Founded in 2015, the establishment of the Griffith Criminology Institute (GCI) reflects the culmination and solidification of the community of criminology, crime and justice scholars from across the University who collectively represent one of the largest, most vibrant and high performing criminology communities in the world. Our vision is to produce cutting-edge knowledge that helps create safe, just, well-governed and equitable societies. Prospective Research Higher Degree students are invited to apply for a PhD scholarship with the Griffith Criminology Institute. Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Stipend Scholarship and Griffith University Postgraduate Research Scholarship applications are currently open, closing Tuesday 3 October 2017. These Scholarship opportunities each provide a living allowance of approximately $26,682 per annum. GCI Strategic Priorities and Top-up Funding Up to 5 GCI funded Scholarship Top-ups will be available for outstanding students in the following areas of strategic importance: Future Harms 3 top-ups available Cybercrime 1 top-up available Developmental Criminology 1 top-up available Each top-up will be valued at $6,000 per annum. Applicants must meet the University s selection criteria for entry into the PhD programme and be awarded a Scholarship to qualify for GCI Top-up funding. If you would like to discuss this opportunity further please contact the supervisory team for the relevant project. Further details regarding this funding opportunity, as well as an outline of each project is available at the following link: How to Apply After reviewing the selected PhD projects in areas of strategic importance below, prospective applicants should make contact with the relevant supervisory team and ensure that details of the project are included in their Scholarship application. Contact must be made with the relevant supervisory team by 5pm Monday 25 September 2017. Where multiple enquires are received for a single PhD Project Topic, the supervisory team will notify the preferred candidate by Wednesday 27 September 2017 in order to allow submission of the Scholarship application. Only one GCI Top-up will be offered per selected topic area. To apply for a scholarship, follow the process for submitting an online application outlined on the Griffith University website; https://www.griffith.edu.au/scholarships/how-to-apply. The GCI will review the full scholarship application via the usual round assessment process and will make recommendations for Scholarships and Top-ups which align with the selected topics below.
Selected PhD Project Topics Project Description: New securities for new harms: examining private harm management in the age of the Anthropocene Future Harms Professor Clifford Shearing Email: c.shearing@griffith.edu.au (or clifford.shearing@uct.ac.za) Professor Janet Ransley Email: j.ransley@griffith.edu.au Phone: (07) 3735 5612 An outstanding doctoral candidate is sought to undertake studies within a broader project focused on new forms of harm management and private governors of security. In an age of the Anthropocene, harms associated with natural disasters, environmental risks and climate change threaten economies and the safety and security of global citizens. Managing such harmscapes traditionally fell to environmental regulators, police, military and other public governors. However, limited public resources, competing priorities and the scale and speed of change has hampered success. Managing these harms increasingly falls to a wider set of private governors, not least insurers and related financial actors. This PhD will examine the environmental risk (e.g, climate change mitigation) actions related to the governance of this new harm landscape. It will add to the understanding of insurance as a governor of environmental security and provide insights into how best to manage uncertainty in the age of the Anthropocene. It will ask when and how insurance and financial services engage in actions that manage environmental risks and, importantly, the regulatory conditions which enable (and disable) those actions. By answering this question, the project aims to develop principles to guide insurance and other private and public governors to deliver improved climate outcomes and security governance within the globe s new harmscape. The research will involve searching for documents on line and through requests and their analysis as well as interviews, and may require travel. Analysis will include the use of analytic tools such as NVIVO and ATLAS data analysis tools. Experience with qualitative research methods, in particular a grounded theory approach, is desirable. The successful applicant will join an innovative team of researchers at the Griffith Criminology Institute who are undertaking interdisciplinary criminological and regulatory research on security governance and new harm landscapes. As a doctoral student, you will develop expertise in cutting edge criminology and regulatory scholarship, gain experience in research design and methods, and produce insights that may lead to improved environmental and social outcomes in practice. Applicants should be available to star in early 2018 and have the following attributes: an undergraduate degree with first class honours in an appropriate discipline (such as criminology law, legal studies, environmental science, the humanities, social sciences, or some combination of these areas) etc.
Project Description Resilience and the Anthropocene: new securities for new harms Future Harms Professor Clifford Shearing Email: c.shearing@griffith.edu.au (or clifford.shearing@uct.ac.za) Dr Kieran Hardy Email: k.hardy@griffith.edu.au Phone: (07) 5552 7426 An outstanding doctoral candidate is sought to undertake studies in a broader project focused on the concept of resilience as a response to new global harms. Today we live in a new earth (the earth of the Anthropocene era), which has been produced, in large part, as a consequence of the burning of fossil fuels to produce energy (particularly electricity). This world, like that of cyberspace, is a world about which knowledge is not well developed. It is a world where uncertainly is pervasive and the risk of catastrophe is ever present. It is a world that is challenging existing thinking about the nature of harmscapes, existing harm management technologies and associated institutional arrangements. This PhD will focus on understanding these landscape changes and understanding the new normative agendas and institutional arrangements that are emerging in response to them, particularly the concept of resilience. Resilience has been a prominent mentality and is invoked and used by practitioners and analysts in seeking to understand and respond to these developments. This PhD will critically analyse how resilience is being used and understood in the Anthropocene context and ask whether and when the resilience response is effective, efficient and equitable in response to uncertainty. The research will involve searching for documents on line and through requests and their analysis as well as interviews, and may require travel. Analysis will include the use of analytic tools such as NVIVO and ATLAS data analysis tools. Experience with qualitative research methods, in particular a grounded theory approach, is desirable. The successful applicant will join an innovative team of researchers at the Griffith Criminology Institute who are undertaking interdisciplinary criminological and regulatory research on security governance and new harm landscapes. As a doctoral student, you will develop expertise in cutting edge criminology and regulatory scholarship, gain experience in research design and methods, and produce insights that may lead to improved environmental and social outcomes in practice. Applicants should be available to start in early 2018 and have the following attributes: an undergraduate degree with first class honours in an appropriate discipline (such as criminology law, legal studies, environmental science, the humanities, social sciences, or some combination of these areas) etc.
Project Description Computational Approaches for Identifying Emerging Crime Trends Future Harms Dr Daniel Birks Email: d.birks@griffith.edu.au Phone: (07) 3735 5728 Professor Michael Townsley Email: m.townsley@griffith.edu.au Phone: (07) 3735 1025 An outstanding cross-disciplinary doctoral candidate is sought to undertake studies in a broader project focused on the changing nature of crime and policing in the 21 st century. Over the last 25 years crime has changed dramatically, with significant reductions in many traditional offences such as burglary seen across most westernised democracies, and rapid increases in new crimes or means of committing crime (e.g. cybercrime) emerging rapidly. Over the same time, there have been parallel increases in the quantity and quality of data routinely collected by policing agencies, and computational analytical methods capable of transforming these data into meaningful knowledge. This PhD will devise and evaluate a range of computational methods aimed at analysing large quantities of police recorded crime data to prospectively identify emerging crime problems. It is expected that the research will involve application of a range of social science analytics including spatio-temporal crime analyses, social network analyses, natural language processing and machine learning. In addition, it will be directly supported by the Social Analytics Laboratory, a $1million enterprise class secure facility that provides essential infrastructure for the storage and advanced analyses of sensitive administrative data (Police, Ambulance etc.) for both research and higher degree teaching purposes. Strong quantitative research skills, ideally in the application of computational analytics, are highly desirable. The successful applicant will join an innovative team of cross-discplinary researchers at the Griffith Criminology Institute who are undertaking criminological research on new trends in crime and policing. As a doctoral student, you will develop expertise in cutting edge criminology and scholarship, gain experience in research design and methods, and produce insights that may lead to improved police effectiveness. Applicants should be available to start in early 2018 and have the following attributes: an undergraduate degree with first class honours in an appropriate discipline (such as computer science, data science, mathematics, computational social science) etc. Some background/experience in criminology would be advantageous but it is not essential.
Project Description: An empirical test of cybercrime prevention strategies: Developing approaches to increase awareness and decrease harms. Cybercrime Dr Jaqueline Drew Email: j.drew@griffith.edu.au Phone: (07) 3735 5957 Professor Michael Townsley Email: m.townsley@griffith.edu.au Phone: (07) 3735 1025 The prevalence and impact of cyber fraud continues to increase exponentially with new and more innovative methods developed by offenders to target and exploit victims for their own financial reward. Traditional crime reaction methods used by police have proved largely ineffective in this context. As such, police agencies and many other government and non-government stakeholders in the cybercrime prevention space, have begun to adopt a victim focused, prevention approach to cybercrime. It is widely acknowledged that the internet has provided increasing opportunities for criminals to commit crimes enabled by the online environment with the creation of new crimes and to perpetrate traditional crimes in new and innovative ways (Australian Government Attorney-General s Department, 2013; Broadhurst, 2006; Clough, 2015; Webster & Drew, 2017). Despite this, there is a notable lack of research analysing online victimisation risk and in turn, online crime prevention (Grabosky, 2001; Reyns, 2010). It is argued, that victims are the lynchpin in their own self-protection and can play an important role in reducing the prevalence of cyber fraud by protecting themselves against cybercrime attacks. However, this approach requires an evidence-based understanding of awareness of cybercrime and both knowledge and use of online self-protective crime prevention behaviours that are being employed by online users. To date, little research has examined the translation of knowledge of online crime prevention behaviours into the actual use of online crime prevention strategies (Burns & Roberts, 2013). It is crucial to better understand what types of crime prevention approaches and strategies can work to stop or at least reduce victimisation risks and harms. Despite the enormity of crime prevention information and advice available to online users about cyber security protection, cybercrime continues to increase. Crime prevention approaches have not been empirically tested, hence we are unaware of the impact and effectiveness of crime prevention education and advice. The research would be theoretically driven by routine activities approach, lifestyle exposure theory and situational crime prevention frameworks. This research would address both theoretical and empirical gaps in existing literature. Aims and Objectives: 1. This research aims to gain a better understanding of cybercrime prevention of online users, by establishing a base line measure of awareness of different types of cybercrime, knowledge of crime prevention approaches and behavioural uses of crime prevention strategies. 2. This study will empirically test different types of crime prevention messages to identify those which are likely to have most impact in preventing or at least, reducing cybercrime victimisation. Applicants should be available to start in early 2018 and have an undergraduate degree with first class honours in an appropriate discipline. The methodology would be a survey-based quasi-experimental design. Research would involve several samples that would be pre and post surveyed via an online survey before and after undertaking relevant cybercrime prevention education.
Indigenous mothers in the criminal justice system: Mechanisms of risk and resilience children s developmental contexts Developmental Criminology Associate Professor Susan Dennison Email: susan.dennison@griffith.edu.au Phone: (07) 373 56808 Project Description: Internationally, parental imprisonment has a demonstrated effect on intergenerational offending as well as a worsening of intergenerational disparities, racial inequality and social exclusion. In Australia, First Peoples comprise approximately 2% of the adult population but make up more than a quarter (27%) of our prison population. Dennison and colleagues found that in Queensland, Indigenous children are nine times more likely to experience paternal incarceration over the course of a year than non-indigenous children. Similar data is not yet available for First Peoples mothers in prison and their children. Despite the significant overrepresentation of First Peoples in prison in Australia, we have very little understanding of the ways that children are affected by the incarceration of their mother. Furthermore, we do not know whether children whose mothers are involved in the criminal justice system but who are not incarcerated (i.e. are on probation) are similarly affected. An outstanding Indigenous doctoral candidate is sought to undertake studies on experiences of maternal incarceration for First Peoples children. This project forms part of a larger ARC Discovery Project using mixed-methods to investigate the developmental contexts of children who have a mother in prison or on probation. The successful PhD candidate will have the opportunity to adapt the methodology of the ARC Discovery project to incorporate methodologies suitable for research with First Peoples. They will be involved in primary data collection; conducting surveys and interviews with Indigenous mothers and their families in Queensland. Aims and Objectives: In this PhD project the candidate will consider the specific challenges for Indigenous mothers in prison and on probation, their children and caregivers in urban, regional and remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. The research will focus on identifying the mechanisms that drive adverse developmental outcomes for children as well as those associated with resilience. Through this project the candidate will identify key programming and policy targets that can address the risks and needs specific to mothers, children, families and communities. The candidate will join a dynamic team of local and international researchers working on a program of research on prison and the family. The project will be nested within both the Developmental and Life-Course Criminology and Prevention Science (DLC&PS) theme and the Corrections theme of the Griffith Criminology Institute. Applicants should be available to start in early 2018 and have the following attributes: an undergraduate degree with Second Class Honours or above, in an appropriate discipline (such as criminology, psychology, sociology, social work, or some combination of these areas) an ability to work with quantitative and qualitative data, with specific experience or interest in qualitative research experience, or interest in developing their expertise, in Indigenous research methodologies excellent interpersonal skills