Phd Scholarship Opportunity

**The Opportunity**

The scholarship comprises:

- full fee waiver (for 3.5 years)
- opportunities for paid tutoring (typically 1-2 days a week in-semester)
- a minimum of $12,000 AUD in travel and research expenses
- _The project aims to bring advances in human-computer interaction to the forefront of online justice systems. We will centre the needs and experiences of litigants in designing effective systems and processes and developing a set of design principles, methods, and technologies for online hearings. This work tackles the challenge of creating systems consistent with legal standards acceptable to justice institutions and actors and inclusive of all stakeholders, particularly people with disabilities. Achieving these aims requires fundamental innovations in interaction design methods bespoke for the legal context, demonstrating their utility and understanding their potential in broader legal processes.

The overall project (of which the PhD project is a component) will achieve this through the pursuit of four objectives:

- Exploring how legal communication technology can support and disadvantage participants in a legal process, including those with a disability, and integrating this understanding into a legal communication technology design process.
- Developing new participatory tools for collaborative process design that address the power dynamics of participants and facilitate ideation and real-time prototyping of remote hearing processes.
- Engaging in collaborative process and system design for online hearings and evaluate the potential of technologies to realise more open, effective and participatory legal processes.
- Understanding how novel legal communication technologies can influence legal processes and identify rules and principles for their fair use that can be operationalised in legal design.

**The PhD project: Legal design for online hearing processes**
- Undertake legal research on the procedures and processes used for online hearings in Australia and internationally, and innovations in comparable jurisdictions.
- Conduct a review of evidence of the physical, social, interactional, and psychological contextual factors that are likely to impact on the experiences of online justice stakeholders.
- Investigate the experiences and perspectives of litigants, advocates and justice institution officials, and engage in targeted observation of both online and physical tribunals.
- Work as part of a team to prototype and evaluate tools designed to enhance online hearings to better meet the diverse needs of hearing participants, advocates, decision-makers and support staff.
- Contribute to the development of mock online hearings, our project’s approach to understanding decision-making processes in action and the impacts of socio-technical digital justice design on those processes.

The PhD project will develop the evidence base needed to support a better understanding of this important topic. Support is available for the research approach to be socio-legal, empirical, transdisciplinary and comparative. Comparison across Australian and international jurisdictions will be encouraged.

**Additional benefits**
- support for attendance at local and international conferences;
- membership of the Action Lab early career network of PhD and post-doctoral scholars; and
- support for research visits to collaborator sites.

The successful applicant will have:

- Qualifications comprising one or more of:

- a bachelor’s honours degree in a relevant discipline (Law, Psychology, Social Science), which includes a research thesis or project, with an overall average grade equivalent to a First Class Honours

OR- a master's degree in a relevant discipline (e.g., Law, Psychology, Social Science) which includes a research thesis or project, with a minimum overall average grade equivalent to a First Class Honours

OR- a qualification, or combination of qualifications and relevant professional experience, deemed equivalent by the Monash Graduate Research Committee.
- strong written and verbal communication skills
- familiarity, expertise and/or interest in empirical research methods and preparedness to further develop these skills; and
- research and/or practical experience relevant to the research topic (this could include but is not limited to working as a lawyer or in a community legal service setting).

**Submit an Expression of Interest (EOI)**

Please request a confirmation of receipt to ensure that your EOI will be considered. Shortlisted applicants will be invited to an interview by 31 March 2025.

EOIs should include the following attachments:

- a cover letter (two A4 pages maximum) that includes a statement of the applicant’s suitability for and interest in the research;
- a curriculum vitae, including any relevant work experience;
- a copy of academic transcripts for all higher education qualifications and
- contact details of two referees (at least one academic referee).

**Applications Close**:Frida