DSC HDR Milestone Conference Abstracts
Milestone schedule and research abstracts for Practice Research candidates can be accessed here.
Second Milestone Review, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies
This research focuses on Melbourne, where the development and promotion of electric vehicles (EVs) are at an early stage compared to other cities in Europe, China and the US. Despite Melbourne’s progressive policies towards reducing carbon emissions, the development of EV as a kind of zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) is significant for achieving the targets. The number of EVs in Melbourne is expected to increase substantially over the coming decades, which will bring many potential challenges to the transport system. Employing agent-based modelling, this research assesses the impact of residential building type on EV charging behaviour and explores strategic allocation of public charging infrastructure. We develop an EV travel demand generator by integrating household-level EV assignment into an activity-based transport demand model and, based on the generated travel demand, model EV charging behaviour and simulate heterogeneity in charging demand across Greater Melbourne. The approach can enable the projection of future charging demands under different EV adoption and electrification scenarios. Furthermore, this research will also evaluate various public infrastructure allocation strategies to analyse their efficacy in optimising traffic flow and accessibility. The result will highlight the significant influence of residential heterogeneity on charging demand and the performance of infrastructure strategies in promoting efficient urban mobility. These insights are instrumental for policymakers and urban planners, providing a data-driven basis for developing sustainable, scalable, and equitable transportation infrastructure that align with Melbourne’s environmental targets.
Confirmation of Candidature, School of Property, Construction and Project Management
Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) refer to small-scale renewable energy generation, or storage systems located close to where the electricity is consumed. Their adoption has led to the rise of prosumers and offers cost-effective electricity solutions by reducing costs in transitioning to a clean, reliable grid and creating new revenue opportunities. However, widespread DER deployment is constrained by economic, operational and regulatory factors. As DER implementation requires substantial upfront investment, financial feasibility is a critical determinant of adoption. Consequently, cost reductions and financial performance have become primary drivers of deployment decisions.
Business models are central to these outcomes, which determines who bears costs and how revenues are shared. While some studies examine DER business models, they are largely conceptual and descriptive, which offers limited insights into the financial rationale and value logic driving industry behaviour. There is no unified mechanism to evaluate and compare financial feasibility across alternative business models, limiting understanding of value capture under varying contexts.
This study aims to develop financial assessment mechanisms for DER deployment under alternative business models. A mixed-method approach is adopted, combining qualitative analysis of business structures, value propositions and cost-revenue allocation, with quantitative analysis of energy performance and financial outcomes for DSPV, BESS and EV systems. Case studies will ground the analysis in real-world contexts, supplemented by document review. Where metered demand data are unavailable, machine learning will derive energy profiles. The mechanisms will be modelled using structured calculations and scenario-based simulations, enabling evaluation of financial outcomes across varying DER deployment contexts.
Confirmation of Candidature, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies
This PhD project will explore care ethics, collective care, and experiences of joy within queer communities in Australia. Mobilising a ‘desire-based framework’ and a combination of scavenger and care-ful methodologies, this project will use photovoice as a participatory and cooperative inquiry method to document experiences of collective care and joy in queer communities. The project will consider if, how, and why theoretical and activist understandings of collective care are being enacted in queer communities, and where such care is being enacted, the ways in which it is experienced, understood, and practiced. As part of this exploration the project will also consider discourses and experiences of queer joy and how these intersect with or stand apart from collective care practices. The overarching aim of this PhD project is to explore collective care and queer joy in the context of individualising care practices and discourses of queer suffering. Mapping practices of collective care and bringing the emerging field of queer joy studies to bear in social science research and education has the potential to disrupt normative narratives about queer identity and the crisis of care.
Second Milestone Review, School of Media and Communication
This project began with a simple but demanding question: how do we move people from awareness of food waste to sustained commitment in everyday life? To answer it, we adopted a Consumer Engagement (CE) lens—cognitive, emotional, and behavioural—as the mechanism that converts intention into durable action.
We first mapped the terrain through a ten-year systematic literature review spanning households, education, hospitality, communities, and digital environments. The review organises consumer-facing strategies into clear functions—how information is framed and delivered, where friction is reduced at decision points, how social influence and feedback operate, and which learning tools build capability. Across contexts, we observed recurring mechanisms: building trust (e.g., with near-expiry or “imperfect” foods), making prevention personally valuable (cost and efficacy), simplifying choices at the moment of action, and enabling local adaptation. We also identified gaps that matter for real-world impact: short time horizons, geographic bias, and limited attention to explanatory mechanisms.
Guided by these insights, our fieldwork turns to identifying the drivers that activate CE. Using multi-country online surveys and quantitative analysis (SEM and conditional process), we test theory-driven pathways involving perceived consumer effectiveness, concern for others, gratitude–reciprocity, status-related motives/virtue signalling, and related marketing levers. The destination is a practical, generalisable framework and playbook—evidence-based design rules on what to activate, for whom, and when—to help move consumers from awareness to sustained commitment in reducing food waste.
Confirmation of Candidature, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies
This research explores the perspectives of practitioners on the safety and support needs of people considering or engaging in mental health psilocybin self-treatment. Psilocybin is the psychedelic component of magic mushrooms. The research specifically engages Psychedelic Assisted Therapy (PAT) practitioners, to understand their perspectives and recommendations on the types of supports people who self-treat with psilocybin require from generalist mental health and social service workers.
The research aims to develop relevant and specific practice evidence for formulating a resource document that is practice-evidence-based, harm-reduction orientated and psilocybin specific. This resource can be utilised by mental health and social service workers interacting with individuals who are inquiring into, considering, or engaging in psilocybin mental health self-treatment.
PAT practitioners will be engaged in two phases: 1) via an online survey; and 2) in semi-structured interviews. Their knowledge, insights and recommendations will be sought on six dimensions: 1) the physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual preparations recommended for mental health psilocybin use; 2) utilising and preparing natural supports during the acute psychedelic experience; 3) risks, concerns, and threats to safety related to mental health psilocybin use, and in particular, within a naturalistic setting; 4) mitigation strategies for reducing risks and threats to safety; 5) supporting the integration of insights and meaning making after the acute psychedelic experience, and; 6) general recommendations for mental health and social service workers to work safely and effectively with people in self-treatment settings.
The data gained through surveys and semi-structured interviews will be analysed and integrated with other research evidence on psilocybin use for intended mental health improvements and harm-reduction approaches. The melding of existing research evidence with the new insights from this research will inform the development of the resource; that is, a practice evidence-based, safety-orientated resource document that is psilocybin and self-treatment context specific. This resource can be used to increase the knowledge and capabilities of mental health and social service workers to work safely and effectively, resulting in a likely reduction of potential harm for self-treating individuals, enhancement of safety, and an increase in effective preparation and support practices in self-treatment contexts.
Confirmation of Candidature, School of Media and Communication
“Law is not what is important”, according to Foucault. Research has shown that it is, to a point. Statute law facilitates the disciplining of the population by professionals. Regulations back up some norms of everyday interactions – such as road behaviour. It is not clear, however, that the criminal law operates as norms – and yet the majority of the population is not violent towards others. It is also not clear that contract law regulates most exchanges between individuals. This project explores whether commercial film steps in as a different strategy of governance to, partially, fill these gaps. Foucault’s archaeological method will be applied to a series of Anglophone science fiction films. The analysis will focus on the detail of the practices portrayed on screen with respect to conduct as homo economicus and as law abiding citizens, and to “proper conduct” more generally. The process by which the displayed norms reinforce those already internalised by the audience is the “reverse gaze”. Watching films carefully, then, allows an understanding of the role that culture plays in governance. The expectation is that the analysis will show significant continuities, in terms of the internal lives of individuals; however, there may be some discontinuities, with respect to legal relations, that reflect the four “families” of governmentality that have been identified in the literature.
Second Milestone Review, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies
In this thesis, I analyse how the Australian Government approaches gender in its governance of natural disasters domestically and in the Pacific. From a colonial- and race-conscious intersectional perspective, I examine how Australian disaster policies construct gender as an issue. Existing disaster scholarship studies gender in terms of crisis vulnerabilities and impacts on women or men. However, there is little academic discussion about how governments manage gender issues through disaster policy, or how policies themselves may constitute patriarchal ideas about gender or disaster. I address these oversights through a case study of the Australian Government management of the 2019-20 Australian Black Summer bushfires, and the 2023 Vanuatu twin cyclones. I evidence my case study with Australian national and international policy documents, and data that I generate through semi-structured interviews with Australian and ni-Vanuatu disaster governance professionals. To examine the data, I employ a poststructural approach to policy analysis, paying attention to assumptions that underpin the problems represented in policies. In the thesis, I critically examine how gender is constituted as a problem, or obscured, in Australian domestic and international disaster management arrangements. Through the research, I extend the theory that disasters are gendered, by identifying intersectional, gendered disaster governance processes that run through and beyond gendered bodies.
Confirmation of Candidature, School of Property, Construction and Project Management
Biophilic design seeks to integrate nature into built environments and has gained recognition as an effective approach for enhancing employee satisfaction and perceived productivity in office buildings. However, its application across various workspace types within Activity-Based Workspaces (ABW) remains underexplored, particularly in the Australian Prime building context. Existing research frequently focuses on a limited set of biophilic patterns or examines a single stakeholder perspective, resulting in fragmented guidance for practical application. This study explores how biophilic design patterns are used for different workspaces in ABW within Prime Australian office buildings, while equally considering the perspectives of employees, interior designers, and landlords or employers. The study will employ a mixed-methods approach, integrating quantitative employee surveys with qualitative semi-structured interviews. Quantitative data will be analysed using Spearman’s rank correlation to assess the impact of biophilic design on employee satisfaction and perceived productivity across various workspace types within ABW in Prime buildings. Qualitative data will be thematically analysed to examine designers’ and landlords’ or employers’ perceptions, design strategies, and implementation challenges and strategies. Finally, based on the findings, a conceptual framework will be developed that integrates biophilic design across diverse workspaces within ABW in Australian Prime buildings, and illustrative workspace designs will be provided to offer practical value to the research. The study offers a clear roadmap for designers, landlords or employers, architects, and practitioners to support the effective integration of biophilic design into future office projects, thereby contributing to healthier and more comfortable workplace environments.
Third Milestone Review, School of Media and Communication
As a leading social media platform, TikTok has become a significant force in the digital media landscape, particularly within the influencer industry (Abidin, 2016). With influencer culture emerging as a full-time profession (Abidin, 2021), research has explored its expansion into entertainment (Cunningham & Craig, 2021), beauty (Indah Lestari et al., 2024), lifestyle (Puteri, 2018), politics (Reidl et al., 2021), and religion (Febrian, 2024). However, grief remains a relatively underexamined aspect of influencer culture, particularly in the context of TikTok influencers.
My thesis sits at the intersection of grief, TikTok, and influencer culture, examining four influencers as case studies who create and share grief-related content on TikTok. I explore how grief is expressed, shaped, and circulated within the platform’s influencer ecosystem. To do so, I employ qualitative visual research methods, with a focus on content analysis and case study approach to examine the content of TikTok grief influencers. My research question is: How can analysing TikTok influencers’ content help in understanding contemporary digital expressions of grief?
Conceptual frameworks grounded in Arlie Russell Hochschild’s (1983) theory of emotional labour, Judith Butler’s theorisations of gender, and Sara Ahmed’s (2014) socio-cultural understanding of emotions are utilised to address the enabling resources offered by TikTok and how these resources are utilised for grief-influencing. This project makes original contributions in understanding influencers’ iterations of grief on TikTok and aims to produce knowledge in the areas of social media grief, influencer culture, and TikTok research.
Second Milestone Review, School of Property, Construction and Project Management
In today’s technology-driven era, occupational safety remains a critical issue in the construction sector, affecting both project outcomes and worker well-being. Various methods have been employed to enhance safety, with the Theory of Production emerging as a key approach in project and safety management. Within this theory, Lean Construction and Building Information Modelling (BIM) play significant roles in improving project and safety management. While literature acknowledges the strong synergy between BIM and Lean Construction, their integration is often examined unidirectionally-from BIM to Lean Construction-leading to a perception of Lean Construction as merely an outcome of BIM. However, to fully understand Lean’s contribution to BIM, the latter must be recognized as a methodology encompassing processes, people, technology, and policy, rather than just a technological tool. Despite this, studies on BIM and Lean Construction in safety management remain limited. To address these gaps, this study explores the methodological application of BIM in safety management, supported by Lean Construction, within the AEC industry under the Theory of Production. A qualitative approach is adopted, consisting of three stages: a systematic literature review to identify research trends, semi-structured interviews within case studies in Australian AEC firms to assess BIM’s current implementation in safety, and focus group discussions to explore Lean’s integration into BIM methodology. This research clarifies Lean’s contribution to BIM, reinforces their mutual synergy, and provides insights for academia and industry on Lean-supported BIM methodology in construction safety management.
Confirmation of Candidature, School of Media and Communication
This study explores how the mediatisation of unbuilt and delayed infrastructure projects in Mindanao, the second largest island in the Philippines, acquires symbolic force. Focusing on the Mindanao Railway Project (MRP), the Mindanao Logistics Infrastructure Network (MLIN), and the Free Wi-Fi for All initiative, the research moves beyond explanations of technocratic failure to interrogate how infrastructural promises are communicated, sustained, and contested over time in a region long romanticised as the Philippines’ “land of promise.”
The study introduces promissory media as a sensitising lens through which to analyse how these promises are produced by state and institutional actors, mediated through journalism, and reworked by citizens across everyday media environments. Rather than treating media as neutral channels, the study situates infrastructural promises within hybrid media systems, where state communication, legacy journalism, and participatory digital platforms intersect and reshape one another, asking how these intersecting media logics sustain, transform, or destabilise promises surrounding unbuilt or delayed projects in Mindanao.
The project will employ digital ethnography, combining online and offline observation with semi-structured in-depth interviews, alongside critical discourse analysis and reflexive thematic analysis of media texts and public commentary. By centring communicative practices rather than implementation outcomes, the study offers a media-centred account of how infrastructures-in-waiting shape everyday futures in Mindanao.
Confirmation of Candidature, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies
Competing government and conspiracy narratives shaped public understandings of COVID-19 in Victoria, offering acutely different accounts of risk, authority, and responsibility. This study examines how the narrative features that make conspiracy narratives persuasive, as alternatives to official public health messaging, can inform the development of more inclusive and effective crisis communication strategies. Grounded in applied linguistics and guided by narrative policy and crisis communication research, it addresses the limited understanding of how conflicting narratives form, interact, and gain influence during extended public health crises. The analysis includes Victorian Government press briefings, health announcements, and crisis updates alongside conspiracy videos, podcasts, and online commentary. Using reflexive thematic analysis and structural narrative analysis, the study identifies the linguistic strategies and narrative structures that shape the credibility and appeal of each perspective. The findings contribute to applied linguistics and narrative studies by clarifying how narrative and linguistic features influence public interpretation and trust during crises, and by developing crisis communication strategies that better address the interpretive and emotional needs of communities in future emergencies.
Third Milestone Review, School of Media and Communication
As the trend of datafication fundamentally reshapes how information is produced, circulated, and controlled, knowledge organisation emerges as a critical site of governance. While media and communication studies often highlight the centralising tendencies of digital technologies -- what Nathan Schneider (2022) describes as implicit feudalism -- this study explores how digital tools and infrastructures might instead be designed to empower local communities with greater autonomy and collective control over how their knowledge is curated, managed, and shared.
Focusing on Metagov, an online laboratory for digital governance, this research examines how decentralised knowledge management is negotiated through the integration of the Knowledge Organisation Infrastructure (KOI), a sociotechnical system that aims to improve the coordination, discoverability, and usability of shared knowledge. Using ethnographic methods, the study investigates the tensions that arise as Metagov works to make its knowledge commons more legible and interoperable. Attending to issues of data consent, hygiene, and stewardship, the research considers how practices of infrastructural care can embed accountability and lay the groundwork for more context-sensitive and ethical uses of AI.
Amid chaotic and fragmented data landscapes, KOI offers a critical testing ground for reimagining how knowledge can be organised, governed, and sustained. By enabling local configurability, fostering the conditions for federated participation, and supporting autonomy without sacrificing interoperability, KOI promotes alternatives to dominant platform logics. In doing so, it gestures toward more inclusive, participatory, and ethically grounded futures rooted in living knowledge systems that remember, respond to, and evolve with the communities they serve.
Second Milestone Review, School of Property, Construction and Project Management
The ongoing need for more housing and changes in residential property characteristics offer significant potential for assessing residential development in Greater Melbourne. This research investigates the effects of residential development on microclimate conditions and energy consumption. The aim is to evaluate the complexity and interrelation of indoor and outdoor thermal environments. Previous efforts in this field mainly considered outdoor and indoor thermal conditions in isolation. This study seeks to integrate the analysis of these environments and the factors that affect them, expanding the time horizons. Stakeholder participation can ensure the feasibility of the thermal analysis results.
This study views urban and building thermal environments as complex thermodynamic systems that require a comprehensive assessment of indoor and outdoor spaces across different time scales. The development of greenfield areas and the demand for thermal efficiency and resilience are linked to adaptive environments. Viewing the topic through the lens of panarchy theory, which focuses on adaptation at different scales and stages, the study emphasises the need to balance different thermal condition indicators.
The research will employ interviews with the stakeholders involved in the residential development. Interviews will provide insights into the economic, social, regulatory, and sustainability aspects of residential development. This can define the boundaries of input parameters for computer simulations. The results will inform feasible guidelines for urban planners, designers and decision-makers.
Second Milestone Review, School of Media and Communication
‘Do-it-yourself’ (DIY) music scenes have long been at the forefront of utilising new media technologies to shape their experience and practice of culture. In contemporary DIY scenes, digital platforms are a ubiquitous if largely taken-for-granted mediator of significant communication and information flows. In an Australian context, Instagram has emerged as the de-facto choice of social media platform for music scenes, and is the most popular social networking site for young Australian adults (Edwards et al., 2024, Newman et al., 2024). Despite its prominent role in local cultural production, Instagram remains under-conceptualised within popular music studies. Following the work of Susan Leigh Star, this research project will position Instagram as a form of ‘infrastructure’ for Melbourne’s DIY scene, exploring the tension between Instagram’s interests as a commercial media-technology, and the ‘logic’ or ethic of DIY music scenes. Utilising ethnographic techniques and interviews, this project aims to investigate the complex interrelationship of digital platforms and cultural production, outlining Instagram as a form of infrastructure with embedded biases that influence DIY music cultures.
Second Milestone Review, School of Property, Construction and Project Management
The environmental impacts of the construction industry necessitate a transition to a more sustainable built environment that adopts a Circular Economy (CE) approach. To accelerate this transition, demonstration projects introduce new materials, technologies, and concepts to the market while providing evidence of technical and commercial feasibility and reducing risks for the wider industry. However, there is limited evidence of how demonstration projects influence the wider industry and share knowledge and lessons learned. Therefore, this research aims to explore the role of demonstration projects in knowledge transfer to the wider industry for facilitating the sustainability transition and enabling demonstrative upscaling of CE in the built environment. To achieve this aim, a narrative literature review and a desktop analysis were conducted to identify exemplar projects and select case studies. Desktop analysis was followed by semi-structured interviews (n=19) with stakeholders involved in the identified cases in Australia and internationally to examine potential influences of demonstration projects, key stakeholders, and upscaling factors in the context of CE. The thematic analysis led to identification of economic, technical, social and regulatory upscaling factors such as profitability, technical and technological readiness, community engagement and policy change. Based on the results from the interviews, an initial knowledge sharing framework will be developed and refined through a focus group discussion with the industry and academic experts and policymakers, supporting enhanced knowledge transfer from demonstration projects to facilitate the transition to CE within the sector.
Second Milestone Review, School of Media and Communication
This research examines the use of lyrical metareference in the music of women pop artists active within the 2000s major-label system. Metareference refers to any self-reflexive gesture that draws attention to a text, performance, or artefact’s constructed and mediated nature, a strategy that became increasingly prominent across art and entertainment forms during the 2000s, known as the ‘metareferential turn’. This period was also marked by major structural shifts in the global music industry, namely label monopolisation and the rise of peer-to-peer file sharing. In response, the emerging new music economy prioritised a hit-driven, profit-oriented model that amplified the commodification of pop music by arranging artists—particularly women popstars—as both products and brands. Given how pop music is often defined by its commercial nature, this project investigates whether and how women popstars—operating at the centre of this system—employed metareference as an artistic and/or discursive strategy. It seeks to understand how these gestures function to contest or reproduce dominant ideologies surrounding authenticity, labour, stardom, and gender.
Through an analysis of 194 women artists’ discographies, 1,082 songs were identified as containing metareference. Using systematic sampling and critical discourse analysis, this project examines how these instances of metareference foreground an awareness of an artist or song’s production, industry structures, celebrity culture, or the mass media. These self-reflexive practices not only challenge the perceived artifice of pop but also provide new avenues for artistic self-representation, significant for women in a genre often dismissed as overly manufactured. By mapping lyrical metareference across the 2000s pop landscape, this research repositions the genre as a key site of the metareferential turn and highlights how women artists used metareference to negotiate power, visibility, and agency within a widely exploitative industry.
Third Milestone Review, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies
Now is a pivotal time for the historically marginalised regional languages of France. While they have seen significant declines in speaker numbers over the past 70 years, they have also received a cautiously growing level of government support—a shift from previous policies which sought to restrict their use (Fenet 2004). They can be taught in schools and are formally recognised as part of France’s cultural heritage (Blanchet 2022). In this time of great significance, however, the perspectives of regional language communities are missing from the literature. What do they want, hope and expect for the futures of their languages? How can their perspectives inform our understanding of the roles of the state and communities in reversing language shift?
This research investigates the perspectives of regional language communities on the state and future of their languages, situated in the broader context of language policy in France. Using Breton, Corsican and Occitan as case studies, interviews have been conducted with community members. Most participants speak the languages and engage with them regularly as teachers, students, activists or writers. The interviews investigate participants’ histories with the languages, their opinions on government policies (both implemented and proposed), and their hopes and expectations for the future of their languages. Using a thematic analysis, the study will provide findings on the perspectives of language speakers and communities at this key moment in time and ascertain whether government language policy is adequately supporting their needs and wishes.
Confirmation of Candidature, School of Media and Communication
Recent decades have seen rapid adoption of digital technologies and resulting pervasive hyperconnectivity in professionals’ work and life domains. These developments have been fostering overwork cultures and reportedly disrupting people’s efforts to maintain boundaries across various scenarios and have prompted a growing turn toward digital disconnection as a response.
While extensive scholarship has investigated workers’ boundary work in algorithmically driven environments, these studies have heavily relied on Western models. With significantly less attention having been paid to non-Western cultures (e.g., collectivist societies), it risks overlooking the cultural, geographical and gendered nuances of work–life balance.
This research project examines how Chinese young professionals navigate and negotiate work–nonwork boundaries within the regulatory ecosystem of China’s Social Credit System (SCS) and Corporate Social Credit System (CSCS). Specifically, by conceptualizing these systems as behavior-engineering infrastructure that creates spillovers on individual-organization and private-public boundaries, the study seeks to understand digital disconnection as a coping strategy in light of boundary erosion.
Using a mixed-methods approach, the proposed research employs social media analysis to map conversations on social platforms to identify discourses related to workers’ boundary maintenance. Based on it, empirical data will be retrieved through surveys and interviews to further understand how Chinese young professionals regulate and manage digital communication in their everyday working lives.
By foregrounding cultural logics and state governance in a shaping workers’ behaviors, this research contributes a contemporary Chinese labor perspective to the existing theory of boundary work. It proposes a new analytical framework for understanding how technology as infrastructural power in China impacts work-life configurations and inform emerging practices of digital disconnection.
Second Milestone Review, School of Media and Communication
This project explores how children participated in the U.S. live action family situation comedy (or ‘sitcom’) television genre in the 1960s as both actors and audience members. It draws on existing theories regarding how television genre is constructed to explore how child performers in 1960s family sitcoms contributed to, engaged with and worked against genre conventions, and how child audiences read and remember them. In this way, it applies a methodology using the intersection of genre, performance and reception studies. Children’s contribution to television genre studies is an underexplored research area, and, by extension, is largely absent from scholarship about the 1960s family sitcom. It is this gap that this project seeks to address. It argues that children contributed to and received 1960s family sitcoms in a number of competing and complementary ways, and in so doing played a significant role in the construction and consumption of the family sitcom genre in the 1960s United States.
Confirmation of Candidature, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies
Family and domestic violence is a serious societal problem that has long lasting, intergenerational impacts on all people, but is mostly perpetrated by men towards women and children. Migrant and refugee women in Australia experience distinct barriers to disclosure, help-seeking, and access to support. This study aims to contribute to an emerging body of research within the Australian context exploring perspectives and experiences of diverse communities impacted by family and domestic violence. While Australian policy and practice frameworks broadly reference Culturally and Linguistically Diverse communities, there remains limited empirical research centring the perspectives and lived experiences of South Asian victim-survivors. This study aims to fill this gap by exploring how South Asian migrant and refugee victim-survivors of family and domestic violence disclose and seek support for their experiences within Victoria, and how those supports are experienced in terms of culturally-responsive, trauma-informed care.
Underpinned by the theoretical frameworks of Intersectional Feminism and Critical Social Work, this research uses a feminist qualitative design to explore the lived experience of South Asian victim-survivors and perspectives of the practitioners who support them. Semi-structured interviews with victim-survivors will be complemented by focus group data with practitioners to explore points of disclosure, experiences of support, the role of culturally-responsive practice across services, and how systemic and service structures shape victim-survivors experiences. The study aims to illustrate the various points of help-seeking used by victim-survivors, to use lived experience to identify gaps in service provision, and to provide evidence to inform culturally-responsive, meaningful, trauma-informed support for South Asian communities impacted by family and domestic violence.
Confirmation of Candidature, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies
Domestic and family violence (DFV) is the main reason women, children and young people in Australia become homeless. Specialist family violence refuges offer safety, tailored support and emergency accommodation, yet crucial gaps remain in understanding the lived experiences of children, young people and mothers in these settings, and how services meet their complex needs. This PhD research will employ ethnographic methods, including observations, interviews and practitioner focus groups, to explore how refuges respond to these needs amid systemic barriers, including housing shortages and funding constraints. This research seeks to address epistemic injustices experienced by children, young people, and women whose voices are frequently missing from studies on the impacts of DFV and homelessness on their lives. By generating new knowledge about women’s refuges in Australia, the research also aims to inform practice, guide policy, and support advocacy efforts for broader systems change and housing justice for families affected by DFV and homelessness.
Third Milestone Review, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies
This study explores the underutilisation of material reuse and repurposing in the Australian volume homebuilding sector despite its potential to reduce embodied environmental impacts. While Circular Economy (CE) principles support material circulation, construction practices rarely enable closed-loop systems. Using Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and interviews with industry professionals, the study investigates socio-technical dynamics influencing reuse on construction sites and the role of digital platforms in shaping these practices, highlighting key actants and underrepresented voices.
The Findings and the analysis show how onsite practices are created through associations between human and non-human actors, and reveal where everyday material-circulation practices diverge from common assumptions. It also uncovers how stakeholders interpret material circulation, including reuse and repurposing, both in definition and in practice, and identifies which actors’ agency is often overlooked despite actively facilitating or hindering the uptake of reuse.
Overall, this PhD explores how sustainable resource use can be embedded within more inclusive housing systems that better respond to environmental and policy imperatives, offering insights for policymakers and industry stakeholders seeking to close circular housing gaps.
Confirmation of Candidature, School of Media and Communication
As live music practices are dependent on musicians being in contact with others, to perform with each other and for audiences, this space has faced unique challenges in bouncing back from lockdown measures where distance was encouraged to stop the spread of C-19 (Woodward et al, 2023). In the body of research on the initial impact of the pandemic, researchers suggest further investigation is needed to observe what long-term changes might be taking place in music communities as a result of the crisis (Howard et al. 2021; Stromblad & Baker, 2023; Bennett et al. 2024; and Brunt & Nelligan, 2021).
The purpose of this study is to understand ongoing changes in DIY music ecologies across Victoria since lockdowns ended, and how these changes have impacted the everyday practices of musicians who live and work here.
To do so, the research project proposed in this paper will collect qualitative data from participants in DIY music communities in Victoria through a mixed methods approach of mapping processes and semi structured interviews. This project will map the resources these musicians access to maintain their practice, and discuss the ways that DIY musicians relate to and maintain their creative practices amongst these changes.
Second Milestone Review, School of Media and Communication
Livestreaming, an integration of social networking, entertainment, and e-commerce, has given rise to unique business models while reshaping broader socio-economic structures. As China’s livestreaming industry matures and urban markets become saturated, livestreaming and social commerce platforms are increasingly expanding into third- and fourth-tier cities and rural areas. Within mainstream discourse, livestreaming is now positioned as a tool for rural entrepreneurship, enabling farmers to market and sell agricultural products online. In response, major Chinese tech companies have introduced policies and platform features to support rural livestreaming commerce, leading to a growing number of farmers engaging in livestreaming to promote their own products.
Despite the attention given to rural livestreamers, this thesis critically examines the often-overlooked intermediaries who facilitate the success of rural livestreaming commerce. These individuals and organisations operate behind the scenes, providing logistical coordination, technical support, and content creation services, such as on-site filming and livestream production. Although they play a crucial role in the ecosystem, their contributions remain underexplored in academic literature.
This research employs a Critical Media Industry Studies (CMIS) framework and adopts a mixed-methods approach, combining semi-structured interviews, content analysis, and ethnographic research across different layers of China’s rural livestreaming commerce sector. The objective is to uncover the complexities of intermediary labour, assess its socio-economic impact, and highlight its significance within China’s evolving digital economy.
Third Milestone Review, School of Media and Communication
As in most aspects of everyday life, gender plays a pivotal role in how individuals experience music, whether they are musicians, fans, or work in other areas of the industry. Reports and studies produced over the past ten years illustrate that women and gender-diverse people are underrepresented and face multiple forms of discrimination in the Australian music industry (see for example Music Victoria 2015; Cooper, Coles and Hanna-Osborne 2017; Fairlamb and Fileborn 2019; Strong and Cannizzo 2020; MAPN Consulting 2022). Pre-determined social roles and expectations are often placed on these individuals, with gender being a key factor in how these musicians experience music-making practices; however, the specific experiences of instrumentalists are currently under-researched.
This project seeks to uncover the gender-specific experiences of women and gender-diverse instrumentalists in local music scenes in Melbourne, Australia. Using one-on-one semi-structured interviews with instrumentalists and music industry workers, this project aims to generate a greater understanding of the relationship between gender and instruments in this context, and to explore pathways to increase participation and reduce gender-based discrimination within music-making, while moving towards more equitable practices.
Second Milestone Review, School of Media and Communication
This thesis examines how Australian adolescents understand, experience and navigate news within algorithmically curated digital environments. Over the past two decades, news circulation has shifted from relatively stable, editorially curated media systems to personalised, data-driven platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, where news is encountered incidentally alongside entertainment, advertising and social content. While concerns about misinformation, polarisation and youth disengagement have intensified, young people’s own perspectives on algorithmic news environments remain underexplored. Drawing on a qualitative, multi-site case study design, this research investigates adolescents’ lived experiences of algorithmically mediated news encounters. Data was generated through student and teacher focus groups and participatory workshops across three secondary schools in Victoria, Australia. Guided by an interpretivist methodology and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis, the study centres young people’s meaning-making practices, rather than treating literacy as predefined competencies. Furthermore, this thesis develops and empirically applies the Socio-Technical Algorithmic News Literacy (STANL) framework, an integrative model that conceptualises algorithmic news literacy as a relational, affective and power-laden phenomenon shaped through everyday platform use. Findings reveal that adolescents possess partial, experiential understandings of algorithmic systems, rely heavily on affective and social heuristics when engaging with news, and perceive limited agency within opaque platform infrastructures. Empirically, this study provides one of the first Australian qualitative accounts of adolescents’ experiences of news within algorithmic environments. Conceptually and practically, it advances news and algorithmic literacy scholarship by offering a socio-technical framework that can inform policy, education and youth-focused interventions in platformised media environments.
Second Milestone Review, School of Media and Communication
Between 1988-1993, the electronic dance music of rave forever shifted the sound of popular music in Britain (Gilbert, 2014). Scholarship on rave has primarily focussed on its impact on British society (Gilbert, 1994; McRobbie, 1993; Melechi, 1999; Pini, 1997, 2006; Redhead, 1999; Reynolds, 1997; Rietveld, 1999; Thornton, 1994; Wilson, 2006), with the majority of this scholarship tracing the electronic music that developed after 1993 as constitutive of a stylistic continuum emerging from rave (Fisher, 2009; Gilbert, 2009; Reynolds, 2010). However, the sounds that defined the heterotopia of rave in ‘88 share very little with those that emerged in ’94 (Gilbert, 2014 p. 169-70). This thesis suggests that rave’s formal and affective discontinuities need to be identified, and in doing so, there requires a definition of a novel musical style of post-rave. Occurring from 1994 until the turn of the millennium, post-rave will be defined as both an affective and formal rupture from rave. To constitute this definition of post-rave, this thesis utilises a theoretical approach of radical formalism (Brinkema, 2014). Radical formalism aligns affects with distinct formal features of aesthetic objects, allowing post-rave musical traits to be identified by their formal and affective novelty. As a lens to analyse and identify post-rave musical traits, radical formalism is a redefinition of affect and a renewed engagement with formalism and methods of close reading. This approach of radical formalism, novel to popular music studies, allows an exploration of post-rave music as both a formal and affective rupture in electronic dance music history.
Confirmation of Candidature, School of Media and Communication
This ethnographic research proposes using queer socio-phenomenology and gender theory to extrapolate the escalating situation with esports in the current masculine and heteronormative environment (Breslin, 2022). Esports programs are following suit with masculine cultures in programs, as gaming culture has historically been male-dominated, leaving female and gender diverse gamers marginalised and underrepresented (Taylor, 2012; Witkowski, 2013; Taylor & Stout, 2020). The esports industry currently severely lacks women and gender-diverse fellows in production roles and as players. Not only does underrepresentation within the industry field of esports bleed into the education sector, but young girls and gender diverse students in these programs are playing games that come with identity-based exclusion and harassment when participating online and in LAN tournaments (Taylor, 2012; Witkowski & Harkin, 2025; Zhu, 2025).
This ethnographic study will use qualitative methods, including field notes, observational research, participant observation and semi-structured interviews in the two phases. Phase 1 will encompass industry experience in esports production as an embedded ethnographer in a highly acclaimed esports organisation in Australia. Detailing the construction and process of esports production, gaining behind-the-scenes knowledge and expertise. Phase 2 will be a case study interviewing current students in esports programs, particularly focusing on young women identifying students and gender diverse individuals’ experiences participating as players, fans or audience members in esports tournaments. Neglecting to understand these critical lived experiences, including industry knowledge on esports production from a queer person’s perspective, risks perpetuating heteronormative cultural customs into esports events.
Confirmation of Candidature, School of Property, Construction and Project Management
Safety footwear protects workers from external hazards, yet inappropriate design can alter gait biomechanics and contribute to discomfort and musculoskeletal disorders. The study aims to design and validate the efficacy of safety boots with rocker outsoles and lattice midsoles in enhancing gait biomechanics during load-carrying tasks. This randomised, within-subject crossover study will recruit 28 healthy participants to evaluate five footwear conditions: regular walking shoes, conventional safety boots, and three modified safety boot variants (rocker-sole, lattice-midsole, and combined rocker-lattice). Participants will complete walking trials under both loaded and unloaded conditions, while biomechanical data will be collected simultaneously using in-shoe pressure insoles, three-dimensional motion capture, and surface electromyography. The analysis will quantify peak plantar pressure, lower-limb joint angles, and muscle activation patterns using a two-way repeated-measures ANOVA. The study hypothesises that rocker-sole and lattice-midsole modifications reduce peak plantar pressure and muscle activity while maintaining ankle range of motion compared to conventional safety boots, particularly during load carriage. Expected outcomes will provide evidence-based recommendations for safety boot design that balance protective requirements with biomechanical efficiency and worker comfort, potentially reducing the risk of lower-limb musculoskeletal injuries in the construction context.
Third Milestone Review, School of Media and Communication
Food waste presents a significant sustainability issue and addressing it is crucial to achieve SDG 12.3, which aims to halve food waste by 2030. It is crucial to improve understanding of how to reduce food waste by adopting practices that prevent its generation, such as circular practices, which are part of the circular economy. This research aims to analyse how circular practices influence consumer food-waste behaviours. To achieve this aim, the study will employ a mixed-method methodology through four empirical studies, using interviews, surveys and data mining to collect data from a global population for analysis. Study 1 is a systematic literature review of scholarly work on circular practices in the hospitality sector related to food waste across the Food Waste Hierarchy. Results from Study 1 inform Study 2, which aims to explore current circular economy consumer food waste behaviours and to conceptualise and develop a typology of behaviours, guided by the Food Waste Hierarchy. Study 2 will inform Study 3; hence, this study aims to conceptualise and develop a measurement scale of circular economy food waste behaviours. Study 3 informs Study 4, as it aims to examine how social influence principles affect consumer choices regarding the circular economy. Future results aim to contribute to the existing literature by providing insights into current circular economy food waste behaviours. Additionally, to provide a measurement scale to assess the impact of the circular economy on food waste and to offer insights into behavioural outcomes related to sustainability.
Second Milestone Review, School of Media and Communication
The ever-changing queer digital culture is highly curated, shaped by the online performativity of sexual and gender diverse people and by the infrastructure and design of platforms driven by technocapitalism. The legibility of self and sexual expression in digital spaces is often constrained by Western, patriarchal and colonial frameworks that define legitimacy of social and gender norms, influencing how individuals perceive themselves and are perceived by others. This PhD research investigates how young sexual and gender diverse people in Nepal navigate both the pleasures and risks of digital spaces that reinforce heteronormativity and homonormativity, shaped by technocapitalism and prevailing social, cultural, and political norms. Using digital ethnography, the research includes semi-structured interviews with 18 young sexual and gender diverse people (aged 20–26) based in Nepal and content analysis of 10 Nepali micro-influencers’ social media profiles. Findings indicate that the online performativity of these youths is strongly influenced by Western, patriarchal and colonial queer digital culture, subjecting their bodies and self-expression to surveillance and censorship within heteronormative and homonormative frameworks. However, through strategies such as disidentification and performance of privacy online, participants actively resist societal expectations, demonstrating agency in negotiating their identities and visibility in the digital landscape. These findings show self-determination of young sexual and gender diverse youth in Nepal as they carve out spaces for self-expression, resistance, and community-building within constraining cultural and technological systems.
Third Milestone Review, School of Property, Construction and Project Management
Despite having proven record of strong growth in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry, projects involving physical asset management throughout the whole of asset management lifecycle experience unsustainable profit margin and slow investment in innovation, research, and development. The World Economic Forum – Future of Construction initiative has proposed project delivery to be one of the ten key challenging areas within the industry. In terms of building and facilities management, the Fourth Industrial revolution, which is characterised by technology advancement and enhancement in customer experience, has encouraged facilities managers to rethink how facilities management can be sustained in future. Being in an ever-changing and complex environment, industry experts seek to improve construction projects and building management activities and analyse the disruption of the industry through a holistic lens.
Originating from the software industry, agile ways of working is believed to promote innovation and effective teamwork. The purpose of this study is to investigate the potential and opportunities to apply the agile ways of working throughout the asset lifecycle within the AEC industry. This study involves understanding the challenges faced using the traditional methods, and the success factors and hurdles for on-time and on-budget delivery. Extensive literature reviews on the application of agile in other large scale, non-software industries are conducted to explore the suitability of agile ways of working in improving team productivity and solving the identified deficiencies.
The researcher plans to adopt the grounded theory approach to achieve the research objectives as this strategy allows awareness to be made with industry professionals who are keen to drive innovation within the industry. Desktop research and interviews will be done, and triangulation will be used to validate the data gathered from many sources. This research is primarily qualitative to obtain better insights and cover a broader spectrum.
Third Milestone Review, School of Property, Construction and Project Management
This research advances the analytical foundations of personnel staffing and project scheduling in residential construction sites, addressing both operational and policy-driven challenges to solve the housing crisis in Australia. The first part includes developing an integrated mathematical model that jointly determines required staff level with considering their skills and project scheduling when projects are executed across multiple construction sites. The results reveal that coordinating staffing and scheduling decisions considerably reduce reliance on temporary workers, and project costs. Building on the gained insights, the second part coordinates human-centric factors such as fatigue accumulation and its detrimental impacts and and fairness in workload allocation. By relying on the empirical evidence demonstrating that construction workers experience fatigue after continuous daily efforts and consecutive days of work, directly affecting their operational performance and safety. Accordingly, an optimization model is developed to balance jointly consider planning efficiency and well-being of workers. The presented model enforces equitable workload distribution, avoids burnout, and maintain the project quality while preserving project feasibility. Recognizing that industry limitations also shape availability of workers and housing delivery, the third part of this research introduces a bilevel government–firm optimization framework to evaluate the role of governmental incentives. The results reveal how incentives can be set to expand accelerate housing delivery across regions. Collectively, all these three parts provide a comprehensive foundation to alleviate the housing crisis by considering the role of workers, firms and the government.
Third Milestone Review, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies
Prior to arrival, international students form financial expectations based on information about cost of living and studying in the host country. However, after arriving in the host country, these expectations may not always align with students’ actual experiences. While existing research explores different perspectives of international students’ wellbeing and experience, this study focuses specifically on Chinese international students’ (CIS)’ information-seeking related to the costs of studying and living before arrival, and to cost of living management after arrival in Australia. This qualitative study draws on interviews with 21 Chinese international students across four universities in Melbourne, supplemented with data from Chinese social media (Xiaohongshu, WeChat, Weibo, Zhihu, Baidu Tieba). This study draws on Chang and Gomes’s (2017) Digital journeys theory to conceptualise adaptation across changing information landscapes, and McKnight and Chervany’s (2001) typology of trust and distrust and Chang, Yeh, and Yang’s (2014) work on trust in Chinese contexts to explain how trust shapes CIS’ engagement with information sources.
Findings reveal that, in the pre-arrival stage, CIS used on Chinese online and offline information sources with limited engagement with Australian-based sources. Their engagement with information also reflects their approaches to seeking (active or passive, proxy) and levels of trust in these sources. After arriving in Australia, most CIS faced a gap between financial expectations and reality. In addition, upon arrival, CIS’s information behaviours undergo a process of adaptation that was partial, complex, and ongoing as they navigate Chinese and Australian information landscapes, adding new nuance to Digital journeys theory.
Confirmation of Candidature, School of Media and Communication
This research addresses a critical paradox: creative work depends on the psychological conditions that empowerment creates – autonomy, meaning and psychological safety – yet the creative industries have systematically avoided the leadership practices that foster these conditions. Despite extensive research in stable organisational contexts, there is insufficient understanding of how empowering leadership operates in the project-based, temporally bounded and precarious work environments characteristic of the creative industries.
This study employs an explanatory sequential mixed methods design across three case studies of creative projects in Australia. Phase one deploys valid instruments Spreitzer’s Psychological Empowerment Scale, Zhang & Bartol’s Empowering Leadership and Creativity and Edmondson’s Psychological Safety measure, adapted for project based work. Phase 2 conducts semi-structured interviews with participants to explore the lived experience of empowerment in creative contexts.
Recent industry reports reveal that 72% of Australian screen workers do not experience psychologically safe workplaces, indicating a systemic connection between leadership practices and worker well-being. As creative industries gain economic centrality and face AI disruption understanding empowerment in these contexts becomes increasingly urgent. This research seeks to develop contextually appropriate frameworks for empowering leadership that account for the distinctive features of creative work, offering practical guidance for leaders, organisations and industry bodies committed to fostering sustainable, innovative and psychologically safe workplaces.
Third Milestone Review, School of Education
International research highlights the critical role of instructional leadership (IL) for enhancing teachers’ instructional practices. Although mandated by the Bhutanese Ministry of Education, the model has not been examined. This study is one of the first in-depth investigation into (1) principals’ instructional leadership practices (2) factors influencing the enactment of IL, and (3) principals’ and teachers’ perceptions of IL, using a convergent parallel mixed methods design. In study one, 44 principals (93% male; 7% female) completed the Principal Instructional Management Rating Scale (PIMRS) questionnaire, and 19 principals (100% male) from Higher Secondary Schools (HSS) also participated in semi-structured interviews. In Study Two, 158 HSS teachers (67% male; 31.7% female; 1.3% neutral) completed the PIMRS, and 31 teachers (61.3% male; 38.7% female) also participated in interviews.
Study One indicated principals perceived themselves as frequently engaged in IL practices. Interview data revealed that factors such as school culture, IL policy expectations, and resource management constrained principals’ ability to enact IL practices.
Study Two indicated principals as frequently engaged in IL practices. Interview findings suggested constraints, including the level of support available to principals, competing leadership roles, curriculum demands, and the broader school environment. Principals and teachers demonstrated varying levels of understanding and interpretation of IL and largely practised IL within the model's domains.
Both studies indicated frequent engagement in IL practices by principals. However, the findings highlight that different contextual and role-related factors constrained the enactment of IL from the perspective of principals and teachers.
Third Milestone Review, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies
This study explores the professionalisation of interpreting in Saudi Arabia, an area that has received limited scholarly attention despite growing international interest in the field. It aims to deepen understanding of how interpreting is perceived and practised in the Saudi context, and to identify the professional conditions needed for its development as a recognised profession.
Using a mixed-methods approach, the research combines a national questionnaire with semi-structured interviews involving interpreters and key stakeholders. The analysis is informed by Tseng’s phases model of professionalisation and supported by Weiss-Gal and Welbourne’s professional indicators framework.
The findings show that interpreting in Saudi Arabia is in a transitional and uneven stage of professionalisation. While elements of market disorder remain, there are also signs of progress towards greater professional consensus and commitment. These include the emergence of professional organisations, the introduction of ethical guidelines, and the gradual implementation of entry control mechanisms.
Professionalisation varies notably across interpreting types. Conference interpreting shows partial consolidation through institutional training and certification efforts. Interpreting in the the Two Holy Mosques demonstrates more advanced, context-specific professionalisation, supported by strong institutional governance and enforced ethical standards. In contrast, community interpreting remains largely overlooked, without professional recognition or support.
The study identifies key challenges such as weak regulatory enforcement, misalignment between education and practice, and uneven institutional recognition. While progress has been reasonable given the recent establishment of formal structures, significant structural barriers remain to be addressed for interpreting to become a fully established profession in Saudi Arabia.
Confirmation of Candidature, School of Media and Communication
As we enter an era marked by rising ultranationalist activism and increasingly visible threats to diversity and social justice within digitalised and datafied society, an important question emerges: is the mere use of data and the narration of data within journalistic practice sufficient to address those existing problems? Should data journalism be perceived only as journalists’ technical capacity to collect, process, visualise data and translate it into stories, or might it serve a greater purpose amid contemporary social crisis happening around the globe? What role can data journalism play in advancing social change, particularly within contexts where data ecosystems remain constrained?
In this PhD proposal, I seek to reconceptualize the function and meaning of data journalism by examining its transformative potential through a multi-layered analysis of data ecosystems, outputs, and practices of data journalists in Indonesia and Australia. The project is anchored in Constructivist Grounded Theory (CGT) by Charmaz (2006), which supports the construction of concepts to formulate a Transformative Data Journalism (TDJ) framework. This TDJ framework is consstructed through a Foucauldian lens of power and knowledge, decolonising data, and critical data studies as the substantive concepts and various studies of transformative potential as the non-substantive ones. The framework will be refined in response to researcher’s empirical findings. To generate these findings, this study adopts a mixed-method design that combines computational approaches (topic modelling) with qualitative methods (critical discourse analysis and in-depth interviews) and quantitative survey research, with each method deployed to address specific research questions in the overall study.
Confirmation of Candidature, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies
This thesis examines how visual art practices in Bosnia and Herzegovina contribute to processes of remembrance and social engagement in the aftermath of war. Drawing on interpretivist and constructivist approaches, the study investigates how artist-led and community-based visual art practices engage with experiences of violence, loss, and survival within a socio-political environment marked by ongoing division and conflicting accounts of memory (Halilovich, 2017; Palmberger, 2016). Rather than framing art as an instrument of reconciliation or a substitute for legal mechanisms of transitional justice, the research approaches artistic practice as a form of inquiry through which meaning, responsibility, and social relations are continuously negotiated (Bleiker, 2001; Kester, 2004).
The study employs qualitative methods, including semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and site-based visual analysis to examine cultural institutions, non-governmental initiatives, participatory memorial practices, and selected artist-led interventions across Bosnia and Herzegovina. This research is built on the premise that visual arts enable process-oriented and emotionally grounded ways of engaging with the past that resist fixed narratives or definitive closure. It therefore seeks to understand how these artistic processes and artworks contribute to communicating lived experiences of the war and its aftermath, and how they may support social cohesion in Bosnia and Herzegovina moving forward. In practice, creative endeavours and art offers a means of approaching painful histories that acknowledges loss and uncertainty, inviting reflection and connection without forcing emotional resolution or unified interpretation (Halilovich, 2017; Palmberger, 2016).
RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business - Artwork 'Sentient' by Hollie Johnson, Gunaikurnai and Monero Ngarigo.
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