25 research claims would replicate (i.e. that a replication study would find a statistically significant result in the same direction as the original study) and described the reasoning behind those judgements. We quantitatively analysed possible correlates of predictive accuracy, including self-rated expertise and updating of judgements after feedback and discussion. We qualitatively analysed the reasoning data to explore the cues, heuristics and patterns of reasoning used by participants. Participants achieved 84% classification accuracy in predicting replicability. Those who engaged in a greater breadth of reasoning provided more accurate replicability judgements. Some reasons were more commonly invoked by more accurate participants, such as ‘effect size’ and ‘reputation’ (e.g. of the field of research). There was also some evidence of a relationship between statistical literacy and accuracy.

Howard Sankey (Philosophy), ‘Having a Hunch‘, Logos and Episteme: An International Journal of Epistemology

It has recently been argued that when one conducts an inquiry into some question one ought to suspend belief with respect to that question. But what about hunches? In this short note, a hunch about the cause of a phenomenon is described. The hunch plays a role in the inquiry into the cause of the phenomenon. It appears that the hunch constitutes a belief that need not be suspended during the inquiry even though belief about the precise cause of the phenomenon is suspended.

Nicole Davis‘s (History) PhD thesis ‘Nineteenth-Century Arcades in Australia: History, Heritage and Representation‘ features in a new article by James Lesh in the journal Urban History, reviewing recent theses in the Australian urban history field. Lesh notes that the thesis makes clear that ‘these are not merely shopping arcades, but rather urban “worlds in miniature”‘. Nicole Davis’ work places the arcade form in transnational context, thereby enabling the Australian arcade to be conceptualised within the global historiography and to conceive nineteenth-century arcades ‘as an interconnected and hybrid global phenomenon, shaped by their significant social history of regulation, design, community, trade and entrepreneurship, extending from at least the nineteenth century to the present day.’

Awards

June Factor‘s book Soldiers and Aliens: Men in the Australian Army’s Employment Companies during World War II (Melbourne University Publishing) has been shortlisted for the 2023 Anzac Memorial Trustees Military History Prize and the NSW Premier’s History Award. Video clips of June Factor discussing her book are accessible via the MUP website.

Ines Jahudka (Hansen PhD candidate in History) has been awarded the Wyselaskie Scholarship and the Miranda Jane Hughes Scholarship. The Wyselaskie Scholarship in History is awarded annually to the highest achieving first-year PhD student in History, and the Miranda Jane Hughes Scholarship supports graduate research humanities students undertaking research in historical, philosophical or cultural studies of the body, health or science.

Ines writes,

I am so honoured to have been awarded these scholarships – apart from the huge confidence boost, they have essentially opened up a new set of possibilities for me as far as travel and archival work. My research is looking at the decision-making process following death in 18th century England. As I am weaving a few different professions together and comparing their activities in different locations, I have been wondering about the logistics (and finances) of an extended stay in the UK. Both these scholarships give me the freedom to significantly extend my time in the National Archives and also the Wellcome Collection in London, which was previously out of my budget. I can then move on to archives in Norwich, York, and Chester, which (as many will know) will involve juggling limited opening hours, travel, and downtime! The scholarships will therefore make an enormous difference to the quality and quantity of data underlying my thesis. I am so immensely grateful to have been selected for both awards and am looking forward to producing work which will justify the selection committee’s faith in me.

Caitlin Mahar‘s book The Good Death Through Time has been shortlisted for an 2023 Educational Publishing Australia Award. Caitlin Mahar completed her PhD in History at the University of Melbourne in 2018 and now teaches at Swinburne University of Technology.

PhD completions

Ashley Finn (PhD in Classics & Archaeology), ‘Vindictively Violent: A Sociology of Roman Punishment c. 50 BCE–200 CE’

This thesis examines Roman cultural and social attitudes towards the propriety of revenge, the role of violence as a means of taking revenge, and how these sentiments affected Roman ideas about the role of punishment in society in the period dating from the mid-first century BCE to the start of the third century CE.

Broadly divided into two parts, the thesis first examines the importance of revenge in Roman social relations. Taking a holistic approach and covering a range of different authors and genres, along with the attitudes displayed by the aristocratic writers, it also examines those of sub-elite groups including slaves. It argues that throughout the time period under consideration revenge was considered a necessary societal good. Revenge was seen not only to restore a person’s honour, but also to play a societal role in deterring other would-be wrongdoers. Although Roman writers in this period never seriously questioned revenge, they did not advocate for a “revenge at all costs” mentality either. In light of philosophical ideas about the role of emotions, there was a belief that revenge ought to be undertaken unemotionally and in proportion to the original affront. Those who indulged their anger, so often associated with a lust for revenge, or pursued excessive revenge could be seen to be acting distastefully. An inherent tension existed between personal and societal pressures to take revenge, and the critique of excessive emotionality.

The second part turns to the question of a Roman penology and examines to what extent the cultural sentiments exhibited in part one shaped Roman ideas about punishment. Taking its cue from modern scholarship on punishment that calls for a more sociological approach, through an exploration of rhetoric, both forensic and deliberative, and the philosophy of Cicero, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius, it demonstrates that Roman writers saw punishment almost exclusively as an act of vengeance for the plaintiff/victim and as a deterrent to future wrongdoers, closely matching Roman views on revenge more generally. Although some Roman writers under the influence of philosophy did advocate for a non-vindictive penology, there is little to suggest such ideas were ever put into practice in the daily administration of justice. Finally, the question is asked as to what extent this Roman penology affected the move to a harsher and more violent penal code in the first two centuries CE. It is suggested that these changes cannot be accounted for in light of Roman ideas about the function of punishment, and that answers must be sought elsewhere. Overall, this thesis contributes to our understanding of revenge and the role of the retributive emotions in Roman social relations, and the cultural and social context of Roman punishment more widely.

Supervisors: Professor Tim Parkin, Professor Frederik Vervaet

Ravando (PhD in History) ‘A “New Newspaper”: Sin Po and the Voices of Progressive Chinese Indonesian Nationalists, 1910–1949′

This thesis examines the emergence and development of the Chinese Indonesian run newspaper Sin Po from 1910 to 1949 focusing on how it shaped political and social thinking and discourses in colonial and post-colonial Indonesia. I argue that Sin Po played an essential role in creating a class and identity consciousness, encouraging organisation and solidarity and formulating new ideas and tactics for the Chinese community and at the same time sustaining and building a political movement for its readers.

Throughout this thesis, I use different lenses to focus attention on the work the paper undertook to address key issues for the ethnic Chinese and promote particular causes. I show how Sin Po engaged in a sophisticated way with a host of social and political issues: race and racism across colonial society, the appeal of Chinese and at times Indonesian nationalism, the need for civic and social equality, and the civic duty of Chinese to help others. By studying Sin Po, this research attempts to provide a more sophisticated analysis of the complex dynamics of Chinese Indonesian society. Moreover, it will delve into the sensitive issue of the relationships between Chinese Peranakan and other communities in Indonesia.

To evaluate the contributions of Sin Po, this analysis examines how it reported on events in China as well as local political developments and issues of concern to the Chinese community in Indonesia. Placing the paper in the context of colonial society and comparing it at times to other publications I also consider contestation and coherence between Sin Po and other Chinese newspapers to gauge the uniqueness of this paper. This thesis relies in method on a close reading of the paper Sin Po and contextualised analysis of how the paper presented topics, issues and developments to its readers. Through an in-depth analysis of Sin Po, I argue that Chinese political orientation should not be treated as a constant and monolithic; instead, it must be seen as fluid, multi-faceted, and continuously evolving. The complexity of the nations and imagined communities promoted by newspapers in this period is what made Sin Po and other Sino-Malay newspapers so dynamic and important.

Supervisors: Professor Kate McGregor, Professor Antonia Finnane

Jonathan Tehusijarana (Jonathan Peter) (PhD in History) ‘Between the Pen and the Sword: Student-soldiers and the Image of Ideal Youth in Indonesia’

This thesis examines the tentara pelajar (Student Armies) of Indonesia that fought in the country’s war of independence (1945–1949), and whose veterans influenced a newly independent Indonesia afterwards. Using a variety of historical resources, such as archival documents, news publications, memoirs, and regimental histories, this thesis argues that the tentara pelajar were influential in informing discourses of pemuda (youth), still a significant political category in Indonesia, throughout the war and beyond, into the post-war socio-political landscape of Liberal and Guided Democracy (1949–1965) and the militarist New Order regime (1965–1998).

It does so by analysing the identity-making processes they undertook to situate themselves in and distinguish themselves from other members of Indonesia‘s pemuda during the war and how this affected their standing afterwards. This thesis first investigates the beginning of these processes from the tentara pelajar’s origins in the militarised practices of scouting that emerged from Indonesian youth’s interactions with early twentieth-century transnational youth culture and proliferated during the late colonial period of the Netherlands East Indies. This tradition of militarism was formalised during the Japanese occupation and culminated with the formation of the tentara pelajar as a laskar (militia) and their participation in the independence war. This thesis argues that wartime experiences influenced the tentara pelajar to construct a student soldier identity based on the values of discipline, professionalism, and notional ‘apoliticism’, which were values they perceived to be possessed by the regular army.

It continues with an examination of post-war circumstances where tentara pelajar veterans were able to rise to important positions within Indonesia’s military and government, from which they were able to exercise their agency and influence on the construction of an image of ideal pemuda. Retaining their status as the pemuda of the independence war, during the New Order tentara pelajar veterans constructed the ideal pemuda image via writing and disseminating memoirs, short stories and histories focused on their experiences that were aimed at youth, all with the support of the regime. The image they constructed was used by the regime to promote the key role of youth is national development, rendering youth as cogs in its developmentalist project. The thesis concludes by examining the agency of youth in interacting with the legacy of the tentara pelajar, and how that legacy continues today.

Supervisors: Professor Kate McGregor, Professor Sean Scalmer

Morgan Weaving (PhD in History & Philosophy of Science) ‘Misogyny as Hierarchy Maintenance‘

There is growing interest in ‘misogyny’ within psychology, yet the concept lacks a clear definition and theoretical grounding. This thesis explores misogyny as a form of gender hierarchy maintenance. Specifically, the thesis seeks to i) provide a definition and conceptual model of misogyny that promotes psychological research on the topic, ii) investigate whether misogyny increases after threats to the gender status-quo, as is expected of hierarchy-maintaining actions, and iii) understand whether individual differences in the preference for social hierarchy vs. equality can help to explain why reactions to perpetrators of misogyny differ.

The thesis argues that misogyny should be conceptualised as the social, physical and economic penalties towards women that enforce a hierarchical gender order. Consistent with this account, it finds that Twitter misogyny towards Hillary Clinton increased after her 2016 presidential campaign announcement, when she threatened male political dominance. The study also found evidence that the motivation to uphold hierarchies predicts more lenient reactions to sexual harassment and assault, and may be implicated in motivated reasoning when evaluating allegations of these misogynistic behaviours. It concludes that theorising misogyny as a form of hierarchy maintenance is a fruitful approach that sheds light on what exacerbates misogyny, and varying reactions to it.

Supervisors: Professor Cordelia Fine, Professor Nick Haslam (Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences)

Research Higher Degree Milestones

Lily Moore, ‘Arboreal Auctoritas: A Cultural Study of Trees and the Development of an Elite Identity in Ancient Rome’ (PhD confirmation seminar, Classics & Archaeology)

This confirmation seminar provided an examination of the socio-cultural function of trees in ancient Rome from the late Republic to middle Imperial periods, positing that they functioned as a cultural signifier and ideological symbol of a cultivated elite identity. Firstly, it examined trees in their various cultural representations, ranging from art, literature, and mythology, engaging with these varying mediums of evidence in order to provide a multidisciplinary analysis of trees as cultural objects. It then considered how trees in their cultural manifestation existed within governing ideologies and debates pertaining to key concerns of the Roman aristocracy such as otium, auctoritas and luxuria, as a way of situating this discussion within a broader historical context. This analysis is equally grounded within the context of the foundational yet increasingly significant relationship between the Roman elite and the natural world, in which nature acted as a staging ground for the development of these ideological concerns and from which trees functioned as a signifier.

Feature image: Oliver Cooke, Curator of Horology, British Museum and Matthew Champion lead the ARC-funded symposium “Sound, Time, Matter” at the British Museum, London. (The image shows Oliver demonstrating the mechanism of a weight-driven medieval wall-clock).

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