Filters
Availability
Publication Year
Resource Type
Faculty
School/Institute
Publication Search Results
Sort
Results per page
1 - 10 of 23
-
(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.
-
(2022)ThesisIn recent years, in light of educational changes such as pedagogical shifts, technological development and educational reforms, language teachers are increasingly being expected to develop their own language learning and teaching materials. However, there are very few empirical studies investigating language teachers’ experiences as materials developers, with the exception of studies by Carabantes and Paran (2022) and Banegas, Corrales and Poole (2020). This study draws upon the ecological perspective (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) and the concept of trajectory from the theory of Communities of Practice (Wenger, 1999) to understand language teachers’ experiences while they are playing the role of materials developers in China. The study employs a multimethod approach, and consists of two stages. In the first stage I interviewed 15 language teachers who had developed or were developing materials, to gain a broad understanding of their experiences influenced by different layers of context. In the second stage I focused on language teachers’ developmental trajectories from a chronological point of view by interviewing four language teachers who were developing a textbook in a materials development group, as well as collecting their WeChat conversations with me and their personal documents related to developing the textbook. The findings show that language teachers who were playing the role of materials developers encountered challenges in relation to three levels of context (the macro, meso and micro levels), and that to cope with these challenges they employed various strategies involving both personal and contextual resources. The study concludes that language teachers who develop materials gain professional development through excising their agency to learn (de Laurentiis Brandão, 2018) and respond to the challenges they experience. The findings enrich our understanding of language teachers’ professional development while they are playing the role of materials developers by highlighting the interplay between the individual teachers and different layers of context, and between their past, present and future identities. The study offers implications for language teacher professional development, for language teachers as materials developers, and for materials development.
-
(2022)ThesisThis thesis explores how Iranian filmmakers have applied elements from Persian culture to the horror genre. Although horror films have not often been present in the rich Iranian cinematic tradition due in part to strict censorship laws following the 1979 revolution, I argue that a small group of directors has made productive and provocative use of the genre. The four chapters consist of close readings of horror films: I examine Fereydoun Jeyrani’s Parkway (2007), Mohammad Hossein Latifi’s Girls’ Dormitory (Khoabgah-e Dokhtaran, 2004), Shahram Mokri’s Fish and Cat (Mahi va Gorbeh, 2013), and Mani Haghighi’s Pig (Khuk, 2018). The close readings are guided by the following research questions: How do themes and concepts from Persian culture and history (cinematic and otherwise) interact with Western generic conventions in Iranian horror cinema? What does the use of concepts from Persian culture in horror films contribute to an understanding of the genre worldwide? How does the generic lens of horror contribute to new understandings of contemporary Iranian cinema? The two chapters on Parkway and Girls’ Dormitory comprise the first section of the thesis, entitled ‘Popular Shocks.’ This section focuses on two films with relative success at the domestic box office but little popularity with international audiences. In contrast, the second section, entitled ‘Frights at the Festival,’ discusses Fish and Cat and Pig, which did receive releases and critical attention at Western festivals. These festivals have long been important sites for the distribution of Iranian films to international audiences. Whereas festival films and popular cinema have usually been discussed separately in scholarship, I show how a focus on horror allows for a bridging of the gap between popular cinema and festival films, since Iranian filmmakers have used the genre to produce noteworthy films in both categories. The films discussed in the two sections also highlight how the particularities of the Iranian context facilitate reconsideration of the strengths and limitations of widely discussed theorisations of horror. I argue that these films exemplify the unique exchange between Persian cultural traditions and the tropes and aesthetics of the horror film.
-
(2022)ThesisThis thesis contributes to the growing international commitment to countering transnational terrorism. It undertakes an empirical investigation of the language of violent extremism by using a forensic linguistic lens, innovatively combined with the Appraisal and Affiliation frameworks from Systemic Functional Linguistics. These frameworks offer tools for understanding the discursive nature of the language of extremism, including how terrorists attempt to incite violence and threaten their audiences through their evaluative language, and how they position key social bonds in their discourse. The study involved a specialised corpus of 20 terrorist public statements produced by four terrorists from two of the most lethal, transnational terrorist ideologies: jihadism and far-right extremism. The aim was to explore the patterns of a set of discursive features that mark a violent extremist’s language and to investigate two aspects of threat – or alternatively alarming, aggrieving and intimidating content – in these statements: incitement to violence and communicated threats. The forensic findings regarding the authors’ features that mark their extremist language showed relatively frequent discursive themes, conceptual burstiness, and repeated, attitudinally loaded lexical items. The authors’ ‘appraisal signature’ (i.e. evaluative style) revealed their underlying ideological schemas, moral reasoning, and enactment of (dis)affiliation when inciting violence and expressing threats. The analysis of the incitement texts identified two main affiliation strategies: COMMUNION, aimed at forging alignments around shared bonds with potential incitees, and ALIENATION, aimed at legitimating disalignments with negatively evaluated outgroups. In the threat texts the disaffiliation strategies identified had three discursive functions: ethical manipulation, deontic retribution, and the boulomaic function. The mixed method approach adopted in this study has the key benefit of enhancing our understanding of the attitudinal and moral positioning that occurs in terrorist incitement and threat texts. It also has a number of potential applied uses in establishing suspect engagement in terrorist activity, classifying terrorist texts, terrorism justification, and providing a diagnostic for examining the performance of personal and relational identities.
-
(2022)ThesisFollowing the 1857-1858 Mutiny and its expression of Indian hostility to British rule, the British response included the formal transition of power, in 1858, from the British East India Company to the Crown. A significant increase in the size of the British population - driven by an increase in the number of British soldiers stationed in India - accompanied this shift in governance. The Mutiny, for the first time, required British authorities and the British public to deal with a significant number of British widows. These women were a stark visual reminder of personal and national vulnerability and of Britain's military failure. The subsequent four decades saw the consolidation of, and the growth in opposition to, British authority in India, and the fashioning of Britain's imperial narrative. Articulations of the purpose of British rule of India focused on Britain's advanced status, its strength (economically, legally, politically, educationally, and morally), and on the benefits India, in turn, would derive from British rule. The success of the narrative required the British in India to exemplify this purpose, status, and strength. This thesis argues that British women widowed in India between 1860 and 1900 were emblematic of the vulnerability, failure, and cost of Britain's presence in India. The fact of their widowhood and their behaviour while in India could tarnish, if not threaten, Britain's narrative of superiority by their critique of British rule, and by their indigence, lack of industry or immorality. An analysis is made of the cultural expectations of widows and the manner in which fiction, advice manuals, consolatory literature and policy marked the boundaries of acceptable behaviour and set the parameters to 'manage' widows. This is complemented by close research of the experiences of a cohort of 260 British women widowed in India between 1860 and 1900. The exploration of the interplay between societal expectations and the ways in which widows accepted, accommodated, adapted, or exploited these expectations illuminates our understanding of gender in British imperialism. This study concludes that while a few widows openly challenged societal expectations and conventions, or simply operated outside them feeling little obligation to model imperial behaviour, most widows found elements of the conventions sufficiently useful and elastic to forge lives of purpose and meaning.
-
(2022)ThesisThis study aimed to develop theoretical and practical understandings of how regional disparities influenced teacher characteristics (i.e., knowledge, qualification, and teaching experience), beliefs, and practices in supporting the behaviours of students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) receiving special education services in China. In recent decades, the Chinese government has proposed policies to ensure equity and quality education for all children across the country. However, there is a considerable gap in the quality of education between the developed areas (i.e., Eastern China) and less-developed areas (i.e., Western China) in China. Indeed, some studies about Chinese special education provision have been conducted in the developed and urban regions in Eastern China, but there is no research to explore the quality of special education in remote or rural areas of China. Moreover, although many studies have explored teachers’ beliefs about the education provision for students with ASD and inclusive education, no studies have investigated how teachers’ characteristics and beliefs influence their use of evidence-based practices (EBPs) to support the behaviours of students with ASD in the Chinese context. Therefore, this study used Western China as a case to explore how teacher quality in less-developed regions influenced their teaching practices and students’ behavioural outcomes. A qualitative approach was adopted for the study. A total of 23 teachers currently working at six special education institutions (two non-government services and four government special education schools) across Yunnan, Qinghai, and Shaanxi provinces, China participated in the research. Semi-structured interviews and classroom observations were used to collect field data. The thematic analysis was conducted under the interpretive or constructivist paradigm to analyse how teacher characteristics, beliefs, and practices were interrelated. The research results indicated that teachers’ characteristics, curriculum design, the application difficulties of interventions, potential outcomes of each EBP, the severity of ASD, and the context could all influence how teachers chose and implemented EBPs to support student behaviours. Analysis revealed an interrelationship among teachers’ characteristics, beliefs, and practices. The findings also showed vast differences in teacher quality between non-government services and government special education schools. Most teachers in the study lacked the knowledge and skills to meet the needs of students with ASD, and some even held negative beliefs about the education provision of these students. Therefore, a shortage of qualified special education teachers in remote or rural areas was revealed to be a significant issue that could potentially lead to educational inequity in China. According to the theoretical framework developed from Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological theory and Buehl and Beck’s (2014) model of teachers’ beliefs, the study found that some external factors, including school conditions, national curriculum, and cultural and socio-economic factors, played significant roles in influencing teachers’ beliefs and practices in behavioural support. This study is the first research study to explore teachers’ beliefs and practices in behavioural support for students with ASD in remote and rural areas of China. A new theoretical model was developed from the research. This study provides valuable practical implications, particularly around informing national government policy reform to highlight the importance of creating national autism-specific curriculum standards. The findings also have international values, as they can inform governments worldwide to promote the equity and quality of education for all students in remote and rural areas. The limitations of the study and the future research directions are also provided in the thesis.
-
(2021)ThesisThe heart has long been a recurrent motif in paintings, drawings and sculptures, yet its actual physiological functioning is rarely represented. Heartbeats (the contractions of the heart) and the pulse (the force of blood flow through the arteries) are signs that show the work it does rather than depict the heart per se. Technoscientific advances in monitoring heartbeats and pulses in the nineteenth century—such as René Laennec’s stethoscope, Étienne-Jules Marey’s sphygmograph and chronophotograph, and Willem Einthoven’s electrocardiograph—transformed the movements of the heart into audible and visual representations and in turn, transformed humans into technological entities. Artists would later recognize in the language of these scientific technologies a way of mingling the inner with the outer, the physical with the technological, and data with flesh. Artworks using heartbeats were most importantly manifested in media arts, conceptual art, works in music and sound, installations and performances starting in the late 1950s, with an increasing frequency to the present. Scientific and medical instrumentation combined with time-based media and events (texts, durational performances, film, video, audio, digital technologies, etc.) in important works by Yoko Ono, Mark Boyle, Joan Hills, Heinz Mack, Brian O’Doherty, Allan Kaprow, Éliane Radigue, Jean Dupuy, Linda Montano and Teresa Burga incorporated heartbeats and pulses, a legacy continued by Catherine Richards, Mona Hatoum, Sasaki, Christian Boltanski, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, among other artists. These works reveal the heartbeat as a catalyst for complex entanglements between technology, corporeality, and ontology that demolish binary thinking. Despite the abundance of artistic activity and the centrality of heartbeats as our most vital sign, Heartbeats in the Arts is the first historical study of ‘heartbeat artworks’ over that last half-century. Using archival research, interviews and correspondence, the thesis describes works in detail, discusses their contexts and development, and examines the larger classes and contours of this neglected area of artistic activity.
-
(2022)ThesisDating and hookup platforms have become a popular tool for seeking romantic and sexual relationships. While there are numerous benefits to making connections online, popular media and academic literature have begun to document how these platforms are implicated in the perpetration of sexual harms. Drawing on feminist and queer understandings of sexual violence and technology, this thesis provides a mixed-methods examination of sexual harms experienced in the context of online dating. Data collection included an online survey (N=527) and in-depth interviews (N=25) with adult Australians who use dating and hookup platforms. Findings indicate that experiences of safety and sexual harms and their impacts in the context of dating and hookup platforms can be complex and varied, with many experiences diverging from legal and normative understandings of sexual violence. Participants documented a range of harms, including unwanted requests for sex, unsolicited sexual images, harassment based on gender, sexuality, and race, and unwanted sexual experiences, among others. These harms were gendered and intersectional, with women and sexuality diverse participants disproportionately affected. Minimisation and normalisation of sexual harms appeared to be common, due to the sexualised nature of these platforms and largely unquestioned acceptance of a ‘hookup’ culture in online dating. Cisnormative and heteronormative discourses of gender, sexuality, sexual behaviours, and sexual violence were both (re)produced and resisted by participants, illustrating how socio-cultural and sexual norms may become inscribed within digital platforms, and alternatively how these platforms may be co-opted to resist or reject these norms. Existing reporting and response options from platforms to these harms were viewed as inadequate, with participants calling for greater transparency and accountability in reporting processes and tangible consequences for perpetrators of harmful behaviours. This thesis concludes with recommendations as to how platforms, law enforcement, and communities could better prevent and respond to these harms.
-
(2022)ThesisThis research explores a novel approach to the visual enhancement of orchestral performance through interdisciplinary creative practice. The dissertation and practice-based research argue that current visual enhancements of orchestral performance fail to meaningfully engage audiences with the musical performance, due to an overreliance on extrinsic imagery and use of imagery shaped by an excessive emphasis on the score and the composer, known as the work-concept. It has been widely documented that contemporary audiences for classical music are declining, and the engagement of new audiences has thus become a priority for symphony orchestras and researchers internationally. In response to these observations, the research identifies musical gesture as an underexplored design material in the visual enhancement of orchestral performance. Musical gesture is central to the practice of musicians and, furthermore, has been found to enhance the engagement and musical perception of audiences new to classical music. The research therefore employs a practice-based methodology to explore the visual augmentation of musical gesture in performance through virtual reality technology. Social anthropologist Tim Ingold’s theories of the meshwork and making are employed to reframe and explain orchestral performance as a performance meshwork for the purposes of visually communicating the creative, collaborative, relational and processual nature of music performance through musical gesture. The research also examines and expands on Ingold’s idea of the meshwork as a framework for the interdisciplinary research in design and music. The practice-based research explores the communicative potential of musical gesture within the performance meshwork through a specific study of conducting gesture, proposing that the traces created by the movement of the conductor generate a performance annotation. The research develops gestural tracing as an interdisciplinary method for creating performance annotations that emphasise and redefine the conductor in performance as simultaneously a musician and a visual communicator. By integrating the performance annotation into the audience’s line of sight through new technologies, the research reimagines the traditional notion of the visual listening guide as a novel and dynamic form. Ultimately, this research examines augmented musical gesture as a visual description of orchestral performance and proposes this as an engagement strategy for new audiences. In so doing, the research remakes orchestral performance as a visual experience augmented with imagery generated from within the making of the performance itself to achieve this.
-
(2022)ThesisThis thesis explores memory narrative in overseas Chinese migrant fiction written since the 1990s, drawing on concepts of memory culture and contemporary migrancy. I inquire into how Chinese migrant writers recollect their past and reimagine collective memory by alternating standard histories and public discourses. I investigate how the writing of memory in migrant fiction constitutes an alternative narrative in order to access memory, trauma, and history in contemporary China. In this study, I approach memory narrative as act, performance, and phenomenon of remembering, focusing on the concepts of collective memory, marginal memory, and transcultural memory. I also position memory narrative in the representation and production of contemporary migrancy, which I explicate in terms of interstitial position, migrant belonging, and the migrant self. Investigating both China-bound migrant writers and localised writers with global ambition, I examine their reflections on collective consciousness, marginality, and displacement, as well as their points of departure, to relocate memory in transculturality. Among a broader body of memory narratives, I delve into Yan Geling’s personal narrative of collective memory, which questions extent memory discourses on the heroism and youth of the Cultural Revolution generation; I probe the marginal memory of transgressing taboos and prohibitions in Hong Ying’s portrait of an excluded life; I scrutinize Yiyun Li’s use of and contemplation on the languages of mourning, silence, and melodrama, which translate memories into moments and narratives; and I gauge Ken Liu’s speculation on witnessing once-eluded global traumatic memory and addressing the ethics of remembrance with emotion and empathy. I argue that memory narrative in contemporary Chinese migrant fiction shows a self-reflexive temperament, interrogative stance, and transborder vision to disentangle the unsettled trauma and historical remnants that resonate in present China. This thesis shows how these works enables the movement and translation of memory, where local, individual memory is communicable and transmutable to global spheres. Their memory narratives build the interlocution of fictional and real worlds where memory reconnects us with the detached past, stigmatized marginals, and alienated otherness. This memory writing contributes to the understanding of contemporary China, the formulation of communities of memory, and global migrant literature.