Dr Matthew Ball

Matthew has worked as a Sessional Academic within the School of Justice since 2004.

Background

• 2004: graduated from the Bachelor of Justice (Critical Criminology) with distinction 
• 2005: undertook Honours in Justice.
• 2009: received his PhD.

Research interests

Matthew has published and presented areas of:

• legal education and the scholarship of teaching and learning
• violence in male same-sex intimate partnerships
• men and violent victimisation
• gender and sexuality issues
• identity politics
• governmentality and governance studies
• foucaultian methodologies
• post-structural social theory and philosophy
• legal ethics.

He is currently in the preliminary stages of developing these areas of research further.

Research into the incidence and experience of violence in male same-sex intimate partnerships within Australia is very minimal, and Matthew hopes that further investigations in this area will not only improve service provision for victims but will also shed light on problematic criminological and social explanations for this violence.

Matthew also hopes to extend his research on legal education using Foucault’s tools and methods, as this work provides an original and innovative conceptual framework for understanding legal education.

Research background

Honours thesis

Matthew examined the extent to which discussions of social justice featured within the undergraduate law curriculum of Australian universities.

This research found that, although discussions of social justice are present within the law curriculum, they do not necessarily encourage students to undertake anything but marginal social and legal change.

Doctoral thesis

Matthew extended this research; he investigated the construction and governance of the legal identity within three Australian law schools.

He used Foucault’s conceptual and methodological tools, particularly ‘governmentality’, in order to do this.

Matthew is particularly interested in the development of cynicism about the ability of the law to achieve social change within ‘idealistic’ students.

His research suggests that this is not a result of ‘indoctrination’ at the hands of the legal profession (as is often suggested within the literature), but is instead a different way of constructing and subsequently ‘performing’ the legal identity.

Career highlights

In 2007, Matthew was the Postgraduate Representative of the QUT Research Degrees Committee.

In this capacity, Matthew:

• represented the interests of postgraduate students to the committee
• actively contributed to a number of initiatives that sought to improve the experience of Higher Degrees Research for students at QUT.

In November 2007, and in collaboration with Miss Denise Foster (QUT), Matthew also convened a multidisciplinary postgraduate research conference (Crime, Law and Society Postgraduate Research Conference) which was supported by the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology (ANZSOC) and the QUT Law and Justice Research Centre.

He has also established a support group for queer-identifying law students at QUT, and has actively sought the inclusion of issues relating to sexuality in the Justice curriculum.