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Dying on Stolen Lands. Racism, Sovereignty, and the Governance of Dying: A WPR Analysis of Queensland’s Voluntary Assisted Dying Framework
This PhD investigates how racism operates as a structure within health law, policy, and practice, shaping what is recognised as ethical, legitimate, and compassionate care. By applying Bacchi’s What’s the Problem Represented to Be? (WPR) approach to Queensland’s Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2021, and supporting documents as a case study analysis, this thesis reveals how categories such as autonomy, choice, dignity, compassion, self-determination, and culture function as operations of structural racism, reproducing colonial hierarchies while appearing neutral or benevolent. Grounded in a Critical Race–informed and post-positivist framework, and drawing on Foucault’s theories of discourse, governmentality, and problematisation alongside Indigenous scholarship, the study exposes how VAD policy operates through racialised moral rationalities that privilege whiteness as ethical authority. Centring Indigenous Data Governance and sovereignty principles, the research demonstrates how the VAD framework embeds Western individualism and biomedical norms while marginalising Indigenous law/lore, relational autonomy, Social Emotional Well Being (SEWB), and spiritual understandings of dying.
Ultimately, this thesis seeks to make visible how racism structures end-of-life governance and calls for reimagining policy through anti-racist, relational, and sovereignty-affirming approaches to care.
Supervisors
- Professor Ben White
- Dr Helena Kajlich (Carumba Insitute)
- Associate Professor Jessica Russ-Smith (ACU)