Minerva Elements Records
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ItemComparison of measured and perceived fundamental characteristics to identify strategies for increasing the rate of daily walking in suburban areas( 2020-07)Future cities will increasingly face health, socio-economic and environmental problems, including disease, social isolation, economic breakdown, excessive carbon dioxide emissions, climate change, and fossil fuel depletion. The planning and design of neighbourhoods which provide high levels of pedestrian accessibility to daily needs destinations such as schools, grocery shops, greenspaces and public transport could contribute to solutions to these problems by the reduction of car-based travel. Future cities need to be walkable based on solutions that can be achieved through better planning and design which takes into consideration accessibility as well as Key Urban Place Characteristics (KUPCs). The author considers walkability to be formed by two factors: the first, accessibility, is the distance to daily needs destinations, and the second is KUPCs, the safety and security, comfort, and attractiveness of the walk to those daily needs’ destinations. Although many suburban neighbourhoods in Melbourne have good access to daily needs, people who live in these areas often choose to drive to their destinations rather than walk. This may be due to negative perceptions of the place and the lack of fundamental place characteristics. The aim of this research is to identify strategies to increase rates of daily walking based on an understanding of the relationship between urban place characteristics and accessibility in suburban neighbourhoods. Therefore, the author has chosen four case studies; two international best practice case studies to validate a theoretical framework obtained from the best practice literature, and an in-depth examination of two local case studies in Melbourne using the validated theoretical framework to assess the scale of walkability in the most accessible areas in selected suburban samples. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are used in this study, in keeping with a sequential explanatory design mixed-method approach. Data collection was conducted using mapping, urban informatics, desktop analysis, field observations of KUPCs, and face-to-face interviews with residents. The analysis of walking-related values using key research studies provided opportunities to reveal the most important characteristics needed for walking to daily needs in the case studies. These results were used to identify strategies for increasing the rate of daily walking in suburban areas.
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ItemThe role of skilled migration in Australian dairy farming and implications for agricultural workforce development( 2020)Employment of a migrant workforce is a key strategy for both the Australian Government and employers to address workforce labour and skill shortages. In the Australian dairy farm sector, structural change has increased the demand for employees with management and technical skills. This led some employers to employ skilled migrants under Temporary Work (Skilled) visas (subclass 457). The 457 visa was introduced by the Australian government in 1996 and abolished in 2017. In March 2018, a new subclass 482 visa was introduced but restricted skilled migrants’ eligibility pathways to obtain Australian permanent residency visas. Focusing on the 457 visa, this thesis examines the research question: "How does the attraction and retention of skilled migrants contribute to development of the dairy workforce?" While skilled migration has been an option for employers in agriculture, the use of the 457 visa in dairy farming in Australia has not been investigated until now. In particular, that involves how the 457 visa has supported a long-term workforce development strategy by sourcing skilled labour from the international labour market. The conceptual framework for this study integrates psychological contract theory, relating to the employment relationship between skilled migrants and farm employers, with theories of workforce development systems, relating to the sectoral and institutional arrangements governing the workforce. The conceptual framework was applied in the design of the research and in the analysis and interpretation of data. A qualitative case study research design was implemented involving semi-structured interviews with 20 case study farm employers and nine of their skilled migrant employees. A focus group was conducted with 10 industry stakeholders, and three government policy makers and three migration agents took part in semi-structured interviews. The qualitative data analysis tools of grounded theory, including coding, categorisation, conceptualisation and constant comparison of data were applied to derive the findings. The primary motivation of case study farmers in seeking skilled migrant employees under visa 457 was the limited availability of skills in the domestic workforce that were aligned to their current and future skill requirements. These skills requirements were significantly broader than qualifications and experience and were found to include attributes associated with organisational commitment and job involvement. Skill requirements were also contingent on the business stage of the farm. The case study farm employers were able to align the skills of the 457 visa employee with their future business goals, irrespective of whether the business life cycle was in a growth, mature or decline stage. Skilled migrant employees under 457 visas choose Australian dairy farm employment to meet their future needs, such as becoming an Australian permanent resident, and to access Australian dairy industry skills and knowledge. Both the employer and skilled migrant played critical roles in determining the quality of the employment relationship, which, in turn, influenced skilled migrant retention. At the pre-employment phase, a shared understanding between the employer and skilled migrant of each other’s future needs from the employment was significant in both the execution of the formal employment contract and in establishing mutual expectations for the employment relationship. A skilled migrant employee’s awareness of an employer’s provision of socio-cultural support was also found to be key in their decision to accept a job offer and in the quality of the subsequent employment relationship. Significantly, perceived strong employer support to the skilled migrant in accessing permanent residency was found to be a key component of mutuality in the psychological contract between the skilled migrant and their farm employer and was associated with both the retention of the skilled migrant and achievement of farm business outcomes. The workforce governance actors of government, community, industry, and employers play different roles in attracting and retaining skilled migrants on dairy farms. The effectiveness of the agricultural workforce development system is constrained when there is a lack of alignment between these actors with respect to supporting pathways for skilled migrants to achieve permanent residency, and recognition of the critical intermediary role of migration agents during the pre-employment phase. Such systemic misalignment impacts on how successfully skilled migrants and their farm employers achieve mutuality with respect to the psychological contract between them. In turn a misalignment of mutuality can undermine achievement of the farm business goals and skilled migrants’ personal aspirations. The findings of this research highlight how the policies and strategies that support agricultural workforce development strongly influence opportunities and constraints at the business enterprise. This study highlights the need for coordination and alignment across all stakeholders within the dairy workforce development to ensure that policies such as Visa 457 deliver benefit.
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ItemModernity, Sociality and the Enigma of Justice( 2020)This thesis is an inquiry into the enigmatic idea of Justice. Like all foundational ideas, justice is subject to increasing tension as a result of competing interpretations of the ‘good’ in modernity and sociality and plurality in all its forms. This creates the enigmatic quality of justice which resides on the one hand in a proliferation of theories of justice which are irreducible and incommensurate and on the other, a hollowing out or fraying of any overarching idea of justice. Justice for this thesis is theorised within broader social rather than usual political frameworks and is situated between formal and contextual approaches and always contains an ethical orientation. This idea of justice is inclusive of both transcendent foundational and immanent regulative moments, which ultimately are not resolvable, which informs the enigmatic quality of justice, related finally to the openness of justice. In drawing out this enigmatic quality, this thesis focuses on early modern and contemporary approaches from Kant and Hegel to Heller and Honneth. The choice of theorists is related to the conceptual dialogue between their varying interpretations of modernity, sociality and their relationship to the idea of justice. This dialogue highlights key theoretical architecture from the earlier theorists, which resonates in the contemporary theories. Most notably, the continuum between form and context and between what I refer to as the ‘pivot points’ of justice, including the subject and their sociality, the right and the good, form and content, contingency and teleology framed within the overarching concepts of western modernity, freedom and value plurality. In developing this dialogue, I identify a number of under-theorised elements, leading to the argument that justice in contemporary modernity must include regulative moments or elements which allow for the negotiation of immanent empirical problems. The idea of justice is however, neither exhausted nor limited to the horizon of the present and always gestures beyond immanence to the immediate future or the distant future. I argue this immanent and transcendent dimension is internal to the idea of justice itself. I also argue that while the enigmatic quality of justice will remain, it may be mediated by mobilising key concepts from both Kant and Hegel which have been updated and modified by Heller and Honneth. The outcome of these updated ideas is that justice as an idea in contemporary modernity can be theorised as 'open', closely aligned to freedom and positioned between and drawing upon immanence and transcendence.
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ItemFrom fact to fiction: a reflexive analysis of how screenwriter and subject intersect in the transformative process of authoring a modern biopic( 2019)The choice to work within the fictional frame of the biopic genre gives the screenwriter powerful representational tools to vivify character. But the tension between historical fidelity, and narrative fiction, raises important ethical questions. What responsibility does the marketing phrase, "based on a true story" place on the shoulders of the socially responsible screenwriter who is essentially writing a fiction? This practice-based enquiry responds to these questions by challenging the pervasive expectation that writers of historical and biographical fiction defend their truth claims on the methodological terms of the historian, and offers an alternative to a media studies proposal to cross-fertilise screenwriting practice with media ethics. By reframing the conversation away from empirical notions of historical fidelity, and consequentialist models of ethical evaluation, a significant methodological issue emerges, one that stems from a profound misconception of filmmaking practice that views the making of moving images as the non-reflexive application of mechanical skills. To counter this misconception, a working definition of filmmaking methodology is articulated, where mise-en-scene is shown to operate as a core reflexive strategy. This definition is intended to open up a conversation, and contribute to a better understanding of how filmmaking practice, of which screenwriting is a part, can generate and disseminate new knowledge in a range of forms and genres, including the biopic. Defining filmmaking as a creative practice also provides guidance to scholars, irrespective of discipline, who wish to engage with filmmaking as a rigorous methodological approach to conducting their own enquiries.
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ItemEconomic evaluation of intensive hand rehabilitation in patients with recent traumatic tetraplegia( 2020)Background This thesis investigated the cost-effectiveness of an innovative 8-week intensive functional electrical stimulation (FES)-assisted hand therapy program for people with recent traumatic tetraplegia that was conducted alongside a pragmatic assessor-blinded phase 3 randomised controlled trial (‘SCIPA Hands On’) at seven sites across Australia and New Zealand, and the issues that emerged during the trial regarding its two multi-attribute utility instruments, Health Utility Index Mark 3 (HUI-3) and Assessment of Quality of Life-8 (AQoL-8). Methods The economic evaluation was an intention-to-treat cost-utility analysis from a third-party payer perspective over a six-month time horizon. Costs were expressed in Australian dollars (AU$); the price year was 2015. In-depth analyses of sample- and participant-level HUI-3 and AQoL-8 responses were undertaken from a subgroup of SCIPA Hands On participants with complete utility data (80% of total sample) to identify factors that may have affected the utility results. Results Irrespective of instrument, the probability of the SCIPA Hands On intervention being cost-effective was above 75% and 78% for willingness-to-pay thresholds of AU$50,000 and AU$100,000 per quality-adjusted life-year respectively. Exploratory sub-group analyses found that for the more severe AIS A or B motor complete injuries, the intervention’s cost-effectiveness probability was unlikely to be more than 55%; for less severe AIS C or D motor incomplete injuries however, it dominated standard care hand therapy alone. In-depth analyses of HUI-3 and AQoL-8 found that while there were significant improvements in some of the expected instrument attributes/items over time as hypothesised (HUI-3 dexterity and ambulation, AQoL-8 household tasks and mobility, but not family role) and significant associations between them and change in summary utility, there were some unexpected associations between change in HUI-3 summary utility and changes in HUI-3 emotion and pain, and change in AQoL-8 summary utility and changes in AQoL-8 general feeling and pain. Instrument responses appear to have been affected by secondary health conditions, hospital discharge, post-injury recovery and psychosocial adjustment. There was also evidence of potential respondent error, possibly linked to confusing or vague items and/or linked to other factors such as cognitive difficulties or fatigue, which may have underestimated the intervention’s effect. Additionally, AQoL-8 was unable to adequately capture important mobility improvement in people with incomplete injuries, and family role responses may have been affected by inconsistent conceptualisation of health with respect to inclusion/exclusion of participants’ physical limitations. Conclusion Although traumatic spinal cord injury is comparatively rare, its impact is devastating with respect to health-related quality of life (HRQoL) and high care costs over an individual’s lifetime. With life expectancy now approaching non-injured populations, full economic evaluations of interventions designed to improve physical function and HRQoL are highly desirable to assist decisions regarding the translation of these interventions into usual practice. The unique opportunity to undertake a full economic evaluation of the SCIPA Hands On intervention and to conduct in-depth analyses of the two multi-attribute utility instruments is therefore timely in view of new interventions that are under development. The findings reported in this thesis provide an important benchmark for future economic evaluations involving spinal cord injured populations, and have the potential to influence the conduct of future trials in this group.
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ItemDeep Learning Approaches for 3D Inference from Monocular Vision( 2020)Deep learning has contributed significant advances to computer vision in the last decade. This thesis looks at two problems involving 3D inference from 2D inputs: human pose estimation, and single-view object reconstruction. Each of our methods considers a different type of 3D representation that seeks to take advantage of the representation's strengths, including keypoints, occupancy grids, deformable meshes and point clouds. We additionally investigate methods for learning from unstructured 3D data directly, including point clouds and event streams. In particular, we focus on methods targeted towards applications on moderately-sized mobile robotics platforms with modest computational power on board. We prioritize methods that operate in real-time with relatively low memory footprint and power usage compared to those tuned purely for accuracy-like performance metrics. Our first contribution looks at 2D-to-3D human pose keypoint lifting, i.e. how to infer a 3D human pose from 2D keypoints. We use a generative adversarial network to learn a latent space corresponding to feasible 3D poses, and optimize this latent space at inference time to find an element corresponding to the 3D pose which is most consistent with the 2D observation using a known camera model. This results in competitive accuracies using a very small generator model. Our second contribution looks at single-view object reconstruction using deformable mesh models. We learn to simultaneously choose a template mesh from a small number of candidates and infer a continuous deformation to apply to that mesh based on an input image. We tackle both problems of human pose estimation and single-view object reconstruction in our third contribution. Through a reformulation of the model presented in our first contribution, we combine multiple separate optimization steps into a single multi-level optimization problem that takes into account the feasibility of the 3D representation and its consistency with observed 2D features. We show that approximate solutions to the inner optimization process can be expressed as a learnable layer and propose problem-specific networks which we call Inverse Graphics Energy Networks (IGE-Nets). For human pose estimation, we achieve comparable results to benchmark deep learning models with a fraction of the number of operations and memory footprint, while our voxel-based object reconstruction model achieves state-of-the-art results at high resolution on a standard desktop GPU. Our final contribution was initially intended to extend our IGE-Net architecture to accommodate point clouds. However, a search of the literature found no simple network architectures which were both hierarchical in cloud density and continuous in coordinates -- both necessary conditions for efficient IGE-Nets. As such, we present various approaches that improve performance of existing point cloud methods, and present a modification which is not only hierarchical and continuous, but also runs significantly faster and requires significantly less memory than existing methods. We further extend this work for use with event camera streams, producing networks that take advantage of the asynchronous nature of the input format and achieve state-of-the-art results on multiple classification benchmarks.
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ItemPerforming Credibility( 2018)Theatre practitioners have displayed an increasing interest in staging Refugee narratives, with approaches undertaking a number of methodologies. This thesis intends to look at a larger pattern of socio-political power relations, rather than a case by case analysis. The focus is on frame and thus primarily theoretical. Essentially this research looks at how Refugee theatre reproduces colonial terms of enunciation that restrict, limit, prescribe and demand how Refugees must perform to particular characters and narratives—both on and off stage. The research asserts that the performative demands of Refugee as a socio-political identity- exists before the theatrical site- extending to the performance demands of Refugee Theatre. I suggest that Refugee Theatre primarily relies on truth claims not because they are the most effective of all forms; but because it remains problematically tied to expectations to prove truth, authenticity and innocence. Refugee is continually asked to speak to these, as a Performance of Credibility. This has severe implications who gets seen and how they get seen. I argue that Performing Credibility is silencing rather than self determining. Thus it argues that that Refugee theatre as Performances of Credibility, function as an extension of the geospatial border in that they are just as oppressive, violent and silencing in its performative demands. The thesis offers two performative interventions that frame ‘Refugeeness’ in ways that resist these colonial narratives, as a form of anti-Performing Credibility dramaturgy. Drawing upon Latin American decolonial scholarship, the thesis argues for a conception of Refugeeness as ongoing and navigational, displacing borders and evading nationalist frameworks. The thesis explores how Refugeeness might be a useful re-frame to ensure Refugee challenges borders, rather than be assaulted within them; Refugeeness as a generative, creative site towards re-emergence and a step away from the burden of continuously Performing Credibility.
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ItemThe significance of the child’s voice in child death inquiries( 2019)International agreements on human rights declare that all children should have the opportunity to express their views on their lives and experiences. When it comes to children who are involved with child protection services, however, research from a number of countries suggests that their perspectives are rarely represented. In Australia, each year, around 3% of children are involved with child protection services because of concerns about their safety and well-being. I wanted to understand how professionals in Victoria represent the voices of children subject to child protection services. With child protection services files not accessible for privacy reasons, to pursue my research question I used the reports of 14 child death inquiries conducted by Victoria’s Commission for Children and Young People. The Commission for Children and Young People is mandated, under particular circumstances, to inquire into the deaths of children who were child protection services’ clients at the time of death or within 12 months of their death. These inquiries examine the services provided to the child and his/her family, prior to the child’s death. The children’s deaths that I explored occurred over a decade from 1 January 2005. In all 14 cases, the child died in adolescence, having been subject to a report to child protection services before the age of three. I asked how did professionals who came into contact with the 14 children describe and document the child’s voice and experience? I asked what these children said, literally or metaphorically, about their lives, experiences, and their feelings. Using a conceptual framework of child development and attachment theory, my methodological approach was content and discourse analysis of documentary texts produced by the Commission. Seen through the lens of Commission for Children and Young People inquiries, my research shows that child protection service documentation in Victoria, at best, minimises and, at worst, completely excludes the perspectives of children, particularly very young children. These results mirror child protection services practice internationally. I hypothesise why this silencing of children’s voices occurs in Victoria’s child protection service files. I outline a new approach to listening to children’s voices and experiences, and a new mechanism to document those voices in child protection service files. Called the Child’s Life Biography Tool, this instrument is intended to be a means of valuing and protecting the child, fulfilling the child’s human rights, while also meeting legislation, policy and practice requirements.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableFrom Tomb to Womb: How a Sensory Ethnographic Methodology can be Developed to Engage with Regional Communities and their Archives( 2020)This research creates a working methodology to engage with archives and communities in regional areas. Discussions on a community’s experience of their environment can be initiated through a sharing of personal archives and storytelling, touching on notions of memory, imaginings and change. My methodology is situated in a sensory ethnographic discipline. Through participation with communities, and my own photographic practice, I devise an applicable methodology for artists in regional environments. The research is developed through emplacement and community engagement, beginning with the Bring Your Own Archive event, and developing into an embedded approach that foregrounds listening and attention. It also expands upon discussions on the use and enquiry into the value of non-digital film material in a contemporary practice and as archival object, and considers what an archive image can tell us with regard to memory, histories and personal stories. Connecting to the notion of non-digital film, my own analogue practice explores place and history in Australian regional towns and this is developed as part of the research and the artwork. This research aims to show how an artist can participate in an active and honourable collaboration with regional towns, and engage in a re-imagination of their archives to create an interactive and lasting work that becomes an archive for the future. It also seeks to create a reflective space for the experiential histories in regional towns and a space for discussion on their future. The outcome of my research is entitled Glory Box. It is an interactive digital artwork that collages a series of archival reinterpretations into a new alternative archive of life in regional areas. It reimagines regional archives for future audiences. It connects my own experiential and dialogical methodology with my fine art photographic practice, commenting on the nature of film photography and on the position of the artist. The research proposes a progressive and experimental approach to archives through a sensory collecting of material, and a knowing or mindful handling of these tangible and intangible histories. A multiplicity of voices through a reauthoring of archive images manifests a contemplation of rituals and customs held within small regional towns today: a visual study on the local, unfolding into a wider reflection on the universal. It also uncovers delicate and indefinite contributions to a community’s connection to its archives that can reveal a deeply felt attachment.