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(2022)ThesisThis thesis develops the concept of Critical Disability Aesthetics. Critical Disability Aesthetics extends upon the current conceptualisation of Disability Aesthetics developed by Tobin Siebers. I argue that Disability Aesthetics adheres to a restrictive definition of the term aesthetics anchored in the judgement of beauty, whilst Critical Disability Aesthetics explores the broader sense of aesthetics as a sensory-affective process. This framework provides a conceptual grounding for a practice-based exploration of the embodied dimensions of lived experience. As an artist with achondroplasia dwarfism, I explore the experience of corporeal difference from a subjective position. My practice examines the framing of disability but also the embodied social interactions of a female dwarf. In my art practice I deploy different media to elaborate various dimensions of this experience, beginning with a series of photographs, “Take a Look at THAT!”, documenting the micro aggressions that confront a person with dwarfism in the act of walking down the street. Then a sculptural work, Little Big Woman: Condescension, that considers the dynamics of an objectifying gaze. From these works, I move into practice that embodies unfolding psychosocial dynamics in a public environment. In Awkward Conversations I offer members of the public the opportunity to walk with me in public. In the Virtual Reality experience, Being Debra, I construct a first-person narrative whereby the story unfolds from my embodied perspective – both in the present and in a series of flashbacks. The thesis demonstrates via this body of artwork, how Critical Disability Aesthetics can advance understanding of the subjective and intersubjective experience of ‘disability’, which is not a quality of the subject but rather, arises within a social nexus.
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(2022)ThesisVideo game trailers are an effective promotional form of intermediation that enables audiences to navigate and engage with old and new media. Although video game trailers function as advertisements designed to sell a game, they are also stories that provoke social media commentary and debate. Trailers aim to draw the viewer in, convey sound and imagery, and evoke an involuntary reaction of excitement and awe. In this thesis, I will be using the games Fallout 4, Watch Dogs 2, and Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate. In the case studies, I investigate how viewers make sense of the promotional and storytelling aspects of video game trailers. I examine how video game trailers have the potential to arouse emotions and interest before viewers even play the game. Trailers provide an insight into the basic gameplay, not only into the gameplay but also into the story and the characters (protagonists and antagonists). They show audiences the video game theme genre and provide the viewer with a visual and auditory tool to entice possession. This project explores these themes, showing how video game trailers have an inherited cinematic quality but also how trailers actually spend little time presenting actual gameplay. There is a clear connection with movie trailers, teasing the events that will take place in the game and asking the player what will happen next. In this study, I used the methods of narrative analysis and textual analysis to analyse comments from YouTube, Facebook, and a survey of video gamers. The textual analysis of the trailers raises questions of representation and authenticity. In this research, I identified an incongruity between the representation of the core features of a game and the promotion of those features in the trailer. The narrative analysis of the trailers focused on storytelling and emplotment in the trailers. A key theme that has emerged from the analysis is that superheroes engage in vigilantism, a justifiable form of self-administered violence. Gamers may feel at ease with the violence used to correct perceived injustices. There is potential for gamers to consider the moral grey area of vigilante violence and romanticised vigilantism. With their enhanced ability to simulate complex interactive narratives for actual and simulated authenticity, video games offer a sophisticated engagement with players that contributes significantly to their widespread and universal support. The role of culturally created characters in the experience of playing a video game helps stimulate philosophical research. I explore whether normative audience expectations can speed up the development of cultural expectations about the relationship between the player and the narrative of the game and its audience. In this context, I examine case study video game trailers and ask what it means to revise our understanding of the relationship between power, law, and morality while playing the game. I examine and critique how the narrative, and thus the mechanics of a specific game, shapes our understanding of connection, power, law, or morality; I contend that prestige reflects normative privilege and law.
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(2022)ThesisSparked by the interesting observation of non-native acquisition of heritage languages despite early and continuous exposure, the study of heritage languages has endeavoured to explore the end results of heritage language acquisition while mostly neglecting the pathway that heritage speakers undergo before arriving in that state. This study investigated how the heritage language develops and is maintained over primary school years in heritage speakers of Korean who grow up in Australia. Linguistic abilities in Korean of 243 heritage speakers of Korean of primary school age in Australia, compared to their school-year-level-matched native speakers of Korean in the Republic of Korean (South Korea), have been examined in the three broad linguistic areas of the sound system, lexis and grammar with a battery of tasks. The results of the tasks indicated that the heritage speakers generally fell behind the native speakers in the linguistic abilities in Korean examined but their gap to the native speaker controls differed between the linguistic areas examined. Regarding the sound system, the heritage speakers did not show reliably lower perception of speech sounds in Korean than those of the native speakers, and their speech sound perception, which is supposed to have developed and been stabilised in early childhood, appeared to be retained well over primary school years. On the contrary, they exhibited a great shortfall in lexical knowledge in Korean compared to their native speaker peers, and this gap appeared to widen from the middle primary school year levels where the lexical knowledge of the native speakers expands explosively. In comparison, their linguistic abilities in grammar exhibited a varying degree of divergence to the native speaker norms by linguistic aspect. The results suggested that they acquired basic syntactic structures and semantic features that develop early in first language acquisition of Korean to a level comparable to that of their native speaker peers and their understanding of sentences made of such linguistic aspects was maintained well over the primary school period. In contrast, they exhibited a considerable delay in the acquisition of certain grammatical aspects that are mastered relatively late by the native speakers, and the heritage speakers’ acquisition of these aspects did not seem to progress greatly over primary school years. They also showed a substantial gap to the native speaker controls in understanding passive sentences and scrambled active sentences, and this gap is likely to have arisen from their greater processing difficulty. Mostly paralleling the linguistic abilities of adult heritage speakers attested in previous research, the results of this study underline that the linguistic abilities in Korean of heritage speakers of Korean in Australia diverge from their (age- or) school-year-level-appropriate native norms already in their primary school years. Although the linguistic aspects that are mastered early in first language acquisition such as phoneme distinction or basic syntactic structures seem to be acquired to a level comparable to their school-year-level-appropriate native norms and be retained well over the first half of their compulsory schooling, the linguistic abilities that should develop further through primary school years show signs of stagnation (if not attrition) and such signs are much more prominent at the middle primary school year levels. This implies that in Australia where EnglishKorean bilingual education programs are not readily accessible to heritage speakers of Korean, it will be extremely difficult for them to develop high proficiency in Korean which requires mastery of complex grammatical aspects and extensive vocabulary. The results of this study not only alarm the Korean ethnolinguistic community in Australia and other stakeholders about the level of Korean language abilities developed and maintained by the heritage speakers in primary school years, but also provide detailed information on in which linguistic aspects they may have greater delays in the development, by which degree they show such delays and when the delays are likely to intensify over the course of primary school years.
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(2022)ThesisThis thesis examines a trend in contemporary experimentation with fictional form that seeks to cross medial boundaries, drawing digital qualities into the print medium and vice versa. In the creative component, a novel entitled alt.holiday, I explore this sort of transmedial experimentation by remediating digital modes of communication for a print-based narrative. The plot follows a diverse group of characters drawn together in their search for the exit file – a document rumoured to contain the only suicide method guaranteed to result in a fatality. They know each other only by the handles they use in an online forum dedicated to the search. Each character must navigate their own lives while scouring the internet for traces of this urban legend that may or may not prove real. This component of the thesis exemplifies some of the ways in which transmedial explorations can manifest new forms of information excess, a subject further extrapolated in the dissertation.In the dissertation, I argue that the prominent genre of the encyclopaedic novel, exemplified by Gravity’s Rainbow, has undergone cultural and transmedial shifts as a narrative form that have not been addressed in current scholarship. These shifts are emblematic of dramatic changes in technology that have altered the ways in which we store and disseminate information in the digital age. The urge to document, the excess of information, and the sense of paranoia which characterize encyclopaedic narratives, have all been reoriented by these changes, and found expression in media other than print. I demonstrate this trajectory first by examining the ways that Mark Z. Danielewski’s encyclopaedic novel House of Leaves, straddles the analogue/digital boundary. Published in 2000 at a moment when the internet had begun to transform our relationship to knowledge, this book carries the trace of both older analogue and newer digital methods of sorting and storing information. Following this, I examine The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, a videogame that shows many of the traits of encyclopaedic novels, but reconfigured for an interactive, virtual world that players must navigate. In much of the scholarship on encyclopaedic narrative form, the key elements are not medium-specific, and so, while allowing that different media have methods available to them, the ultimate effects of these key elements are the same across the media I explore. This examination opens up greater possibilities for discussions of encyclopaedic narrative form.
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(2022)ThesisFor decades, feminists at Australian universities have fought to publicise and politicise the issue of campus sexual violence. These efforts have recently come to fruition, with universities publicly acknowledging the problem and undertaking various institutional reforms. However, there has been little scholarly attention paid to political struggles over sexual violence within universities. This thesis critically examines the politics of feminist activism against sexual violence at Australian university campuses. It situates this activism against the backdrop of the neoliberalisation of Australian universities, to reveal how feminists have challenged – and at times, acted in complicity with – these transformations in the landscape of Australian higher education. This analysis is both historical, drawing on archival material relating to the history of campus feminist politics, and contemporary, using data from interviews with students currently engaged in organising against sexual violence. It explores the strategies and tactics adopted by feminist collectives, the constraints on feminist mobilisation in the neoliberal university, and the shortcomings of these movements. This thesis makes two original contributions to knowledge. Firstly, it extends existing analyses of university sexual violence and contributes to the growing body of scholarship on this topic. Research on campus sexual violence in Australia has so far focused on policy analysis and prevalence data. While this provides an important basis for evaluating the scope of the problem and potential remedies, it is largely disconnected from political struggles over institutional responses to sexual violence, a gap this thesis seeks to fill. I offer an analysis of the historical and contemporary struggles that have created the conditions for institutional change, as well as the complex ways in which the neoliberal university undermines and constrains oppositional movements. Secondly, this thesis makes a theoretical contribution to the field of New and Feminist Institutionalism. It critically intervenes in the institutionalist field, drawing greater attention to the roles of macro-social contexts and actors in the form of social movements in processes of institutional change and proposing a framework that foregrounds these aspects of institutional politics. The findings of this research reveal significant limitations in Australian universities’ responses to sexual violence, with their actions falling short of both student demands and expert recommendations. I argue that these actions have largely functioned to consolidate managerial power and mitigate reputational risk, in doing so narrowing the space of political contestation. My analysis further illuminates the specific institutional constraints that bear upon student feminist organisers within the neoliberal university. This analysis offers strategic insights into feminist engagement with institutions, suggesting that student movements must develop the capacity to disrupt processes of institutional reproduction and challenge the reformist approach adopted by universities. A transformative response to campus sexual violence, I argue, will require broader and better-organised coalitions of staff and students in order to collectively challenge and overcome these constraints.
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(2022)ThesisAs collaborative agents are implemented within everyday environments and the workforce, user trust in these agents becomes critical to consider. Trust affects user decision making, rendering it an essential component to consider when designing for successful Human-Agent Collaboration (HAC). The purpose of this work is to investigate the relationship between user trust and decision making with the overall aim of providing a trust calibration methodology to achieve the goals and optimise the outcomes of HAC. Recommender systems are used as a testbed for investigation, offering insight on human collaboration with dyadic decision domains. Four studies are conducted and include in-person, online, and simulation experiments. The first study provides evidence of a relationship between user perception of a collaborative agent and trust. Outcomes of the second study demonstrate that initial trust can be used to predict task outcome during HAC, with Signal Detection Theory (SDT) introduced as a method to interpret user decision making in-task. The third study provides evidence to suggest that the implementation of different features within a single agent's interface influences user perception and trust, subsequently impacting outcomes of HAC. Finally, a computational trust calibration methodology harnessing a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) model and SDT is presented and assessed, providing an improved understanding of the mechanisms governing user trust and its relationship with decision making and collaborative task performance during HAC. The contributions from this work address important gaps within the HAC literature. The implications of the proposed methodology and its application to alternative domains are identified and discussed.
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(2022)ThesisThis study was conducted to increase our understanding of residents’ place attachment within residential outdoor environments in urban China. There were three aims for this study: to investigate how residents develop place attachment within residential outdoor environments through their experiences of these settings; to examine the role of the physical environment in residents’ place attachment within residential outdoor environments; and to identify the relationship between the Chinese socio-cultural context and place attachment, adding the evidence in the Chinese context to the existing literature on place attachment that mainly focuses on the Western context. Place attachment as an affective bond between people and place has a positive impact on people’s health and well-being. Residential areas are important places in people’s everyday life and there is a large body of research on residential attachment. Residential outdoor environments have been proven to play a role in residential place attachment, but the mechanics of place attachment within residential outdoor environments are not known. This study investigates residents’ experience of the outdoor environments to which they are attached to identify the significant physical characteristics and social dimensions that may contribute to place attachment. Residential neighbourhoods in urban China have witnessed great change over the last forty years due to rapid urbanisation and currently there are two typical residential models in urban China: one, mid-rise apartment blocks with unrestricted street patterns built before 2000; the other, high-rise towers in gated communities built in the past 20 years. Residential outdoor environments are traditionally designed to provide opportunities for physical activities and social interaction, but aestheticization of outdoor environments has become a major selling point and an important indicator for evaluating the quality of newly built settlements in China. This dilemma has put great pressure on landscape urban design to provide quality residential outdoor environments. This study used a comparative case study of the two residential models in Qingdao, China, and three methods were used: semi-structured interviews with 20 adult residents for each case, 40 in total; a questionnaire with the participants involved in the interviews; and participant observation of outdoor environments. Theories of place attachment, social ecological perspective, and urban open space studies provide the conceptual framework for this study. The findings reveal that place attachment within residential outdoor environments can be rooted in social ties and can also stem from the physical attributes of the environment. For the former, residents can ascribe attachment to the place through lengthy person-environment interaction or because of environmental beauty and distinctiveness. For the latter, residents can be attached to the place that symbolises their social group or where they have important personal memories. The findings also identify the key attributes of the physical environment that contribute to place attachment. The relationship between the Chinese socio-cultural context and place attachment is also identified in terms of the physical characteristics as well as social dimensions. This study makes theoretical contributions to place attachment theory. It throws light on the understanding of the role and functions of the physical environment in place attachment and increases our understanding of how place attachment manifests in the Chinese context. It also provides design recommendations for landscape architects and planners to create and construct supportive residential outdoor environments in urban China, which has practical implications.
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(2022)ThesisCollaboration is a routine part of practice in social service organisations, including those in non-government domestic and family violence (DFV) services. Like other aspects of practice, the ways collaborations occur and their effectiveness matter to service delivery outcomes and practitioners’ experiences of their work and their sense of efficacy. This thesis deepens understanding of the nature and motivation for collaboration and investigates what makes collaborations effective, using the perceptions and experiences of DFV practitioners who collaborate in their daily work. The study draws together insights from resource dependence theory, interorganisational network theory, and feminist social work theory. It utilises data that was collected using a sequential mixed method approach, designed to capture practitioners’ accounts and experiences of collaborating in the specific context of DFV services in New South Wales. The first stage involved case studies of three DFV service organisations. The case studies explored how practitioners experience and perceive collaboration, their motivations for collaborating, the forms collaborations take, how organisations and practitioners evaluate effectiveness, and the factors contributing to success. The second stage involved a quantitative survey that supplied information on collaborations, including frequencies of motivations and forms, various internal and external factors, and their correlations with the perceived effectiveness of collaboration. The study delivers a range of significant results that concern many aspects of working in the sector, including trust, formal and informal approaches to evaluation, and partner selection strategies. Reported results demonstrate that collaborations are most frequently motivated by the desire to provide the best possible quality of services to clients. Practitioners frequently understand collaboration as a referral of a client to a partner organisation as they focus their efforts on service delivery. The study showed that in successful collaborations, interpersonal ties play a crucial role in establishing and maintaining them, with trustful and mutually beneficial relationships being perceived by practitioners as the most effective. The study argues that adherence to feminist values and promoting relational skills can be the key to effective collaboration between DFV services.
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(2022)ThesisIt is held in consensus worldwide that targeted professional development and learning (PDL) approaches should be provided for in-service teachers at different career stages. This research aims to add to the paucity of research that explores what PDL approaches are best suited for in-service teachers at different career stages. By integrating personal and environmental factors encompassing working years, government certification, teachers’ honorary reputations, and leadership positions, this study proposes a three-career-stage division of in-service teachers in China: beginning teachers, experienced teachers, and expert teachers. In examining the main question of what PDL approaches are best suited for in-service teachers at three career stages, various contextual factors need to be considered: firstly, discovering what various stakeholders such as government, teacher educators, and in-service teachers, perceive to be the best PDL approaches for that purpose; secondly, discovering which of these work to that effect. These main points are critically investigated by looking at two research questions: Research Question 1: What PDL approaches are best suited for in-service teachers at three career stages according to the perceptions of the stakeholders, including government, teacher educators, and in-service teachers? Research Question 2: How are these PDL approaches that are thought to be best suited for in-service teachers at three career stages by the stakeholders effective? The methodology, a two-stage qualitative study, was used to address the research questions. The first stage combined interview data with document analysis to answer Research Question 1. All the data from various sources were critically analysed and then pieced together to determine what PDL approaches were thought by all the stakeholders to be best suited for in-service teachers at three career stages. To address Research Question 2, the second stage was to explore how these identified PDL approaches were effective. This study adopted the perspective of teacher knowledge building (TKB) to investigate the effectiveness of identified PDL approaches through teachers' self-reported knowledge changes. This research conceptualises that TKB is a process wherein teachers build new knowledge through the continuous, dynamic, multi-faceted, multi-layered interaction and dialogue among theoretical, practical, explicit, and tacit knowledge through the action of problem solving. However, the TKB processes at various stages may show different characteristics concerning approaches, mechanisms, and facilitating conditions. It is the hypothetical conception that this research attempts to confirm. The results indicate that the identified PDL approaches are suitable for beginning teachers, experienced teachers, and expert teachers respectively because they could promote TKB when properly designed to provide high-quality facilitating conditions. The similarities and differences in the approaches, mechanisms, and facilitating conditions to knowledge building of teachers at different career stages were reported and discussed. A composite model was then developed to present TKB at all three career stages based on cross-case analysis. This research provides promising approaches for designing effective PDL approaches for various stages of in-service teachers, and expands the knowledge base concerning TKB, practical knowledge, and learning sciences.
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(2022)ThesisThis research proposes practice-based models for examining the perceptions of 3D printing as entrepreneurial, accessible and environmentally sustainable. The dissertation and practice-based research argue that these popular perceptions limit the potential of 3D printing, and maker culture more generally, because of their overemphasis of human agency in maker culture. The research contends that such perceptions have arisen because of misunderstandings about the agency of the materials and technologies engaged in 3D printing networks, the failure of maker culture to make 3D printing accessible to an audience beyond the typical readership of maker magazines, and the failure to account for the significant environmental dangers of the plastic filament that construct 3D printed objects. Tracing maker culture’s initial commitment to anti-consumerist principles that no longer prevail – DIY culture of the 1960s and 70s and hacker culture of the 1980s and 90s – the practice of 3D printing has instead become a black box. In this research, I define black boxes as objects, systems, or processes whose inner workings become hidden because of their own success and so, black boxes are typically understood by their inputs and outputs. To open up the black box of 3D printing, the research reflects on a series of material experiments with 3D printing that are informed by critical making, co-design and speculative critical design within an Actor-Network Theory (ANT) framework. Through the ANT concept of generalised symmetry the research argues for the importance of ascribing agency to the more-than human actants in the maker practice networks of 3D printing, and provides documentation of the critical making project titled Dissolvable Furniture as a model. An investigation of contemporary challenges to participating in maker culture, framed within the ANT concept of translation, was conducted through online co-design workshops on 3D printing and identified barriers to inclusive maker culture. Subsequent to the workshops further investigation of the agency of 3D printing materials, titled Co-created Ceramic Objects, provides a model for the disposal of PLA through incineration in a kiln. The final exploration of a model for un-black boxing 3D printing, specifically addressing claims that PLA is environmentally sustainable, demanded a provocation that unsettled complacency about the dangers of plastic. Based on extensive research on the waste management practices of plastics the research documents the practice-based model of the speculative critical design titled Biorecycling Machine. These projects address the long-term implications of entrepreneurial, accessible and environmentally sustainable practices of maker culture and interrupt the individualism at the core of much debate in maker movement groups by reframing maker practices as material–semiotic constellations of interactions of human and more-than-human actants that are constantly in flux. The research concludes with recommendations for areas requiring further study, including the need for better protection of the intellectual property of makers, the necessity of creating more accessible maker cultures, and the urgent need to address the environmental dangers of 3D printing materials.