Our HDR students

Lachlan Hoy

Lachlan’s PhD addresses the ways in which law is already implicated in the existential dimensions of the climate crisis. Through ontological critique and jurisprudential deconstruction, his thesis asks how socio-legal norms have enabled our inertia, and seeks to re-imagine the law within a planetary, posthuman frame.

Ilana Bolingford

Ilana is an interdisciplinary PhD student investigating the experiences of law academics in relation to research engagement and impact policy. She is interested in how extrinsic elements such as policy and technology inform the experiences of legal actors such as law academics, judges, and the legal profession.

John Siong

John’s PhD focuses on the adoption and regulation of automated land vehicles in Australia and China. Through a comparative law approach it focuses on the role of consumer law in both jurisdictions to deal with issues of assurance of safety, injury compensation and privacy.

Kristina Chelberg

Kristina’s PhD is in how public discourses frame understandings of social problems, particularly in the field of health law. It and investigates narratives of dementia in Australia, representation in the public discourse of key stakeholders and institutions, and how these may present in the legislative and regulatory framework of the aged care system.

Adam Smith

Adam’s PhD is a critical examination of the boundaries between humans and technology. His thesis focuses on aged care robots and the role of law in socio-technological developments.

Morgan Broman

Morgan is an experienced researcher with Masters degrees in law and computer science from Lund University, Sweden. Morgan’s PhD examines how the Laws of Armed Conflict (LOAC) can be programmed into lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS)

Rene Cornish

René’s PhD examines the ways in which social media is transforming broader society and employment relations in South Africa. Using systematic content analysis techniques, the thesis is positioned at the intersection between social media proliferation and contested first-instance dismissals for social media misconduct as a developing global phenomenon.

Nicholas Korpela

Nicholas’ thesis concerns how artificial intelligence technology itself could be used as an instrument of power, as well as having the potential for profound social, political, and economic change. In this regard, the research will critically examine AI through the perspectives of ideological analysis. It will also consider whether AI deployment can be explained beyond these ideological frameworks, and if this is the case, if there are alternative ways of thinking about power structures which could improve upon legal responses to emerging technology.

Rachel Horne

Rachel’s PhD examines the existing Australian regulatory frameworks for the accreditation and assurance of autonomy for commercial automated maritime vessels.

Stephen O’Mahony

Stephen’s PhD considers how understanding pilot decision making through behaviour economic models should underpin the regulatory and enforcement strategies of the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) in Australia.

Marcelo Feitosa de Paula Dias

Marcelo F. Dias’ PhD investigates the role of tracing technology and how the acceptable use of data it collects may enhance the international environmental law framework concerning the global stewardship of trees and plants. Adopting a doctrinal description, the dissertation aims to dig deep into the intersection of international law, science & technology and propose innovative solutions on how tracing tools can address global environmental harm issues.

Amanda Bull

Amanda’s PhD research focus is on the 2021 amendments to the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) that were intended to provide financially troubled Small to Medium Enterprises with a more cost effective, efficient and less complex legislative regime to restructure or liquidate. My research considers whether technology, (i.e., anything from simple digital automation to sophisticated artificial intelligence), could better assist the regime to achieve its stated objectives.

Emily Muir

Emily’s thesis concerns how images of children are prefigured, embodied and critiqued in Japanese Popular Culture. Children live within the complexities of the adult world and childhood can be seen as a time of discord and vulnerability. She explores how Japanese anime as a valuable source for critics of legality, forms of justice and juridical life through cultural legal inquiry.

Diogenes Eli Casas Samper

Diogenes’s PhD project explores Blockchain-based technologies implementation in the Global South to prevent corruption within the climate change framework of the carbon market. This project uses Colombia as a case study.

Syed Shahzad

The critical space infrastructure (CSI) is a complex system-of-systems that provides vital services to society, and its unavailability has a significant impact on economics, safety and security. Although CSI is faced with specific environmental risks such as space weather and debris, it has a significant human-made threat called anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons, of which one is a cyberattack. In my PhD research, I am developing a comprehensive cyber resiliency engineering framework to provide robust design and sustainable cyber security guidelines at the planning and design stages. This framework presents contemporary concepts such as service adaptability and degraded service operations for CSI, which may come under cyberattack.

Vincent Goding

Vincent Goding is a PhD candidate at the School of Law and Society, University of the Sunshine Coast. His thesis  ‘Exceptionality, Neoliberalism and Corporations in COVID Times’ examines the Australian Government’s economic responses to the pandemic and related legal frameworks. Vincent uses legal theory to critically analyse those responses and to ask what they reveal about neoliberalism, its accounts of the corporation, and the role of law and power in our neoliberal order in exceptional circumstances.

Simeon Lawson

Simeon’s thesis is on Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) as the next step in the evolutionary progression of legal tender. Through CBDC, central banks are seeking to take full advantage of the benefits available to them through distributed ledger technology (DLT) and blockchain including, but not limited to, programmability, improved efficiency, finality in settlement, security, accessibility, transparency, and systemic resilience. The central bank’s public policy goals for their legal tender and payments system will inform and influence the subsequent legal features of CBDC – unique to the jurisdictions’ financial systems, its strengths, and weaknesses. As central banks will be relying on broad adoption as a significant criterion of a CBDC’s potential success, the legal features of the CBDC will be critical to its adoption.

Heloisa Valadares

Heloisa’s PhD thesis focuses on a comparative analysis between how Brazilian and Australian data protection public policies have been structured for the last years, through the investigation of the role played by the will in the context of Informational Society, developing a list of elements devoted in effectively protecting the personality rights and to put light on elements that represents points to continuous improvement.