Dorothy Roberts
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 87469 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Dorothy Roberts |
| NOMBRES | Dorothy |
| APELLIDO | Roberts |
| FIRMA | ROBERTS D |
| AFILIACIONES | University of New England |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0599-0528 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 53 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 202 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 52 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1951 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Inquiring into Empire
This is the first history to grapple with the vast project of British imperial investigation in the years between the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and the Great Reform Act. Beginning in 1819, commissions of inquiry were sent to examine law, governance, and economy from New South Wales and the Caribbean to Malta and West Africa. They left behind a matchless record of colonial life in the form of papers, reports and more than 200 volumes of testimoni…
Uprising
Ghosts and the machine
This article presents the findings of an experiment in the use of Artificial Intelligence text generation processes to convert historical 'big data' into narrative text. Using an extensive collection of records pertaining to the Australian colonial settlement of Norfolk Island in the South Pacific (1788–1814), we investigate Generative Large Language Model technology for converting tabulated data from the site into short pieces of novel text, des…
‘Damned lives and statistics’
We do not here theorise the distinctions between, for example, prosopography and 'collective biography', noting only that attempts to locate individual lives within broader systems and structures, including methods employing large-scale quantitative analyses, have revolutionised history and biography, and that such definitions are sometimes loose and flexible
Why abolition
Calls to abolish the child welfare system have provoked questions about the feasibility of dismantling the current system and worries that abolition will put vulnerable children at greater risk of maltreatment. Despite the clear evidence of harm inflicted by the family policing system, some child welfare experts argue that abandoning the system is dangerous because it is needed to protect children from harm. This essay makes a concise case for ab…
Family Policing as Counterinsurgency and the Gathering Abolitionist Force
I spent the first year of the pandemic writing a book about abolishing the so-called child welfare system—what I call the family policing system. When I heard Dylan Rodríguez’s remarkable presidential address, I was already proofing the galleys of Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World.1 Every word Rodríguez spoke resonated with my thinking and activism around the need to dismant…
Reflections on Re-Creating Biological Race and the Entrapment of Black People
The US white supremacist regime is a machine of death and destruction and that’s intensified under the current administration. The maternal mortality rate, that’s the rate of deaths from the pregnancy-related causes, is actually going up in the United States, which is unlike any other so-called advanced developed nation in the world. For more than half a century, most scientists and scholars have taken it as common knowledge that race is a social…
Keynote
This piece is a written version of Professor Dorothy Roberts' keynote speech at the Columbia Journal of Race and Law's 11th annual symposium, titled Strengthened Bonds: Abolishing the Child Welfare System and Re-Envisioning Child Well-Being
Why Now
2019 was the year of the declaration – from Culture Declares to Architects Declare to Architecture Education Declares – a landmark moment when architects pledged to confront climate emergency. In this paper I step back to reflect on the ethical dimensions of public declarations in architecture, from the institutional to individual, to consider their role in negotiating ethical concerns. This is explored through three paths: reviewing the ethical …
The Biology of Racism
Colonial penal stations and uneven legal reform after the Bigge Commission of Inquiry
Between 1822 and 1824, just under 100 convict absconders from the mainland penal settlement at Port Macquarie were relocated to Van Diemen’s Land under executive orders they be retained at the island’s new penal station at Macquarie Harbour. The subsequent fate of this cohort reveals an early moment of divergence in policy and practice between the two colonies. Two years later, when the New South Wales government tacitly acknowledged that many co…
The Convict Peace
This paper places a well-known controversy about the jurisdiction of nineteenth-century magistrates in its imperial context. In particular it shows how and why conversations about convict management and the jurisdiction of magistrates in New South Wales were interwoven with contemporary conversations about the law and government of slavery. In 1833 in the aftermath of the Castle Forbes Revolt, convicts, administrators and magistrates in New South…
History in Sight and Sound
We are thrilled to present our second issue of Australian Historical Studies for 2019. Here we bring together a series of methodologically innovative and interdisciplinary pieces that explore seein
New Migrant Histories
It is with great pleasure, and a little trepidation, that we take on the role of editors of this iconic history journal. We have a simple goal: to continue publishing Australia's best historical sc
Floating Prisons
Floating Prisons: Irish Convict Hulks and Voyages to New South Wales 1823–1837." Australian Historical Studies, 49(1), pp. 140–141
Landscapes of production and punishment
The 'Landscapes of Production and Punishment' project aims to examine how convict labour from 1830-1877 affected the built and natural landscapes of the Tasman Peninsula, as well as the lives of the convicts themselves
Landscapes of Production and Punishment
This paper presents an interdisciplinary project that uses archaeological and historical sources to explore the formation of a penal landscape in the Australian colonial context. The project focuses on the convict-period legacy of the Tasman Peninsula (Tasmania, Australia), in particular the former penal station of Port Arthur (1830-1877). The research utilises three exceptional data series to examine the impact of convict labour on landscape and…
Exile in a Land of Exiles
This article considers the peculiar application of English criminal transportation law in the ‘convict colony’ of New South Wales during its foundation years. It demonstrates, first, that transportation was not intended to be within the sentencing jurisdiction of the New South Wales Court, but that it was adopted and practised nonetheless, with confused and incongruous results. In particular, substantial challenges emerged in applying colonial or…
Colonial gulag
Recent developments in convict and penal studies are placing that field at the forefront of the ‘digital humanities’. In that vein, this article employs some newly digitised records relating to the Port Macquarie penal settlement in the 1820s to rectify the neglect of that settlement in the historical literature. The rise and fall of the colonial penal settlements involved monumental and rapid population movements that were meticulously documente…
The ‘illegal sentences which magistrates were daily passing’
Recent literature has recast the history of the British empire as a vast project of intervention in and reordering of colonial legal administrations. Closer inspection of local moments of legal reform, however, reveals substantial complications and contradictions in that project. This article re-considers Governor Richard Bourke's Punishment and Summary Jurisdiction Act 1832, the most celebrated legal intervention in the history of the ‘convict c…
Sleep disparity, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic position
Taking race out of human genetics
Engaging a century-long debate about the role of race in science
Mr Peel’s Amendments’ in New South Wales
This article investigates the difficult interface between metropolitan legal reform and empire in the late 1820s. In 1828, the Supreme Court of New South Wales sentenced dozens of men to death under legislation that had been repealed in Britain. It then insisted that every one of them be set free. This mess raised a fundamental question agitated in different ways around the empire in that decade: to what degree should colonial subjects enjoy the …
Realizing Reproductive Health Equity Needs More Than Long-Acting Reversible Contraception (Larc)
Can Research on the Genetics of Intelligence Be “Socially Neutral”
The history of research on the genetics of intelligence is fraught with social bias. During the eugenics era, the hereditary theory of intelligence justified policies that encouraged the proliferation of favored races and coercively stemmed procreation by disfavored ones. In the 1970s, Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen argued that black students’ innate cognitive inferiority limited the efficacy of federal education programs. The 1994 controver…
Movement Intersectionality
Intersectional analysis need not focus solely on differences within or between identity-based groups. Using intersectionality for cross movement mobilization reveals that, contrary to criticism for being divisive, attention to intersecting identities has the potential to create solidarity and cohesion. In this article, we elaborate this argument with a case study of the intersection of race, gender, and disability in genetic technologies as well …
Complicating the triangle of race, class and state
This article complicates Wacquant's three-sided schema of race, class and state by adding a focus on gender, the experiences of black women, and a black feminist intersectional analysis. Welfare retrenchment in the USA relied on stereotypes of black women, especially the 'Welfare Queen', that were at once sexist and racist and implemented policies targeted specifically at them as the vilified beneficiaries of state largess. Attributing social ine…
Realizing Reproductive Health Equity Needs More Than Long-Acting Reversible Contraception (Larc)
Landscapes of Production and Punishment
This paper presents an interdisciplinary project that uses archaeological and historical sources to explore the formation of a penal landscape in the Australian colonial context. The project focuses on the convict-period legacy of the Tasman Peninsula (Tasmania, Australia), in particular the former penal station of Port Arthur (1830-1877). The research utilises three exceptional data series to examine the impact of convict labour on landscape and…
Shattered Bonds
The Biology of Racism
Smallpox and the Baiame Waganna of Wellington Valley, New South Wales,1829-1840
Of all the various infections that afflicted Aboriginal people in Australia during the years of first contact with Europeans, smallpox was the most disastrous. The physical and social impacts of the disease are well known. This article considers another effect of the contagion. It is argued that a nativist movement in the form of a waganna (dance ritual) associated with the Wiradjuri spirit Baiame and his adversary Tharrawiirgal was linked to the…
The 'Knotted Hands that Set Us High
Although labour and economic perspectives now seem integral to the study of convict Australia, for much of the twentieth century labour historians seemed to find the subject distinctly unprofitable and inappropriate. Most histories tended towards a reductive view of convict work as inherently brutal and exploitative, while the key questions revolved around the moral character of the convicts and the possible cultural legacies of the convict era. …
The Orange Order in Ireland
The ‘illegal sentences which magistrates were daily passing’
Recent literature has recast the history of the British empire as a vast project of intervention in and reordering of colonial legal administrations. Closer inspection of local moments of legal reform, however, reveals substantial complications and contradictions in that project. This article re-considers Governor Richard Bourke's Punishment and Summary Jurisdiction Act 1832, the most celebrated legal intervention in the history of the ‘convict c…
Legal Change, Convict Activism and the Reform of Penal Relocation in Colonial New South Wales
This article investigates how imperial legal reforms and convict activism combined to challenge the expanding system of internal ‘removal’ and ‘transportation’ in New South Wales during the 1820s. In particular, it explores how prisoners at the Port Macquarie penal settlement disputed the legal foundations of sentencing by colonial magistrates, contributing to the closure of the settlement and a flurry of ameliorative legislation. This article al…
Paradox Preserved
As a universal theory Luhmann's systems theory of society includes art in its ambit. The Art of Society (1995) reconstructs the formal and the social-historical conditions of the functional differentiation of a system of art since the Renaissance. The methodological focus of the reconstruction - Luhmann's theory of form (perception, first and second order observation, medium and form) and of systemic differentiation (social function, self-organiz…
Landscapes of production and punishment
The 'Landscapes of Production and Punishment' project aims to examine how convict labour from 1830-1877 affected the built and natural landscapes of the Tasman Peninsula, as well as the lives of the convicts themselves
Family Policing as Counterinsurgency and the Gathering Abolitionist Force
I spent the first year of the pandemic writing a book about abolishing the so-called child welfare system—what I call the family policing system. When I heard Dylan Rodríguez’s remarkable presidential address, I was already proofing the galleys of Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World.1 Every word Rodríguez spoke resonated with my thinking and activism around the need to dismant…
New South Wales Penal Settlements and the Transformation of Secondary Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire
This paper uses a comprehensive survey of sentencing patterns and penal regulations to demonstrate the collapse of internal transportation in the colony of New South Wales into a system of extra-penal labour. It argues that a combination of judicial exigencies, local regulations, and creative misinterpretations of metropolitan penal reform turned the penal outpost established at Newcastle in 1804 into an experiment of interest to local and metrop…
The Forgotten Commandant
This article explores the administration of Captain James Wallis as Commandant of the Newcastle penal settlement from 1816 - 1818, illuminating a forgotten character and a neglected aspect of Australia's early colonial history. Our argument explores two core strands. First, we consider Wallis' reputation and role as the primary architect of the colony's first secondary punishment regime. Second, we assess his influence in shaping the nature of th…
Bells falls massacre and Bathurst's history of violence
(1995). Bells falls massacre and Bathurst's history of violence: Local tradition and Australian historiography. Australian Historical Studies: Vol. 26, No. 105, pp. 615-633
Paternalism in Early Victorian England
Ghosts and the machine
This article presents the findings of an experiment in the use of Artificial Intelligence text generation processes to convert historical 'big data' into narrative text. Using an extensive collection of records pertaining to the Australian colonial settlement of Norfolk Island in the South Pacific (1788–1814), we investigate Generative Large Language Model technology for converting tabulated data from the site into short pieces of novel text, des…
The Convict Peace
This paper places a well-known controversy about the jurisdiction of nineteenth-century magistrates in its imperial context. In particular it shows how and why conversations about convict management and the jurisdiction of magistrates in New South Wales were interwoven with contemporary conversations about the law and government of slavery. In 1833 in the aftermath of the Castle Forbes Revolt, convicts, administrators and magistrates in New South…
Floating Prisons
Floating Prisons: Irish Convict Hulks and Voyages to New South Wales 1823–1837." Australian Historical Studies, 49(1), pp. 140–141
Colonial gulag
Recent developments in convict and penal studies are placing that field at the forefront of the ‘digital humanities’. In that vein, this article employs some newly digitised records relating to the Port Macquarie penal settlement in the 1820s to rectify the neglect of that settlement in the historical literature. The rise and fall of the colonial penal settlements involved monumental and rapid population movements that were meticulously documente…
Australian Convict Sites and the Heritage of Adaptation
The Australian Government's successful nomination of eleven ‘convict sites’ for World Heritage listing has again highlighted complex relationships between history and heritage. This article considers one convict site excluded from the nomination—the Coal River Heritage Precinct in the heart of Newcastle (NSW). While the site falls short of fulfilling conventional heritage criteria, the material remains having been so seriously eroded, its histori…
In Search of the Old Ones
Journal Article In Search of the Old Ones: Exploring the Anasazi World of the Southwest. By David Roberts. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. 271 pp. $24.00, ISBN 0-684-81078-6.) Get access David J. Weber David J. Weber Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 83, Issue 3, December 1996, Pages 994–995, https://doi.org/10.2307/2945667 P…
Georg Simmel's Philosophy of Money
Diagnosis and Process in Family Counseling – Evolving Concepts Through Practice
Diagnosis and Process in Family Counseling – Evolving Concepts Through Practice Dorothy Wilson, and Dorothy Roberts CopyRight https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.41.11_Pt_1.1430 Published Online: September 06, 2011
The Orange Order in Ireland
Paternalism in Early Victorian England
Without Subject, Without Reason
Bells falls massacre and Bathurst's history of violence
(1995). Bells falls massacre and Bathurst's history of violence: Local tradition and Australian historiography. Australian Historical Studies: Vol. 26, No. 105, pp. 615-633
In Search of the Old Ones
Journal Article In Search of the Old Ones: Exploring the Anasazi World of the Southwest. By David Roberts. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. 271 pp. $24.00, ISBN 0-684-81078-6.) Get access David J. Weber David J. Weber Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 83, Issue 3, December 1996, Pages 994–995, https://doi.org/10.2307/2945667 P…
Georg Simmel's Philosophy of Money
Paradox Preserved
As a universal theory Luhmann's systems theory of society includes art in its ambit. The Art of Society (1995) reconstructs the formal and the social-historical conditions of the functional differentiation of a system of art since the Renaissance. The methodological focus of the reconstruction - Luhmann's theory of form (perception, first and second order observation, medium and form) and of systemic differentiation (social function, self-organiz…
Constabulary and Military Reform in Northern Ireland
Shattered Bonds
A Newer World
Journal Article A Newer World: Kit Carson, John C. Frémont, and the Claiming of the American West Get access A Newer World: Kit Carson, John C. Frémont, and the Claiming of the American West. By Roberts David. (New York: Touchstone Books/Simon & Schuster, 2000.320 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliographical notes, index. $14, paper.) Pamela Herr Pamela Herr Palo Aito, California Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Schola…
Smallpox and the Baiame Waganna of Wellington Valley, New South Wales,1829-1840
Of all the various infections that afflicted Aboriginal people in Australia during the years of first contact with Europeans, smallpox was the most disastrous. The physical and social impacts of the disease are well known. This article considers another effect of the contagion. It is argued that a nativist movement in the form of a waganna (dance ritual) associated with the Wiradjuri spirit Baiame and his adversary Tharrawiirgal was linked to the…
The Valley of Swells’ ‘Special’ or ‘Educated’ Convicts on the Wellington Valley Settlement, 1827–1830
Between 1827 and 1830, around forty convict men were exiled to the government’s remote agricultural and stock establishment at Wellington Valley (NSW), having been identified and labelled an ‘educated’ or ‘special’ convict. Men of education and status formed a small but conspicuous minority within the predominantly working-class convict population of NSW. Their presence complicated the principles and policies of convict management, and challenged…
Bearing Australia's ‘beloved burden’
Australia's Birthstain: The Startling Legacy of the Convict Era', by Babette Smith, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 2008, 408 pp., $49.95 (hardback), ISBN 9781741146042. 'A Cargo of Women: Susannah Watson and the Convicts of the Princess Royal', by Babette Smith, 2nd ed., Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 2008, 328 pp., $35.00 (paperback), ISBN 9781741755510. 'Voices from Tocal: Convict Life on a Rural Estate', by Brian Walsh, Tocal, C.B. Alexander Foundation, 2…
Beong! Beong! (more! more)
“Beong! Beong! (more! more!)”: John Harper and the Wesleyan Mission to the Australian Aborigines David A. Roberts and Hilary Carey I said to them in their own language “Were gairer” be not afraid, at which words they sat down and became quite composed. One of them was much pleased to hear me speak in the native tongue, and exclaimed “Beong! Beong!” (more more) Harper Journal, 5 March 1825).1 In July 1826, two Methodist gentlemen sat down for a te…
The Paradox of Silence and Display
In this essay, I seek to understand the paradox of silence and display that characterizes contemporary black female sexuality by examining its relationship to the sexual violation of enslaved women and girls. I argue that slavery’s identification of black female sexuality with licentiousness and black female acceptability with asexuality led to silencing the subjective sexual experiences of black women even while the media are full of images of b…
A ‘City on a Hill’
The Anglican Church Missionary Society’s Wellington Valley mission (1832–43) was one of the most ambitious and important religious experiments attempted in early nineteenth-century Australia. Located on the very western fringe of the British colony of New South Wales, amid the remains of an abandoned convict settlement, the mission provided the setting for competing assertions of status, authority and morality, played out in complex interactions …
The Forgotten Commandant
This article explores the administration of Captain James Wallis as Commandant of the Newcastle penal settlement from 1816 - 1818, illuminating a forgotten character and a neglected aspect of Australia's early colonial history. Our argument explores two core strands. First, we consider Wallis' reputation and role as the primary architect of the colony's first secondary punishment regime. Second, we assess his influence in shaping the nature of th…
Fatal Invention
Fatal Invention
The 'Knotted Hands that Set Us High
Although labour and economic perspectives now seem integral to the study of convict Australia, for much of the twentieth century labour historians seemed to find the subject distinctly unprofitable and inappropriate. Most histories tended towards a reductive view of convict work as inherently brutal and exploitative, while the key questions revolved around the moral character of the convicts and the possible cultural legacies of the convict era. …
Exposing an exposé
In March 2010, the NSW Legislative Council passed a remarkable motion demanding the release of archival records relating to the death of the bushranger, “Captain Thunderbolt”, who was shot by police in the New England (NSW) in May 1870. The interest in this 140-year-old episode from the colonial past reflects a suspicion that the police shot the wrong man in 1870 and that the colonial authorities engaged in a high-level conspiracy to conceal this…
Australian Convict Sites and the Heritage of Adaptation
The Australian Government's successful nomination of eleven ‘convict sites’ for World Heritage listing has again highlighted complex relationships between history and heritage. This article considers one convict site excluded from the nomination—the Coal River Heritage Precinct in the heart of Newcastle (NSW). While the site falls short of fulfilling conventional heritage criteria, the material remains having been so seriously eroded, its histori…
Movement Intersectionality
Intersectional analysis need not focus solely on differences within or between identity-based groups. Using intersectionality for cross movement mobilization reveals that, contrary to criticism for being divisive, attention to intersecting identities has the potential to create solidarity and cohesion. In this article, we elaborate this argument with a case study of the intersection of race, gender, and disability in genetic technologies as well …
New South Wales Penal Settlements and the Transformation of Secondary Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire
This paper uses a comprehensive survey of sentencing patterns and penal regulations to demonstrate the collapse of internal transportation in the colony of New South Wales into a system of extra-penal labour. It argues that a combination of judicial exigencies, local regulations, and creative misinterpretations of metropolitan penal reform turned the penal outpost established at Newcastle in 1804 into an experiment of interest to local and metrop…
Sociology (34 obras) · History (29 obras) · Political science (28 obras) · Law (26 obras) · Australian History and Society (19 obras) · History (19 obras) · Law (19 obras) · Convict (15 obras) · Archaeology (14 obras) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade (12 obras)