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(2021)ThesisAn Impossible Present: The Indivisible Time of Video Feedback Art is a practice-based research project that investigates the capacity of artists to impact our understanding of the thing around which much of our conscious experience is structured yet which cannot be grasped: time. It consists of the iterative creation of four artworks along with a written thesis examining historic and contemporary artistic practices, including my own, that employ video feedback. I interrogate artists’ conceptual preoccupations, the processes they use and their aesthetic outcomes using novel applications of philosopher Henri Bergson’s philosophy of consciousness and time to provide new understandings of their work. Bergson argues that conscious existence can be understood as the indivisible continuity of change, which he calls duration, and yet we divide all things as a means of control over the material world, including time. I argue that specific artworks that utilise video feedback provoke a certain way of thinking about, or indeed experiencing time contrary to the usual way that video is used to divide it. I make use of three interpretations of Bergson’s philosophy, media theorist Mark B. N. Hansen’s reformulation of Bergson’s thinking to account for digital video technology, transdisciplinary critical philosopher David Kreps’ alignment of Bergson’s theory of evolution with developments in evolutionary biology, and philosopher Michel Serres’ extension of Bergson’s theory of time as indivisible to an understanding of time as manifold. Each interpretation is brought into relation with one of the artworks I produced as part of this research along with the artworks of others. In the hands of the artists discussed throughout this thesis, the video feedback loop becomes a metaphor for human consciousness and through the shaping of these loops, they create artworks that move toward restoring the quality of indivisibility to the concept, and indeed experience, of time.
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(2021)ThesisThe emergence of English as a global language has had a considerable impact on national education curricula in many non-English-speaking countries, including Vietnam. Recently, the Ministry of Education and Training in Vietnam has introduced the new English communication-oriented curriculum for upper-secondary education; however, little is known about how the new curriculum is perceived and enacted by EFL teachers at the classroom level. An interpretive multiple case study design was employed to investigate how participant EFL teachers perceived and enacted the new curriculum; and explore the influences that conditioned these processes in the rural, suburban and urban areas in Vietnam. The current study adopted cultural-historical activity theory (Engeström, 1993, 2014; Leont’ev, 1978, 1981) as its theoretical lens to shed light on EFL teachers’ experiences of curriculum reform. Qualitative data were generated through multiple interviews, classroom observations and documentations over seven months. The findings revealed that the teachers’ enactment of the curriculum was a socially mediated activity. The teachers aspired and struggled to enact the curriculum within the pull of the status quo. The enactment processes were non-static, dynamic and highly individualised through the teachers’ agentive engagement in the negotiation process between the old and new practices. The study identified a wide range of inter-related influences from personal, school, and broader socio-cultural contexts of teachers’ work that conditioned the teachers’ experiences of the curriculum reform. The results of this study suggest that policymakers inadequately considered teachers’ perspectives and the realities of their work in the curriculum planning and implementation process, which led to the challenges of its implementation at the local level. The thesis concludes with the implications for language policy planning and for the implementation of teacher support in response to curriculum change. It argues for the need to conceptualise teachers’ enactment of the curriculum in the socio-cultural context of teacher’s work for achievement of the desired curriculum implementation outcomes.
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(2021)ThesisOver the last decade, there has been rising interest in speculative fiction in contemporary art practice. These practices are appearing in a context where the future is being contested through resurgent patriarchal nationalism, ongoing settler-colonialism and the uneven distribution of environmental crisis. This thesis examines a group of artistic practices that use speculative fiction to navigate these spatial and geopolitical complexities: Pussy Riot, Larissa Sansour, Nicoline van Harskamp and Adelita Husni-Bey. Each artist responds to a specific context and builds on a different branch of the speculative, from magic and witchcraft to feminist science fiction and Afrofuturism. The outcome, I argue, is a revitalised anarcha-feminist subjectivity that is critical and creative enough for the present. This is mapped through a suite of speculative figures that straddle fiction and activism—holy fools, witches, healers, terrorists, pirates, and time-travellers, to name a few. Drawing on political, geographical and feminist scholarship to analyse Pussy Riot, Sansour, van Harskamp and Husni-Bey, I locate their work in the fraught space between nationalism and neoliberalism. I argue that these practices reflect a growth of what I call shadow geographies: para-state formations that obfuscate state and corporate actors. They foreground the need for an anarcha-feminism that responds to this changing distribution of power. In contrast to tidy schemas that centralise masculine subjects, the method I develop by analysing these practices privileges mess, misrepresentation and mistranslation. This creates space for alternative subjects that subvert the hegemonic flow of space and time. The original contribution I am making opens a dialogue between anarcha-feminist subjectivities, contemporary art practices and the geographical complexities of the present. Further, I insist on speculative fiction as the motor that animates this subjectivity. Rather than offering escapist or apolitical fantasies, these artists do not eschew struggle or contradiction. In emphasising how their work is anchored in material, geopolitical realities, this contributes to a grounding of speculative fiction. Perhaps there are no clean or clear lines of exit from global capitalism but there is much to be gained from taking the speculative seriously.
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(2012)ThesisBetween 1937 and 1986, Australian Indigenous people diagnosed with Hansen's disease (leprosy) were compulsorily isolated under the care of Catholic religious nursing Sisters in remote leprosaria across the north of the continent. This thesis explores the forces that gave rise to and maintained this policy; the underlying ideals and anxieties; and the ways the policy was executed across the four institutions that form the focus of the study: Derby (WA), Fantome Island (QLD), and Channel Island and East Arm (both NT). Missionary archival documents, oral histories and publications are used to examine the lives, work and traditions of the Sisters and other influential Catholic missionaries. Government records also reveal medical and social objectives implicit in the founding, staffing and ongoing operations of the institutions. Comparisons are made with management strategies for white Hansen's disease patients in Australia to unravel prevailing conceptions about the separate categories of race and disease. The Indigenous leprosaria derived from the Commonwealth government's interwar vision of a healthy White Australia, and the supervision and treatment of the inmates was considered a necessary corollary to this initiative. Catholic women religious were uniquely positioned for this role, being prepared for the incumbent risks, and having the requisite nursing and midwifery qualifications, resulting from a current upsurge in Catholic missionary activity in northern Australia. The Sisters expanded their nursing duties to encompass the holistic care of their patients and to educate them in Western skills, culture and morality. They ushered in the more intensive participation of Catholic Brothers and priests in evangelising the patients. In many ways the Catholic project aligned with government objectives for the social assimilation of the Indigenous population, but in the leprosarium, the object of such efforts was that ‘civilised’ and ‘Christianised’ residents would comply stoically with their enforced detention. Prescribed activities, whether hard work or leisure, were to keep patients occupied, diffusing their yearnings for home, and offering a gentler alternative to more punitive controlling measures. In later years, the Sisters became modern therapists, and agitators for better conditions and less stringent discharge criteria, thus more effectively helping patients regain their health and independence.
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(2021)ThesisMuseums are important cultural sites in cities to attract visitors. The physical context of museum buildings is essential in shaping the visitor experience, and it is important to understand the spatial and display layout and its impact on visitors’ experience. This thesis analyses the selected case study, the National Museum of Australia. It investigates the relationship between museum spatial properties and visitors’ movement and the influence of movement patterns on visitors’ experience to determine how the museum’s architectural characteristics affect visitors’ experience. Unlike extensive research in spatial and visitor experience studies, few studies have combined qualitative and quantitative assessment to understand visitors’ perspective of the museum visit. Unlike previous studies that only focus on behaviour mapping, this study included interviews with visitors to explore visitors’ experience and clearly explain the visitor perspective. Mixed-methods of data collection are used in the study, including the quantitative and qualitative assessments of the National Museum of Australia. In the quantitative analysis, space syntax techniques were used to assess the spatial characteristics of the museum. In the qualitative analysis, two types of data were used. First, behaviour mapping of 30 visitors in each gallery of the museum was used to record visitors’ movement patterns. Second, interviews were conducted with ten visitors who had completed their museum visit. The findings indicate that the difference in the layout of each of the four permanent galleries and the main hall resulted in various museum movement patterns and different visitor experiences. The results show a direct correlation between spatial characteristics, such as visibility, integration and connectivity, and visitors’ experience, encouraging visitors to move toward more integrated and visible space. The main recommendation to improve visitor experience is to increase the accessibility and visibility toward the garden to create the integration core for the museum. This combined approach illustrates how differences in layouts can create different visitor experience in the same environment. In conclusion, the study of spatial and display layout enables designers and curators to better evaluate the movement pattern of visitors and provide a better quality of experience, improving the museum’s ability to convey its messages.
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(2021)ThesisReal Estate Online Platforms (REOPs) are responsible for providing property-related information to their users. However, most of these users are not satisfied with the information provided to them. This thesis highlights the REOP users’ needs and regrets and the pertinent disruptive digital technologies (DDTs) to address these needs. Two models are developed for assessing the REOPs users’ perception and the two-way relationship between them. Also, the barriers to adoption of the DDTs from a managerial perspective are examined. For assessing the users’ perception, Smart Real Estate Technology Adoption Model (SRETAM) is developed, whereas Risk, Service, Information, System TAM (RSISTAM) is developed to assess the two-way relationship between the perceptions. Concepts of KANO and SISQual are used to assess the perceptions, whereas Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) is used for assessing the potential two-way relationships. The barriers to adoption of the DDTs are analysed through Fault Tree Analysis. These models, coupled with the users’ needs and DDT adoption barriers, constitute the novel framework adopted in this study. Eight key regrets of the users are identified from the published literature and meta-analyses: complicated buy-sell process, lack of information, housing costs, house size, mortgage, agents, inspections and emotional decision-making. Nine key technologies can help address the REOP users’ needs and regrets. In terms of REOP users’ perception, 31 key factors have been identified, among which 19 are very important based on responses from 407 respondents. Graphical statistics, attractive design, immersive and novel content attract REOPs users, whereas tracing user location, learning tutorials and hyperlinks discourage them. Among possible relations between RSISTAM constructs, nine are categorised as two-way. There are 21 key barriers to adopting DDTs in the Australian real estate sector identified through a survey of 102 real estate managers. High costs, high complexity of systems and lack of government support, regulations and standards are the top reasons for non-adoption. This thesis addresses the users’ regrets and needs related to REOPs-based information through DDTs adoption and provides a novel framework for facilitating such adoption. The users’ perceptions, needs and regrets addressed through DDTs and the elimination of associated barriers can transform Australian real estate into the smart real estate sector.
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(2021)ThesisThis study addresses modern and contemporary food art practices that incorporate edible materials into art. Such art emerged in the early 20th century when artists began using edible materials in work designed to be touched, tasted, or smelled by audiences. By constructing these experiential encounters, food art activates bodily responses of a perceiving subject. My project proposes a theoretical framework called the 'gastronomic body' to address and analyse the subjective, bodily involvement of food art audiences where their bodies become perceptual sites for interpretation and introspection. I argue that social and cultural environments inform and direct audience perceptions of gustatory art. In this thesis, I build on existing food art literature by investigating how bodily memory links to culturally formed habits, dining rituals, and customs activated by food art. The experience of eating food, and by extension food art, is multidimensional: past experience can influence or shape a subject's perception. Referencing key examples of food art, I trace a lineage of art that employs edible materials from the Futurist banquets of the early 20th century to neo-avant-garde practices of the 1960s and 70s. Artists including Alison Knowles, Allan Kaprow, Dieter Roth, Edward Ruscha, and Daniel Spoerri used foodstuffs in various applications from object-based work to participatory, performance, and installation art. I also examine food-based artwork from the 1990s by Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Janine Antoni and more recent examples, including 21st-century edible installations by Elizabeth Willing and Sonja Alhauser. This examination of food art shows how the imagined dimensions of sensory experience in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological theory of the 'virtual body' link sensory perception and encultured experience. I uncover how sociocultural customs and norms shape bodily responses and sensory feelings from pleasure to displeasure through the lens of Silvan S. Tomkins's psychological approach to affect theory. The gastronomic body bridges the sensory with the sociocultural to map the spectrum of sensations, memories, and gestures activated through the embodied experience of food art, connecting past and present, body and mind, self and others.
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(2021)ThesisAs increasing numbers of apartments are developed domestically and internationally, longstanding concerns about their livability for families with children become more pressing. This research explores how the quality and choice of apartment designs might be improved to better meet the needs of families with children. It focuses on unit layouts in Sydney, the city, which has the highest number of new apartment developments in Australia and a growing number and proportion of families with children. Unit layout is an important factor that influences residents’ desires and residential satisfaction, but there are few studies available on unit layout and residential desires. Firstly, the research investigated the units being developed in three areas (City of Sydney, City of Parramatta, and Liverpool City) through an analysis of sale information (unit plan, size, and price) before exploring the drivers behind current unit layouts through interviews with architects and developers. Secondly, the desires of families with children regarding unit layout were explored through interviews with parents living in apartments. The desires of parents were categorized as universal, consistent (according to children’s age), and diverse (according to personal tastes and cultural backgrounds). Thirdly, parents’ desires were compared with the unit layouts being delivered to identify synergies and mismatches and determine the aspects that need to be kept or need to be improved. Lastly, the implications of the research findings for designing and delivering units that better meet the desires of families with children are discussed. The research provides knowledge on the characteristics of delivered and desired unit layouts for families with children and contributes to academic research on the potential role the spatial layout of units has for improving residential satisfaction. The findings can assist governments in regulating apartment design and enable professionals in the building industry to better meet the desires of families with children. It also offers methodological innovation by combining different methods to measure spatial layout and compare this with abstract ideas about the desires of residents. While this thesis focused on the Sydney context and families with children, it provides insights into the impact and implications of apartment design for residents more broadly.
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(2021)ThesisThis one-year longitudinal ethnographic case study explored the intercultural experiences of 11 Chinese international students during their first year of study in an English language pathway programme and Master’s degrees in commerce or engineering in an Australian university. This enquiry was motivated by an identification of the emphasis on cultural differences resulting from national boundaries and the essentialist grouping of international students as the major limitations in previous research on international students’ cultural adaptation. In response to these limitations, a theoretical framework taking a normalisation perspective was proposed to guide this enquiry. This theoretical framework addresses Chinese students’ intercultural experiences at the individual, community and transnational levels. At the individual level, Bourdieu’s (2013a) capital, field and habitus were applied to explain Chinese students’ intercultural experiences. Imagined community and tribalisation together were utilised to understand Chinese students’ intercultural experiences at the community level. Transnationalisation was employed to interpret Chinese students’ intercultural experiences at the transnational level. This study adopted semi-structured interviews, focus groups, classroom observations and social network exchange collections (observing participants’ public posts on WeChat and Facebook) for data collection, and used content analysis to analyse the data collected. It applied friendship as method as the way to balance power relations and collect data. The findings of the study indicate that Chinese international students have diverse intercultural experiences during their first year of study in Australia. Their diverse intercultural experiences are attributed to their motivations and beliefs related to intercultural interaction. The study also finds that Chinese students’ intercultural experiences demonstrate their capacities to construct and fulfill their own social needs in facing the constraints from their context. The findings suggest that universities and teachers should change their viewpoints with regard to the ideas that international students should proactively interact with local students and make significant adaptations to accommodate intrinsic cultural gaps. This study also encourages international education institutions to appreciate international students’ individual differences in intercultural interactions, and cultivate their capacities to manage social relations. Universities, teachers and researchers should work together to create additional resources and guidance to enhance international students’ intercultural experiences.
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(2021)ThesisThe thesis contributes to the scholarship on disaster recovery by centring the experiences of women as a category of analysis and a methodological approach. I argue that women s everyday realities are a site for disrupting the powerful circuits of knowledge and practice that articulate pathways of recovery through the notion of resilience. As a feminist research, analysing disaster recovery involves exploring possibilities for reclaiming alternative futures. Thus, my research asks: what possibilities for reimagining resilience might women s experiences of recovery reveal? I focus on the reconstruction of Tacloban City, Philippines, after its destruction by typhoon Yolanda in November 2013. To answer my question, I investigated: 1) how resilience has been inscribed in the institutional and social landscape of Tacloban, and 2) how women qualified, re-appropriated, or contested attempts to build their resilience as a way to map out possibilities for alternative pathways of recovery. Using PhotoKwento, a photo-based feminist method which I designed, the study focuses on urban poor women s experiences of disaster resettlement. My findings show that building back better has been enmeshed in a citizenship project aiming to produce responsible and resilient communities. I identify new modes of governing that employ state performances of care on one hand, and the instrumentalisation of women s participation and care-based practices in service of the state s visions for recovery, on the other. Foregrounded are women s navigations of precarity, insecurity, and the unknown amidst attempts to make them better . The thesis shows how the processes of self-formation; the workings of emotions and aspirations; and care relations with others and the environment counterbalance hegemonic views about resilient recovery. I underscore productive tensions as governmental practices, discourses, and prevailing ideologies are incorporated, negotiated, and contested in and through women s care-based practices, affective labours, and hopes for a better future after and beyond Yolanda. Lastly, I reconceptualise resilience as lived , grounded in feminist ethics of care. A lived resilience perspective requires broadening ethico-ontological horizons in order to view resilient recovery as a process of becoming not simply driven by the goal to rebuild what has been damaged, but as a regenerative practice that centers care as a normative basis for exploring post-disaster futures.
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