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The Rights of Nature is an emerging concept within sustainable development, it states that the current environmental laws are not enough to protect nature from human harm. The movement emphasize the need to acknowledge other living entities in our law systems, regardless of their use or benefit for humans. It requires a paradigm shift in the way that modern societies relate to nature, moving from an anthropocentric to an ecocentric age. The first and only nation that has enacted the Rights of Nature in its constitution is Ecuador in 2008. On a global scale this is an historic event challenging the human norm of acting superior to nature. Due to the magnitude of this event, this inductive study investigates the causal mechanisms of the process leading up to this change. The paper proposes a chain of historic events all interlinked to the indigenous values of the Andes, Sumak Kawsay. Throughout the research, the findings created a hypothesis arguing that the Rights of Nature in the Ecuadorian constitution was a collective effort of indigenous movements and political agendas by influential scholars.

Reaching beneath the market surface of backpacker culture, this doctoral research probes uncomfortable politics, excluded voices and global inequalities. It questions why, in a context of economic inequality, environmental crisis, terrorism and war, the tourism industry continues to grow, unhampered by politically fractured and uneasy mediations of the world. Arguing that tourist modalities are defined in a popular memory matrix where the rules and norms for becoming a tourist are negotiated through conversation, television, popular literature, travel guides and the Internet, this research project critiques both popular and academic tourist pedagogy. In forging an interdisciplinary dialogue between Cultural Studies and Tourism Studies, this doctoral research seeks new ways of theorising depost-globalisation. Market-driven renditions of the tourable world displace, marginalise and exclude oppositional, negative, violent and discriminatory narratives. Placing a spotlight on the discomforts found in backpacker discourse requires the application of progressive meta-theoretical discourses, alongside postcolonial and poststructuralist analysis. A serious study of touristic popular culture implicates tourism in terrorism, backpacking in poverty, imperialism in globalisation, mobility in power and backpacker discourse in the re-writing of a contemporary subaltern. The original contribution to knowledge emerging from this doctorate is via the application of Bauman and Said’s late work to independent tourist discourses. The innovation is formed through disciplinary connections and popular cultural applications. There is also a re-theorisation of Spivak’s most famous study, applying metaphors of the pyre to sites of backpacker tourism, with the aim of developing ‘listening literacies.’ My research justifies the introduction of two new theoretical trajectories for the Tourism Studies academy. The first new approach encourages and frames a listening literacy amongst tourist cultures so they can acknowledge silenced and displaced agents in host – guest interaction. The second new approach aims to infuse touristic popular culture with a powerful and political pedagogy that teaches mobile citizens to read difference and diversity. A pleasure filter obscures the costs and consequences of global markets, often at the expense of local communities and individuals. This thesis focuses on the inequalities disseminated in and through backpacker tourism. It posits that it is not only important to change the way the tourist industry operates but also that it is necessary to change the way tourists tour. Moving off the beaten track in approaches to the study of tourism, this research project forges a new path for Tourism Studies that merges cultural theory and everyday life to develop a critical academic literacy for backpacker discourse.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Abstract: Globalisation, Gender and Teachers’ Employment This thesis examines the nexus between globalisation and patterns of gendered employment in the education industry in New South Wales, Australia. Globalisation has had an impact on employment and gender relations in Australia through economic restructuring, through the transformation of the labour market and through public sector reform. A number of theories of globalisation recognise its impact on employment practices, but many fail to examine its impact on gender relations. This study brings the gendered aspects of globalisation into focus. The changing nature of employment in the education industry is located within the broader context of globalisation and economic restructuring in Australia. Using statistical information from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and other sources, this thesis traces the impact of globalisation on the Australian economy, labour market and, in particular, the public sector. The thesis also traces historically the institutional changes in Australia that have contributed to the globalisation process. A field study was undertaken to examine casual teachers’ experiences of globalisation, economic and labour market restructuring and public sector reform in New South Wales. Interviews were conducted with 20 casual school teachers working in the New South Wales public education system. Men and women teachers, working in rural and urban locations, were asked about their experiences of globalisation and its impact on gender relations in the workplace and in the home. Although household and workplace structures in Australia are changing as a result of globalisation, these structures remain gendered. Gender relations in the household continue to structure access to the workplace. There are elements of systematic discrimination in the treatment of casual teachers in public education in New South Wales, and teachers are penalised for adopting non-standard forms of work. Globalisation has individualising and peripheralising impacts on casual teachers; however, they have developed mechanisms for resisting these aspects of globalisation. Although individuals are formed by and respond to the structural conditions created by globalisation they are able to make choices about employment patterns and gender divisions between home and paid work.

Recent debates in comparative industrial relations scholarship have raised significant questions about the impact of changes in the international economy on national patterns of industrial relations. Globalisation, it has been argued, creates pressures for convergence that will increasingly undermine national diversity in industrial relations institutions and outcomes. At its most extreme, the globalisation thesis predicts �a universal race to the bottom� of labour standards. This globalisation thesis has been broadly criticised in the comparative industrial relations literature. Rather, a growing body of comparative industrial relations literature has pointed to evidence of continued diversity, despite the common pressures associated with changes in the international economy. This literature has focussed on the importance national level institutional variables play in explaining diversity and suggested that differences in national level institutional variables are likely to produce cross-national divergence rather than convergence. While the institutionalist approach represents an important corrective to the globalisation thesis, it has difficulty explaining similarities in patterns of industrial relations changes, despite institutional differences across countries, and is largely unable to explain changes in the institutions themselves. This thesis argues that these limitations of the institutionalist approach reflect its intellectual origins in comparative politics. The major contribution of this thesis is the development of an interaction approach the relationship between international economic change and the domestic institutions of industrial relations. This alternative theoretical approach, which is drawn from concepts in the political economy tradition in industrial relations and the international political economy literature, identifies four key variables the shape the relationship between international economic change and the domestic institutions of industrial relations: namely, the international economic regime; the national production profile; the accumulation strategy of the state; and the role of institutional effects. The thesis tests the explanatory power of the interaction approach by focussing on the comparison between two closely matched countries- Australia and New Zealand- during three periods of significant economic change in the international economy: the end of the nineteenth century; the immediate post world war two period; and, in the late 1960s. It shows that each of these periods a focus on changes in the international economy and how they impact the interests of employers, workers and the state helps explain both similarities and differences in industrial relations developments in the two countries. In doing so it demonstrates the importance of what appear to be small differences between the cases. The ability of the interaction approach to account for similarities and differences across three time periods in two most similar countries suggests that it may have broader application in cross-national comparison and that may provide the basis for a more general reassessment of the relationship between the contemporary wave of globalisation and industrial relations institutions and outcomes.

Abstract The International Baccalaureate in Australia and Canada: 1980 - 1993 This dissertation is a study of the International Baccalaureate(IB) in the education systems of Canada and Australia. The IB has been described as a world movement. The number of global institutions and social movements are increasing greatly in the 1990s. The thesis looks at the historical development of the IB, recent developments of the IB in Canada and Australia and develops the claim that the IB has become a provider of global cultural capital. The theoretical paradigm adopted is that of Pierre Bourdieu. Conclusions of the study are: 1 in Australia and Canada the IB is as important for the 'symbolic imposition' it bestows on holders of the IB as it is for the stated intentions of educating the whole person. 2 the IB functions as an agent of 'reproduction' rather than as an international laboratory for experiment both in curriculum and examining methods as originally intended by the founders of the IB. 3 students participating in the IB increase their potential for advantage in the 'global field'.

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Within the field of International Political Economy (IPE), and across the social sciences more broadly, analysis of restructuring and guides to its management have tended to use the master concept of globalisation as 'common sense' knowledge about social change. As a result, a discourse surrounding restructuring has emerged which presents a cause-effect and uni-linear model. Thus, restructuring processes within statesocieties and firms are viewed as responses to the imperatives of global change. Building on insights from contemporary IPE approaches, which highlight the historical and institutional contingency of these processes, the central purpose of this thesis is to reconsider global change as contested within and across societies. This is pursued through a consideration of the restructuring of productive and working practices as they are negotiated and contested in the key social terrain of states and firms. The inquiry proceeds through three stages. First, the use of globalisation as a master concept for framing knowledge of social change generally, and of changes in working practices particularly, is outlined. Second, through a focus on the debates surrounding the restructuring of work in Britain and Germany, it is argued that interpretations and experiences of restructuring are socially rooted and, therefore, distinctive. It is demonstrated that state-societies do not simply absorb global imperatives; that firms, as social arenas, do not respond to intensified competition in an unproblematic way; and that social groups actively experience and participate in the restructuring of embedded practices. Finally, it is suggested that perceived technological or economic pressures to restructure working practices take on distinctive meanings for particular societies, raising specific conflicts, and reflecting discrete social understandings. From this perspective, globalisation and social restructuring cannot be meaningfully understood as a single, universal or convergent process. Rather, globalisation and restructuring take on distinctive meanings as they are understood and experienced within specific social contexts.