Thesis
RC: regulatory communities and the spaces of online censorship
Southern Cross University, School of Law and Justice
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Southern Cross University
2003
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Abstract
The concept of community, as it is expressed in Australia's internet censorship scheme, is one which is deployed in a spatial manner and concerns issues of locality. This thesis explores the concept of community spaces and regulatory communities in order to problematise the spatial silences of legal and regulatory theory.
Spatial theory challenges the abstraction of liberal legal concepts, especially the rule of law and jurisdictional maps. In this thesis, the work of Henri Lefebvre is used extensively to examine the ways in which law produces space and deploys strategies of spatial regulation. Lefebvre's work opens the way to examine spaces as discursive texts and to investigate the inscription of law on spaces and on bodies that occupy those spaces.
Recent regulatory theory, informed by critical and Foucauldian theories of power, also provide tools to examine the spatial practices of the Australian internet regulatory scheme. Law can be considered as a series of regulatory networks and power can be re-conceptualised as a flow rather than a resource. Simple positivist, mechanistic models of governance must be reconceptualised in a dynamic space of network flows. The uniform and abstract model of the rule of law is replaced by a 'jurispace' of regulatory networks and regulatory communities.
While Australia's system of media censorship claims to be concerned primarily with classification of media, it retains the power to exclude and expel through the inscription of a 'refused classification' or 'RC' status on a text. Through this, the borders and boundaries of the geopolitical landscape are shaped and Australia's relationship to globalised mediascapes and cyberspace is defined.
This thesis aims to disrupt the series of monolithic concepts which are used throughout the Australian internet regulatory scheme: community, family, the internet, media, pornography and others. This destabilisation and potential decentralisation of legal regulatory order is recognised and manifested in the contradictions of the legislation itself.
Details
- Title
- RC: regulatory communities and the spaces of online censorship
- Creators
- Scott Andrew Beattie
- Contributors
- Greta Mary Bird (Supervisor) - Southern Cross University
- Awarding Institution
- Southern Cross University; Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Theses
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Southern Cross University
- Publisher
- Southern Cross University, School of Law and Justice
- Number of pages
- 370
- Identifiers
- 991013321027802368
- Copyright
- © Scott A. Beattie 2003
- Academic Unit
- Faculty of Business, Law and Arts
- Resource Type
- Thesis