DSC Intertext Symposium 2021

Monday 4 October, 10:00am – 11:30am

Presenters

Anne Carson, ‘Visual evolution of an idea – the poet/scholar house’

Organising material for a PhD thesis is a hugely challenging task. In creative practice PhDs, this involves managing both creative and critical material, as well as ideas about the capacity of both parts to be ‘knowledge-generating’. How we choose to represent these elements in the final thesis has epistemological implications, manifesting attitudes to how ‘the creative’ contributes to knowledge generation. As creative practice research progresses within the academy, creative possibilities for the format of the PhD proliferate, including various methods of blended, braided, woven (Krauth, 2018) theses. 

In my own creative writing PhD, these reflections led me to conceive of my thesis as an architectural model, where I could present the creative on an equal footing with the critical, as well as representing the way each mode seeded and fed into the other in practice, in an iterative model of creative practice (Smith and Dean, 2009). My model commenced life as my own simple line drawing, (representing a primarily physical space). I then worked with two artists (René Carrasco and Bridget Nicholson) and my supervisors to formulate and finesse my ideas. As it progressed the model became more metaphoric and ephemeral, morphing into a representation of a reconfigured heart-space, grounded in affirmative philosophy (Rosi Braidotti, Jane Bennett, Corrine Pelluchon) and ‘love-of-life’. This presentation maps the visual evolution of an idea.

Belinda Glover, ‘Media Representation of Female Politicians in the 2020 Elections in Ghana’

The representation of female politicians by the media in Ghana is noted to influence the political success of female politicians. Previous studies have shown that female politicians are being represented negatively by the media with a focus on their physical appearance. Similarly, female politicians who participated in the 2020 general elections were not an exception. The 2020 elections in Ghana saw female politicians being represented by the media negatively. This was seen in the cases of Professor Naana Opoku-Agymang who was nominated as the first female Vice-Presidential running mate, on the ticket of the largest opposition party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC) in Ghana. Her nomination as the first female Vice-Presidential running mate resulted in negative representation by the news media and political opponents.

Therefore, through a qualitative methodology using methods such as content analysis and digital ethnography, the paper examines how female politicians who participated in the 2020 general elections were represented by the news media and political opponents.

The findings suggest that the media including political opponents represent female politicians negatively. This was seen in the case of Professor Naana Opoku-Agymang who was nominated as the first female Vice-Presidential running mate on the ticket of the NDC during 2020 general elections in Ghana. The findings contribute to new knowledge on the current trend of how female politicians are represented by the media and political opponents in Ghana. It also extends on other studies with similar focus on Ghana.

Ekaterina Ostapets, ‘Nutritional Influence’

Delivering science-based nutritional health information to young adults is more important than ever. Public trust in nutritional science is steadily diminishing, as misinformation regarding nutrition is being shared by some popular social media influencers who hold no formal qualifications but have achieved high online engagement from their followers. Social media influencers know how to communicate with their followers powerfully and engagingly with studies showing that they can positively affect their followers’ food choices.

This thesis will investigate the social media communication approaches that food and nutrition social media influencers use to engage with their followers. The first aim of this research is to establish which aspects of this communication process have been previously studied. Then, building on existing knowledge, the second aim is to identify the communication tactics that successful social media influencers are using on Facebook. The final aim is to discover which tactics result in the strongest engagement, positive sentiment and response to the ‘call to action’ from their followers. The insights from this research will help health organisations be able to mimic social media influencers’ communication style to better disseminate science-based nutritional information to young adults, thereby improving their health, quality of life and potentially decreasing healthcare costs.

The presentation will focus on the current social media communication approaches of food and nutrition social media influencers, as established using a scoping review. The highlighted approaches include how social media influencers build source credibility, encourage parasocial relationships and find congruence with the products and services they promote.

Monday, 4 October, 2:00pm – 4:00pm

Presenters

Priyanka Jain, ‘Decolonising classical Sanskrit erotic poetry’

Erotic poetry celebrating the fertility of humans and Nature that can be found in the earliest Sanskrit verses of the Rig Veda (1000 BCE) continued to be enjoyed in the Indian subcontinent till the arrival of the British colonisers (1600’s), shifting from Sanskrit to vernacular languages and even into the cult of Krishna. British colonisation imposed Victorian morality, which cast the concept of Kama (pleasure, one of the goals of Hindu life) as obscene and Indians practiced self-censorship to mimic the colonisers. In the formation of a national identity for a new independent India (1947), ideas of India’s sensual past were further dropped to the effect that contemporary India has little safe space for sexual discussions.

My artistic studio practice seeks to decolonise, contemporize and make visible some classical forms of erotic poetry, using the theories proposed by Walter Mignolo. Using research from neuroscience, microbiology and phytochemistry, short verses seek to explore the theme of erotica. The source of passion, which was placed within the Divine in the classical past is now placed under the agency of the human microbiome, which researchers have found to be able to communicate with the brain and influence moods and behaviours. My research aims to focus on the role of practice in decolonisation.

Tal-El Rubner, ‘Sailor Moon’s Uniform: Peircean semiotics for beginners’

Prominent thinker and philosopher, Charles S. Peirce, , has boldly stated that 'we think only in signs'; in other words, signs are how people make sense of their world. In Peirce’s theory of the sign, the sign is not a single object but part of a triadic relationship between three different types of signs, that is, icons, indices, and symbols. Each sign type carries different information from which the thinking person can infer information and reach a conclusion. To materially demonstrate the principles of this theory, the uniform of the popular, Japanese Manga/Anime character, Sailor Moon is examined. Sailor Moon was written in the 1990s by Naoko Takeuchi, and the manga and subsequent show are aimed at middle-school girls (12-15 years old). Tsukino Usagi, is a 14-year-old, clumsy and romantic girl who is able by magic to transform into Sailor Moon, a soldier of justice, fighting evil along with her friends the all-girl, “Sailor Scouts” who compensate for her many deficiencies. This analysis reveals the layers of signs and significations existing within Sailor Moon’s uniform, which make the Sailor Moon character both authentic as a soldier of justice and relatable to its target audience.

Thuy Dam, ‘Language use and learning in sojourner families: Vietnamese parents’ perception and performance’

According to the Australian Department of Education, Skills and Employment (2021), in the financial year of 2020-2021, there were 89 Vietnamese dependants aged 5 to 9 who accompanied their student-parents in Australia (age based on the time at visa grant). This study investigates how Vietnamese student-parents perceived and performed family language policy and practices with their children during their temporary residence in Australia. Results of 10 in-depth semi-structured interviews (with parents of 7- to 9-year-old children who were or had been residing in Australia from 2 to 4 years at the time of data collection) reveal that parents switched languages in family settings throughout their stay for a variety of reasons. Yet, it was a challenge for them to systematically practise any particular language use rules within their family settings to assist their children’s maintenance of their mother tongue. Anxiety about future reintegration into formal schooling back in Vietnam was also a common theme. Almost all parents chose to self-tutor their children and resort to online learning instead of sending them to Vietnamese community language classes due to its alleged non-conformity with the modern Vietnamese language used domestically and worries about the political and religious content of the lessons. This, to some extent, reflects how family language policy and practices are shaped by parents’ language and cultural ideology and imagined communities and raises issues that stakeholders may need to consider about community language programs in Australia to accommodate sojourners’ language needs, too.

Tuesday 5 October, 10:30am – 12:00pm

Presenters

D.A. Calf, ‘A Spectral Geology: Listening to the monument site through the flux of time’

Monuments exist as solidifications of national narratives. Just like the intended unimpeachability of these official histories, they are designed to be resilient and permanent. However, the world around them is in constant flux, calling into question their significance. Drawing on fieldwork (field recording and photography) undertaken at various monument (spomenik) sites in the former Yugoslav republics of the Balkans, together with archival research, this presentation investigates the role of listening in acknowledging and granting voice to the complex of agential flows that exist in any site but that are mostly ignored by top-down approaches to history. The presentation suggests the suitability of geologic paradigms as metaphors for thinking about the connections between sound, agency, site and history. By approaching sound as a medium subject to sedimentation and stratification and that has the potential to transmit and sequester memory, it considers the possibility of hearing, speculatively and however faint, the murmured traces of the past through its excavation. By examining recordings taken from sites of shifting significance and in seeking to uncover those sounds that were once present, the research questions whether there is any significant difference, pragmatically speaking, between the sounds we hear and the sounds we think, in turn entertaining a mode of listening which enables the audient to hear the past in new inaudible ways.

Lynette Spence, ‘Placing children in the Australian suburbs: reading representations of landscape and loss’

The Romantic gaze towards industrialised places reads landscape as loss and in/authenticity of experience, as the basis of a poetic and affective response for an idealised ‘elsewhere’. When this gaze is directed towards the child, tales of authentic childhood places are told as nature or the past, for example, as a ‘nature deficit disorder’. Such telling, within culture, gathers the child into a universal concept, securing ‘childhood’ as an historical and spatial imagination. This research seeks to untangle this Romanticism, told in narratives of authenticity of being and sadness for the lost places of childhood, from an understanding of philosophical nostalgia. Using approaches within representation and phenomenology, this paper explores how the politics and poetics of childhood place can be read in stories of everyday urban life, asking if situated lives of children can be understood as other than lost natures or ghosts of suburbs past.

Tuesday 5 October, 2:30pm-4:00pm

Presenters

Alamgir Yousufzai, ‘Khawaja Sara/Hijra’s parental houses: Contemporary panopticons in Pakistan ‘

This article emerges from my PhD research Khawaja Sara and Hijra: Gender and Sexual Identity Formation in Contemporary Pakistan. This project is empirically and theoretically designed, and seeks to address and explore the social, economic, cultural, religious, and political forces, which shape up the non-normative gender and sexual identities of Khawaja Sara or Hijra (in Western terminology trans* women) in contemporary Pakistan. In this article, I am using Foucauldian (1975) concepts of power, surveillance, and the panopticon where I unpack the role of the familial house as contemporary panopticon that regulates the behaviour of young Khawaja Sara and Hijra’s in Peshawar city. I use a qualitative research methodology and engage with participants in a face to face in-depth and photovoice interviews. The data demonstrates how parents and other family members are frequently observe, continuously question, and pressure Khawaja Sara and Hijra about their trans* identities and non-normative behaviour. This work further illustrates how, within Pashtoon culture, gender diversity is considered a violation of honour which could bring disrespect in the form of disgrace and defame to family name. In this way, there is a perceived moral obligation on individuals in Pashtoon societies to be loyal to family values. Failing to comply is considered a violation and has serious consequences that are, in some cases, life threatening as “honour killing” is a regular cultural practice in Pakistan where violators are sentenced to death who fail to keep the values and family honour. The paper shows that many young Khawaja Sara and Hijra’s leave their parental families because of the rigid behaviour and the extra pressure that they are getting from their parents. After leaving their parental families, many of them (participants) join the guru-cheela houses in Peshawar city where they can get a chance to live their life in a way as they understand and free from other fears.

Neginsadat Aalami, ‘Phase Change Materials for Responsive Architectural Façade
A review Of Material and Design Strategies’

The climate environmental problem poses a significant threat to human well-being, the most pressing issue facing the world in the coming decades. In recent years, responsive architecture has gained the attention of building designers to change how the built environment contributes to climate environmental changes. From this point of view, it is possible to design the façade of the building in a way that responds to its local context and decreases the total energy consumption. However, a successful, responsive building façade has often recorded some through backs because of its high level of complexity and energy it has consumed rather it has saved. A systematic mapping review was undertaken to reviews the literature on Phase Change Materials (PCMs) and the design strategies when integrated with active façade systems without electricity. We also consider whether they evaluate the final proposed design concerning energy consumption and thermal comfort. The results show that SMA (Shape Memory Alloy) has been widely used for the moving function. In contrast, other phases-changing materials are used for the heat storage capacity of the system. The design strategies that have been identified are PCM as an actuator, PCM as heat storage capacity or the combination of both. It was found that there is considerable potential to comprehend the energy efficiency of the final designed façade. Further research needs to simplify the energy performance assessment of the responsive façade systems.