LAWS651 - Migration Law Research Thesis

Year

Credit points

Campus offering

Unit rationale, description and aim

A defining characteristic of modern-day migration law and practice is not merely specialised content knowledge, but also the ability to draw upon evidence to revise that knowledge and in so doing enhance and innovate professional practice. Research-informed decision making is now a term widely used across a range of contexts and it is therefore critical for practitioners to understand what constitutes valid research, how it has been produced, and in what ways such research can be applied. By fully understanding and utilising research, migration law practitioners and scholars can be leaders in their field and have a lasting impact on the future.

The aim of this unit is to build upon the Migration Law Research Paper unit in order to enable students in the postgraduate course who are otherwise qualified to do so to undertake a thesis enabling them to progress to a PhD Program in the Faculty of Law and Business in the field of migration law and practice.

Learning outcomes

To successfully complete this unit you will be able to demonstrate you have achieved the learning outcomes (LO) detailed in the below table.

Each outcome is informed by a number of graduate capabilities (GC) to ensure your work in this, and every unit, is part of a larger goal of graduating from ACU with the attributes of insight, empathy, imagination and impact.

Explore the graduate capabilities.

Content

Topics will include:

Learning and teaching strategy and rationale

This unit will be offered by way of personal supervision from a designated academic. Supervision will be provided online and/or in person as needed. The learning and teaching and assessment strategies include a range of approaches to support your learning such as reading, reflection, online discussion, webinars, case studies podcasts, workshops, self-directed learning tasks and assignments.

This is a 40-credit point unit and has been designed to ensure that the time needed to complete the required volume of learning to the requisite standard is approximately 400 hours in total.

Representative texts and references

Representative texts and references

Booth, A., Papaioannou, D., & Sutton, A. (2016). Systematic approaches to a successful literature review (2nd ed.). Sage.

Bryman, A. (2016). Social research methods. Oxford University Press.

Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S., (2008). Collecting and interpreting qualitative materials. Sage

Denzin, N. K., Lincoln, Y. S., & Smith, L. T. (Eds.). (2008). Handbook of critical and indigenous methodologies. Sage.

Fink, A. (2013). Conducting research literature reviews: From the internet to paper (4th ed.). Sage.

Hobson, C., & McCartan, K. (2015). Real world research (5th ed.). Wiley.

Mills, G. E. (2014). Action research: A guide for the teacher research. (5th ed.). Pearson.