Thank you for your interest in SOCY3001 Research Internship

This course allows students to work closely with a member of academic staff in the disciplines of Sociology, Criminology or Demography on a research project in a field of interest. Students will develop real-world research skills and get a sense of how high-level academic research is conducted. The project, to be negotiated with a supervisor, will most often be related to work already underway by the faculty member, and the student will be offered the opportunity to join the research team.

Enrolment in the course requires:

1. The agreement of a supervisor and
2. The completion of an application form (by July 1st).

Each year, there is a list of internship opportunities. If you are interested in applying for one of these, you should make contact with the named academic. It is also possible to approach an academic you have been taught by or are interested in to see if they would be interested in supervising you on another topic.

Please read the following opportunities and email the named academic if you are interested in applying (please note that some internships have prerequisites). 

If you are awarded an internship, please email celia.roberts@anu.edu.au

• Making Net Zero Policy, 1990-2025

A project investigating the socio-political origins of net zero statecraft in Australia. The internship will involve a defined set of tasks that support research into the institutional history of Australia’s climate policy regime. Each intern will be assigned a key segment of this policy history to investigate. Over the first six weeks, students will undertake empirical data gathering and produce a briefing note. This will form the basis of their independent inquiry and final essay. The remaining six weeks of the semester will be devoted to independent analysis and write-up.

Number of interns wanted: 2

Email: Beck Pearse (SOCY)

• Migration and Australia's Care Economy

Our project examines how different visa pathways into frontline employment in the aged care sector create particular constraints on migrant workers' ability to manage the demands of paid and unpaid care work. We explore how varying restrictions on location, working hours, employer sponsorship, and family accompaniment influence migrant care workers’ lives at and outside of work, where negative outcomes are reported, we will seek to propose policy reforms to guide a fairer and more sustainable care economy. 

Number of interns wanted: 1

Email: Matt Withers (SOCY)

• Network Analysis of Collective Action in Reddit’s r/Place

First launched on April Fools' Day 2017 (and repeated in 2022 and 2023) Reddit’s r/Place was a 72-hour experiment where anyone with a Reddit account could place a colour pixel every five minutes onto a 2000x2000 pixel canvas. Redditors collectively created (and destroyed) images relating to culture, politics, sport, technology, nationhood and geopolitics. The Reddit r/Place datasets (showing the colour, position and timestamp of each pixel for each anonymised user) have been released open source, representing a unique source of data on online collective action and peer production. 

This project involves the intern using network analysis and R programming (learned via SOCY2166 or SOCY3169) to analyse an aspect of the collective behaviour on r/Place. The focus of the analysis can be driven by the intern’s own interests, and the supervisor will provide advice on data handling (the data have already been collected) and analytical approaches.

Number of interns wanted: 1

Email: Rob Ackland (SOCY)

• Energy Labour in Transition

A project investigating the career histories and experiences of industrial change among energy workers in NSW and the ACT. The internship will involve tasks that support the analysis of interview material. In the first six weeks, students will prepare interview case notes and develop skills in qualitative interpretation and thematic analysis. In the final six weeks, they will write an essay based on the key sociological themes emerging from the interviews.

Number of interns wanted: 2

Email: Beck Pearse (SOCY)

• Working with more-than-human data

This interdisciplinary (sociology + design) project is provisionally entitled Patches: Working with More-Than-Human Data, a monograph project that draws together in the single conceptual frame of 'patch' a series of practical and speculative projects concerning non-human lives, data and experience in ecological crisis. The intern's focus will be on developing some key elements of the conceptual framework by gathering key sources, tracing connections between them and piloting their use in analysing component projects.

Number of interns wanted: 2

Email: Adrian Mackenzie (SOCY)

• Aging and mortality

Recalculate old-age dependency ratios, taking into account increasing life expectancy across populations. 

Students must have done DEMO2002.

Number of interns wanted: 1

Email: Vladimir Canudas-Romo (Demography)

• Reviewing the evidence on the workplace impacts of AI

Managers and employers often justify the integration of AI tools in the workplace, on the grounds that it 1) increases productivity and 2) delivers significant cost savings. However, these claims are rarely supported by empirical evidence and instead rest on modes of speculation that reproduce industry hype. 

Students undertaking this project will have the opportunity to 1) review the evidence of genAI tools and their impacts on workers, and 2) contribute to the writing of a report that can be used to advocate for worker rights.

Number of interns wanted: 1

Email: Thao Phan (SOCY)

• Network Analysis of Decentralised Governance in Mastodon

Mastodon is a decentralised microblogging platform that uses an open-source network protocol called ActivityPub to communicate between server instances and users. The instances collectively form a network of interoperable servers that comprise part of a federated universe or Fediverse. Users join autonomous local communities (with their own rules, administration and moderation), typically established around a community or area of interest and intended to group similar users based on, e.g. geographic location, language, views, interests, etc. 

Governance in Mastodon occurs via local (instance-based) rules and moderation: instance administrators apply moderating rules (e.g. by nominating other instances as “friends” or “foes”) in order to protect their own users from being exposed to potentially harmful timelines, content and users. This project involves the intern using network analysis and R programming (learned via SOCY2166 or SOCY3169) to analyse decentralised governance in Mastodon. The focus of the analysis can be driven by the intern’s own interests, and the supervisor will provide advice on data handling (there is an existing workflow and software for representing networks of Mastodon instances, where instance-to-instance ties reflect friend and foe lists) and analytical approaches.

Number of interns wanted: 1

Email: Rob Ackland (SOCY)

• Community attitudes towards women who kill their abusers

This project explores community attitudes towards the use of self-defence as a full defence in cases where a victim-survivor of abuse has been charged with murdering their abusive intimate partner. This project involves the secondary analysis of qualitative survey data collected from 2,500 people residing in Queensland who were asked to determine an appropriate outcome in a matter involving a female victim-survivor of intimate partner violence killing their male abusive partner. Methods: Thematic analysis of qualitative survey data. Literature review.

Number of interns wanted: 1

Email: Hayley Boxall (Crim)

• Research on justice in the metaverse/virtual reality

We are developing a series of research projects that seek to understand the dynamics of courts, tribunals, restorative justice, or other justice processes in a virtual reality or metaverse environment.

Methods: Literature review skills, ethnographic, an observation of metaverse interactions, and possibly some comparative analysis. The research is in the very beginning stages, so the student would have the opportunity to help shape how it unfolds.

Number of interns wanted: 2

Email: Meredith Rosner (Crim)

• TechRespect: Locating sharing in dating relationships

This project explores how young people (16–24) use location-sharing technologies in dating relationships, and how these tools can support or harm trust, safety, and boundaries. Insights will inform the development of resources to help young people, parents, and educators recognise and challenge unhealthy monitoring and tracking behaviours.

Methods: qualitative analysis, literature synthesis

Number of interns wanted: 1

Email: Meredith Rosner (Crim)

• Changes in post-school plans: Analysing the GENERATION survey of adolescents

This project will explore how students navigate the transition from school into life after Year 12. It will examine whether aspirations to attend university translate into actual enrolment and will explore who misses out and why. Focusing on the gap between plans and outcomes, the project will also investigate the social and economic factors shaping these decisions, including family background and the cost of study. By exploring these patterns, the project aims to reveal who has real access to higher education and how inequalities at this stage can shape life chances.

The 3rd-year student will analyse existing GENERATION survey data (a longitudinal survey of the educational pathways of young people in Australia, see https://generationsurvey.org.au/) to answer these questions. Note that the successful student should have basic data analysis skills, including conducting correlations and t-tests, and have a good understanding of hypothesis testing (including p-values).

Methods:  • Conducting literature searches on related academic research education transitions, inequality, and access • Data analysis of young people’s survey data, including descriptive statistics, group comparisons, and hypothesis testing •  Regression analysis to examine which factors influence outcomes • Skills in statistical software (e.g., Stata, SPSS, R, or Excel) • Interpreting results through sociological concepts like inequality and access • Academic report writing.

Number of interns wanted: 1

Email: Jessica Arnup (POLIS)