‘Fear’ and ‘Hope’ in Graphic Fiction: The Schismatic Role of Law in an Australian Dystopian Comic

The rise in popularity in recent times of dystopian fiction (particularly among young adults) is reflective of contemporary anxieties about law: the inhumanity of judicial-coercive machinery; the influence of corporate power; the lack of democratic imagination despite the desperate need for political reform; and the threat of order imposed through violence and victimisation. These dystopian texts often tell fear-inducing stories of law’s failure to protect; or of law’s unsuccessful struggle against unbridled power; or even sometimes of law’s ‘bastardised’ reconstruction. Indeed comics, with their visual and narrative intricacies, thrive on dystopia as a key vehicle for contributing to collective notions of fear and trembling about the future. Yet, at the same time, these texts also contain within them the blueprints for hope—the idea that with transformation, heroic intervention, and/or faith in ‘justice’, the law will ultimately prevail. Law’s ability to be transformed is thus simultaneously portrayed as society’s downfall (when manipulated and disrupted), AND as the key to enlivening humanity (when redeemed and restored). This article attempts to understand this schismatic role of law as presented in the recent dystopian comic book series From Above by Australian creator Craig Bruyn. In this series set in futuristic Melbourne, where law has given way to an unaccountable corporate rule, the social divide is made manifest by the absence of ‘order’, ‘law’ and ‘justice’ in certain segments of society, and yet hope in law’s return is ever-present. The paper will interrogate expectations of law and justice that is mediated through the complex interaction of fear and hope, and contextualise this within current contemporary anxieties.     

(Mis)Understanding the Impact of Online Fraud: Implications for Victim Assistance Schemes

Australia provides victims of violent crime access to financial support to assist with recovery, excluding victims of nonviolent offences. The author examines the experiences of online fraud victims, and details how the impacts experienced extend beyond financial losses, to include deterioration in health and well-being, relationship breakdown, homelessness, and unemployment, and in the worst cases, suicidal ideation. Using online fraud as a case study, the author argues eligibility to access victim assistance schemes should consider harms suffered rather than the offence experienced. Consequently, the author advocates a shift in eligibility criteria of victim assistance schemes to facilitate much-needed support to online fraud victims.     

Online fraud victims’ experiences of participating in qualitative interviews

Institutional Review Boards often raise concerns about qualitative research with vulnerable populations such as crime victims, and assume that research with vulnerable populations will be distressing for participants. It is therefore vital to examine whether participants do in fact experience adverse effects stemming from their participation. The existing research is clear that some members of vulnerable populations do feel distressed when they participate in research; however, in most cases, this distress is outweighed by the benefits of participation, such as a sense of having contributed to community awareness raising. This literature is, however, predominantly quantitative. In addition, it overwhelmingly focuses on violent trauma, providing no insight into participants’ experiences of research on non-violent traumatic events. The current study addresses these shortcomings by examining the research participation experiences of victims of online fraud. Specifically, an online questionnaire designed to elicit qualitative data was administered to victims of online fraud who had previously participated in a semi-structured qualitative interview. Among other findings, the study suggests that perceptions about the outcomes of research, in addition to the research process, influence victims’ satisfaction with their participation in qualitative research.     

Forensic casework analysis using the HVI/HVII mtDNA linear array assay

The mitochondrial hypervariable regions I and II have proven to be a useful target for analysis of forensic materials, in which the amount of DNA is limited or highly degraded. Conventional mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequencing can be time-consuming and expensive, limitations that can be minimized using a faster and less expensive typing assay. We have evaluated the exclusion capacity of the linear array mtDNA HVI/HVII region-sequence typing assay (Roche Applied Science) in 16 forensic cases comprising 90 samples. Using the HVI/HVII mtDNA linear array, 56% of the samples were excluded and thus less than half of the samples require further sequencing due to a match or inconclusive results. Of all the samples that were excluded by sequence analysis, 79% could be excluded using the HVI/HVII linear array alone. Using the HVI/HVII mtDNA linear array assay, we demonstrate the potential to decrease sequencing efforts substantially and thereby reduce the cost and the turn-around time in casework analysis.     

Community‐Based Organizations and Institutional Work in the Remote Rural West

The institutional landscape for public land management in the U.S. West underwent a seismic shift in the 1990s as the long‐dominant resource extraction paradigm was replaced by the ecosystem management paradigm. Here we analyze the efforts of community‐based organizations (CBOs), entities that emerged in some locations across the West to help their respective communities navigate the transition from resource extraction to environmental stewardship. Despite their formal status as civil society actors, in practice CBOs came to fill various institutional gaps by taking on roles traditionally assigned to both the state and the private sector. We use a case study approach to examine how the Hayfork, California–based Watershed Research and Training Center engages in institutional work within a setting that is at once both open and constrained, as the rural community within which it operates lacks strong state‐ or industry‐led development trajectories while remaining constrained by the legacies of past institutions.