Third Milestone Review, School of Media and Communication, Social Change
Contemporary societal developments are significantly increasing the incidence of help-seeking by people in vulnerable circumstances. These developments include the COVID-19 pandemic and the demand for mental health services; the cost-of-living crisis and demand for emergency relief; and the housing crisis and demand for homelessness and legal services. This is occurring in the context of the pronounced digital transformation of everyday life, which on the one hand may also be contributing to affordability pressures and the precarity of employment in the so-called gig economy, but on the other hand, is importantly providing opportunities for community service organisations, in collaboration with business and government, to find new ways to better respond to rising inequality and the financial hardship faced by many people in maintaining access to essential services.
Digital social innovation is an emerging field of theory and practice focused on utilising the affordances of modern digital technologies to address social needs, particularly for people in vulnerable circumstances. It is related to, but different from, concepts such as Tech for Good, digital innovation, social innovation, and corporate social innovation, which are all actively discussed by the international scholarly community. While there is some consideration of social innovation in Australia, particularly social entrepreneurship, this research fills a gap in knowledge about digital social innovation and contributes to a better conceptual understanding of this emerging phenomenon.
It does this by examining prominent extant case studies through the views and experiences of the actors involved. Using qualitative interviews and thematic analysis, it provides an understanding of the emergence and process of digital social innovation in the context of broader Australian societal conditions and their impact on people in financial hardship. It answers questions about: What are the conditions that support the emergence of digital social innovations that are responding to community welfare needs in Australia today? Who are the key actors, what are the key capabilities, and how these innovations are considered successful?
The research contributes an Australian perspective to a relatively new field of theory and practice. It also contributes to contemporary public policy considerations regarding the unique capability of the not-for-profit sector in Australia, to discussions on corporate social responsibility, and to better cross-sector collaboration for social good between for-profit, not-for-profit, government and philanthropic organisations.
Second Milestone Review, School of Property, Construction and Project Management, Social Change
The rapid growth of offshore wind energy presents a significant opportunity for Australia to transition toward a low-carbon economy. However, while the environmental and economic dimensions of offshore wind projects have been widely studied, their social impacts remain underexplored, particularly in the Australian context. This research addresses that gap by developing a multi-criteria decision-making framework for social value assessment to systematically evaluate the social benefits and risks associated with offshore wind development. The study employs a multi-phase mixed-methods approach. First, a comprehensive literature review identifies existing frameworks, indicators, and methodologies used for measuring social value in infrastructure and renewable energy projects. This is complemented by semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders, including government agencies, developers, Indigenous organisations, regional authorities, and independent experts, to refine and expand relevant social value indicators. A questionnaire survey will then be conducted to prioritise these indicators and determine their significance from diverse stakeholder perspectives. Building on these findings, a multi-criteria decision-making framework will be developed. Finally, the model will be validated through focus group discussions with experts and stakeholders. The expected outcome is a robust and transferable framework that integrates stakeholder input and social indicators into the planning and decision-making process. This framework will assist policymakers, developers, and communities in navigating complex social challenges, fostering transparency, and enhancing public trust. Ultimately, the research aims to ensure that offshore wind projects deliver equitable and sustainable social value alongside environmental and economic benefits.
Confirmation of Candidature, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, Social Change
This research explores the power of documentation in shaping the narrative of families as they move through the service system and into the Family Court. Documentation submitted to the Family Court by human and justice services can influence the Courts understanding of a family and, consequently, its judicial decision making. In turn, documentation has the potential to either strengthen or undermine the wellbeing and safety of adult and child victim survivors.
Family violence informed documentation is therefore critical. Such documentation holds the parent choosing violence accountable for their choice to use violence by highlighting their pattern of behaviour, the impact of their violence on the family and the strength and resilience of the protective parent. Documentation that is not family violence informed can minimise the accountability of the parent, instead holding the protective parent responsible for the choices of their violent partner. Unless the documentation shared with the Family Court is family violence informed, the Court’s capacity to make family violence-informed decisions will be constrained.
Despite the potential of documentation to shape Family Court outcomes, limited research has explored its influence. In particular, little is known about the impact of documentation in cases where the Court’s decision has recognised family violence and held the parent choosing violence accountable. This project aims to address this gap by investigating the influence of family violence informed documentation in judicial decisions of the Family Court. The findings will be used to highlight good practice in documentation and inform improvements across the service sector.
Second Milestone Review, School of Property, Construction and Project Management, Urban Futures
In today’s cognitively demanding work environments, maintaining alertness is critical to both employee health and performance. Among office workers, sleep deprivation, often caused by long working hours and occupational stress, as well as mental fatigue, resulting from sustained engagement in demanding tasks, are known to impair alertness. Declines in alertness in work settings have been associated with diminished job performance, impaired information processing and decision making, increased error rates, and a heightened risk of depression and burnout. Supporting alertness therefore can be essential not only for enhancing organizational outcomes, but also for employee’s health and well-being.
Lighting in office spaces is one of the indoor environmental factors increasingly recognized for its potential impact on workers’ health and productivity. For decades, lighting design was primarily focused on meeting visual requirements necessary for performing everyday tasks. However, growing evidence indicates that, beyond supporting vision, light entering the human eye also influences health and well-being through non-image forming effects, including circadian entrainment, and acute enhancements of alertness and performance.
Despite this evidence, research examining the effectiveness of light in enhancing alertness within real-world settings remains limited. The majority of existing studies have been conducted in controlled laboratory settings, which do not fully capture the complexities of everyday life. With a focus on office environments, this study contributes to the emerging body of field-based research by investigating the relationship between light exposure and alertness among office workers during their working hours.
Confirmation of Candidature, School of Media and Communication, Social Change
Since cinema was reintroduced in Saudi Arabia, the film industry has grown rapidly and become a more prominent part of the country’s cultural and creative landscape. This growth has occurred alongside broader social and economic changes. At the same time, questions have emerged about how Saudi cinema is perceived internationally and how its international reputation is being built.
This PhD research examines how key stakeholders in the Saudi film sector understand and shape that reputation. It will analyse approaches to increasing international recognition and assess whether the experiences of other national film industries offer useful points of comparison. The study will also explore the challenges that may influence these efforts, including cultural, regulatory, institutional, and market-related factors.
The research adopts an interpretivist, exploratory qualitative approach. Around 15–20 semi-structured interviews will be conducted with stakeholders across the Saudi film sector, including policymakers, industry organisations, producers, distributors, creatives, critics, and academics. Interview data will be analysed using reflexive thematic analysis.
The study focuses on how people working within and around the Saudi film industry understand its reputation and its international position. In doing so, it aims to contribute to discussions about national cinema, cultural reputation, and the international development of creative industries.
Third Milestone Review, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, Urban Futures
Flood disasters are not natural occurrences, they are the byproduct of structural conditions that determine who is most vulnerable, who bears the greatest harm, and who is left waiting. This thesis examines why flood disasters continue to be so devastating in the Chancay-Lambayeque subbasin, focusing on the 2017 Coastal El Niño and its aftermath in the communities of Chongoyape and Etén. Drawing on forty-two semi-structured interviews with community members and key stakeholders, it argues that institutionally produced waiting –veiling, delaying, and confusing– is the central governance condition through which vulnerability is sustained and flood disaster risk reproduced.
The thesis contributes to scholarship about the politics of waiting, building on Auyero (2012) and applying it to flood disaster governance. It demonstrates how waiting is experienced by communities as enforced entrapment, disorientation, and resignation; how it is produced institutionally through fragmented governance, performative collaboration, and the systematic exclusion of community voices; and how prolonged exposure to waiting produces submissiveness and learned compliance, conditioning communities to accept institutional inaction as inevitable. Floating is introduced as an original contribution, capturing the perpetual and directionless movement in which communities are unknowingly ensnared in the institutional waiting game.
The thesis concludes that breaking this cycle requires governments to recognise how waiting is deployed as a weapon of bureaucracy, and to take responsibility for the conditions of vulnerability they have produced.
Confirmation of Candidature, School of Property, Construction and Project Management, Social Change
When safety-critical systems, such as process plants and railway signalling control systems fail, such failures can result in considerable harm. No engineer has infinite time or resources; design engineers must work within their project's constraints while progressing the design, yet ensure they have sufficient justification for that progression. Within this decision-making process, engineers use standards, past experience, and other design inputs. These inputs influence the engineer's judgement about whether there is sufficient justification for the design to progress. Research on failures of safety-critical systems is documented in the literature, but few studies have examined how design engineers assess the sufficiency of their design safety justifications. This study asks: How do design engineers reason about the sufficiency of their design safety justifications? Two cases are used across two industries (railway signalling and process safety), with a common safety goal but achieving it differently. Using semi-structured interviews, approximately 15 engineers with varying levels of experience in each industry will be interviewed. Using a social constructionism framework, the study will learn how sufficiency judgements are constructed across industries. Downer's epistemic accident framework will inform the analysis of how safety justifications may be reasonable despite incomplete knowledge. By considering how engineers decide that enough has been done, this research aims to better understand how they reach sufficiency judgements and the extent to which those judgements can be challenged. Knowing this, the findings may help engineering teams consider when more inquiry may be warranted.
Confirmation of Candidature, School of Media and Communication, Social Change
If generative artificial intelligence participates in your creative process, can the work still be considered yours? Drawing on distributed creativity theory, human-machine communication scholarship, and posthumanist philosophy, this research addresses the unresolved question of what counts as creative work when AI participates — a source of anxiety for many in the cultural industries. The advertising industry is a productive site for research, where its creative professionals operate within institutionalised norms, cultural values, and beliefs that shape the legitimacy of creativity. These creative practitioners navigate the challenge of balancing artistic expression with commercial interests — a tension further complicated by generative AI’s involvement in creative production. This study examines the human-AI ideation in advertising as a social phenomenon, investigating how advertising creatives understand creativity with generative AI, what boundaries they draw between human and AI contributions, and how they experience these entanglements, in which creativity is no longer exclusively human.
Third Milestone Review, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, Urban Futures
Rapid urbanisation has disconnected humans from their innate connection to nature, each other, and other species. In Melbourne (Naarm) urban context, my research investigates how architects and community groups adopt biophilic and ecological design in practice. It asks: What shifts are required to integrate these approaches toward regenerative practice that delivers biodiversity benefits and addresses Melbourne's ecological crisis? What conditions, values, and skills support this adoption?
This practice-led research draws on my roles as principal architect, developer, researcher, sustainability/regenerative lecturer, co-founder of an environmental community group, and cultural community leader. I adopt a reflexive practice methodology allowing my professional experience to inform research insights about challenges and enablers for implementing regenerative design.
Through literature review and qualitative/quantitative fieldwork methods, these insights are examined across five investigations: 1) Indigenous knowledge through caring for Country that challenges Western architectural frameworks; 2) environmental community groups adopting tacit ecological knowledge to boost biodiversity and create habitat; 3) how motorway noise barriers can be transformed into ecological buffers and wildlife corridors; 4) courtyards, gardens, and green walls reconnecting humans to nature; 5) regenerative urban interfaces weaving these interventions, establishing ecological connectivity across urban fabric.
Challenges are identified such as red tape prioritizing urban sprawl over ecological solutions, Indigenous knowledge poorly integrated into Western frameworks, and gaps between volunteer capacity and systemic support. Yet enablers are emerging: transdisciplinary collaboration, community stewardship, iterative design processes, and place-based ecological knowledge. These findings can guide architectural practices, environmental community groups, and infrastructure designers to restore socio-ecological systems through regenerative practice.
Confirmation of Candidature, School of Media and Communication, Urban Futures
Journalists routinely work at close range to emotionally demanding situations – from interviewing grieving families and sitting through disturbing court cases to navigating hostile audiences online. Yet journalism has historically valued professional detachment, leaving the emotional work involved in reporting comparatively hidden. While research increasingly recognises emotion as central to journalism, less is known about how journalists learn to manage these demands early in their careers. This formative period warrants particular attention because journalists may encounter significant emotional demands while still developing professional identities, coping strategies and support networks.
This research examines how early-career journalists manage the emotional labour of journalism in everyday practice, and how prepared and supported they feel to do so. Rather than focusing on specialist high-risk or traumatic reporting contexts, it considers emotional labour as a recurring dimension of everyday journalistic work.
Drawing on emotional labour and professional socialisation as conceptual lenses, the study will use semi-structured interviews with approximately 30 journalists in their first three years of professional practice. Interviews will explore participants’ emotional experiences, the strategies they develop, how they learn professional expectations around emotion, and their perceptions of preparation and support from journalism education, colleagues, editors and news organisations. Data will be analysed using reflexive thematic analysis.
By centring early-career journalists’ lived experiences, the research aims to deepen understanding of how journalists learn to navigate the emotional and professional demands of journalism, with potential implications for journalism education and newsroom support.
Second Milestone Review, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, Social Change
In Vietnamese universities, CEFR-aligned benchmarks and quality assessment requirements intensify pressures on speaking assessment, making teacher agency central to balancing accountability and learning. This qualitative interpretivist single-site case study investigates how teachers exercise agency in co-designing and moderating an individual-turn speaking rubric for a B1-level general English course at a public university.
The study involves six to ten teachers with four phases: (1) a preliminary survey and document analysis to establish existing practices; (2) a co-design workshop to develop an analytic rubric; (3) a moderation session using consented re-take audio clips to refine criterion bands and rationales; and (4) individual interviews exploring enablers, constraints, and perceived rubric effectiveness. The data, including workshop discussions, interview transcripts, documents, and a rubric change log, are analysed using Reflexive Thematic Analysis with abductive reasoning, framed through Priestley et al.’s (2015) ecological agency dimensions related to iterational, practical-evaluative, and projective, and Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) Ecological Systems Theory.
The expected outcomes include a co-constructed, contextually evaluated B1 speaking rubric with text-based anchors and rationale notes, moderation documentation, a comprehensive description of teacher decision-making and explanatory vignettes, an ecological perspective on how teachers negotiate fairness and practicality in resource-constrained contexts, and their perceived effectiveness of the co-designed rubric. The study highlights ethical rigor through voluntary participation and confidentiality. The findings are intended to support rubric implementation and offer transferable insights for similar higher education settings.
Third Milestone Review, School of Media and Communication, Social Change
This thesis asks: How do older adults engage and empower a Community of Practice (CoP) mobilising with generative artificial intelligence (AI)? It reports a four-cycle Participatory Action Research study with twelve U3A members from June 2024 to March 2026. It challenges deficit accounts of older people as technologically limited or vulnerable.
Participation did not unfold as a steady developmental progression. Technical competence mattered, but did not define the trajectory. Participation changed with the activity and with judgements about what was useful or acceptable. People persisted, redirected effort, questioned outputs, taught others and sometimes stopped. Agency appeared in deciding how, and whether, to remain involved.
Across the inquiry, tinkering became increasingly useful for understanding this shared practice. Making and repair gave it a material register, checking and comparison an epistemic one. Social tinkering developed through humour, troubleshooting and peer exchange. Ethical-political questions arose around representation, reliability, access, authorship, safety, cost and organisational purpose. These registers overlapped.
Viewed retrospectively through Wenger’s account of CoPs, the inquiry shows mutual engagement, joint enterprise and shared repertoire developing while the technologies remained unstable. Mobilisation became visible as practices travelled beyond experimentation, were taken up by others, and entered U3A teaching and organisational work.
The thesis argues that, in this study, agency, competence and ethical judgement were produced collectively. Older adults did not simply learn to use AI; they worked together to decide how it should be used, questioned or refused.
Third Milestone Review, School of Education, Social Change
The COVID-19 pandemic had a profound impact on schools in Victoria, requiring teachers and school leaders to navigate some of the most prolonged and recurring government-imposed quarantine lockdowns in the world. This was an unprecedented event and essentially a time of crisis for the education sector characterised by uncertainty, unpredictable timelines and stress. It was a period where approaches to teaching and learning were forced to change quickly and this became a turning point for schools and families. This research explores the key insights from the influences of the pandemic on professional learning in Victorian schools. Central to the project is the knowledge teachers gained about their own learning through the disruptive experience of the pandemic. As well as amplifying teacher voice, the study also draws on the perspectives of school leaders. Situated within a social constructivist theoretical framework, the study draws heavily on the subjective perspectives of teachers and school leaders, collected through semi-structured interviews. The qualitative approach used across the independent school sectors in Victoria provided an opportunity to explore these reflections in depth. Focusing on teacher learning, this research provides insights which may guide or schools and systems into the design of professional learning models beyond the pandemic. The emerging themes potentially characterise ‘effective’ and ‘sustainable’ professional learning.
Confirmation of Candidature, School of Media and Communication, Social Change
Digital content creation is becoming increasingly visible in rural areas, yet rural creator cultures remain comparatively underexplored in research on digital cultural production. Drawing on emerging scholarship on rural creator cultures and using media anthropology as an analytical approach, this study examines how creator practices are embedded in rural social life. It focuses on two villages in West Java, Indonesia, where two rural creator communities have developed around digital content production. The study asks how creator practices interact with local livelihoods, social relations, place, and community life, and how these interactions may reshape everyday rural experiences. The research will employ ethnography as its main method, including participant observation, interviews, and engagement with participants’ content-making practices. By examining creator culture within its wider social and cultural context, the study seeks to contribute to the emerging scholarship on rural creator cultures in the Global South and to offer a more place-sensitive understanding of digital cultural production in rural settings.
Confirmation of Candidature, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, Social Change
English proficiency is increasingly important for graduate employability, yet questions remain about how well university English learning prepares graduates for workplace communication and career development in Vietnam. This study examines tertiary English language studies within non-English-major undergraduate programmes, including general and discipline-specific provision where offered, rather than degrees specialising in English. The scope includes institutionally required English studies where applicable, without assuming uniform compulsory English requirements.
The study compares perspectives from graduates, employers, English-language teachers and university administrators across Business and Management-related disciplines, Information Technology and Computing, and Tourism and Hospitality. It investigates perceived contributions to employability; priority English-language skills and workplace communication tasks, adequacy of university preparation; and individual, educational, institutional and workplace factors that facilitate or constrain graduates’ development and use of English for employment.
Grounded in a pragmatic research paradigm, the study adopts a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design. Four stakeholder-specific surveys will be followed by semi-structured interviews informed by aggregate survey findings. Volunteers will be selected through a separate, unlinked interview opt-in process. The Graduate Capital Model, workplace language-needs analysis and a curriculum–workplace alignment perspective will guide interpretation, with work-integrated learning considered as a contextual facilitator, rather than as a separate primary outcome. Integrating quantitative and qualitative findings will explain similarities and differences across stakeholder groups and disciplines. The findings may inform curriculum, assessment, workplace-oriented teaching and university–industry engagement, without establishing causal effects or claiming national statistical representativeness.
Second Milestone Review, School of Media and Communication, Social Change
This research examines how the authenticity of cultural heritage is co-created through social media engagement in the Vietnamese context. In this research, engagement refers to the dynamic interaction among influencers, users, and platforms that reimagines how heritage is understood and practised.
Combining netnography and semi-structured interviews, this study explores how influencers and users negotiate what counts as authentic through social media content and interactions related to Vietnamese heritage. It also examines how platform affordances and algorithms shape this process.
The study aims to develop a co-creation framework mapping how cultural authenticity is reciprocally shaped by human and non-human actors.
This research is expected to contribute to scholarship on cultural authenticity, influencer relations, and social media communication, while providing insights for cultural policy, heritage institutions, and digital communication practitioners.
Confirmation of Candidature, School of Media and Communication, Social Change
Television broadcasts on election night play a dominant role in the democratic press of presidential elections in the United States. However, existing academic research has seldom examined election night television coverage, and has largely ignored the ‘projections’ which are prominently featured within that coverage. To address this gap, this proposed research seeks to conduct a direct analysis of the election night broadcasts from two cable news channels to understand the role of projections in the coverage of five presidential elections from 2008 to 2024. This textual analysis will focus on projections, and explore how they are narratively and visually presented and the role they play in the wider coverage of election night. The findings of this analysis will allow a deeper understanding of how projections shape election night television coverage and will invite further discussion about the role of cable news channels in the democratic process, a pressing concern globally considering the precarious state of many democracies today.
Third Milestone Review, School of Property, Construction and Project Management, Urban Futures
Climate change is intensifying the need to reconsider how urban flood defence infrastructure, including widely used structural defences such as floodwalls, is planned, designed, and adapted over time. This research aims to enhance floodwall resilience by developing an Evidence-Based Conceptual Model (EbCM) for Climate-Adaptive Floodwall Design (CAFD), using Australia and Vietnam as contrasting governance, socio-economic, and environmental contexts.
A sequential mixed-methods design integrates a systematic literature review, comparative case studies, structured questionnaires, open-ended responses, semi-structured interviews, and secondary data. Five determinants of CAFD were established: governance and policy effectiveness, financial feasibility, technical capacity, stakeholder engagement, and hydro-physical conditions. These determinants guided quantitative analysis using Fuzzy Synthetic Evaluation and the Analytic Hierarchy Process, identifying differences in their perceived severity and prioritisation across Australia and Vietnam. Semi-structured interviews with flood defence practitioners subsequently provided contextual explanations for these differences and revealed that the determinants operate as an interconnected system rather than independently, with governance acting as a key enabling mechanism and hydro-physical conditions driving continuous adaptation.
Through methodological triangulation, these findings established interaction pathways underpinning the proposed EbCM. Informed by Socio-Technical Systems, Complex Adaptive Systems, and Complex Network theories, the model conceptualises CAFD as an interconnected socio-technical network. The model will next be evaluated through empirical grounding, cross-case applicability, theoretical consistency, and future climate robustness. The research contributes an evidence-based decision-support framework for strengthening long-term climate-adaptive floodwall planning and resilience.
Confirmation of Candidature, School of Education, Social Change
The Australian Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine (STEMM) sector is committed to addressing gender disparity, making it a strategic imperative driven by the national interventions such as Science in Australia Gender Equity initiative (SAGE, 2015) which is an adaptation of UK’s Athena Swan Charter (Kalpazidou Schmidt et al., 2020; SAGE, 2015) -implementing policies to address leaky pipeline (Blickenstaff, 2005), gender pay gap (McGee et al., 2024) and hiring women in senior leadership (Borger & Purton, 2022; Carangio, 2023). However, mainstream Gender Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (GEDI) policies within Australian Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medical (STEMM) institutions see “women” as a homogenous category(Miles et al., 2022) where white, cis-gendered women benefit the most over racialised diverse women migrants (Davis & Sanchez-Hucles, 2010; Harris, 1993; Sanchez-Hucles & Davis, 2010).
Despite growing interest in understanding the intersectional experiences and barriers faced by women of colour STEMM, there is limited research examining the unique experiences of South Asian women in Australian STEMM (AuSTEMM) Higher Education sector. This research will focus on understanding the experiences of South Asian Women Researchers in Australian STEMM Higher Education sector, specifically aiming to understand the factors influencing on their entry, experience, progression and retention in Australian STEMM.
The research will employ qualitative surveys and semi-structured qualitative interviews to capture the depth of the unique experiences of the cohort group, providing a landscape of their unique experiences, enablers and barriers. The project will not only serve the purpose of providing visibility, acknowledgement and recognition to South Asian researchers but will also enhance the nuanced understanding of the structural, cultural and systemic forces that shape their experiences in STEMM.
This research draws on a number of existing theoretical frameworks to investigate the unique experiences of South Asian Women researchers in AuSTEMM Higher Education spaces. Some fragments can be analysed through the lens of Critical Race Theory (CRT), Kimberley Crenshaw’s Intersectionality theory (as interlocking systems of oppression), feminist institutionalism, Barnacle’s ontological becoming (of South-Australian women in Australian STEMM), whiteness as STEMM property (Harris, 1993), Bourdieu’s Social Capital theory and decolonial theory (coloniality of knowledge and epistemic injustice).
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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