Minerva Elements Records
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 10 of 1474
-
ItemDissecting the role of gd T cells in T cell priming for liver stage immunity( 2023-11)Liver resident memory T cells (TRM) are poised for protection against repeat infection and rapidly form a robust defence against tissue-specific insults such as liver stage malaria. A direct correlation between liver stage immunity and gd T cells has been observed both in mice (Zaidi et al. 2017) and in humans (Seder et al. 2013; Ishizuka et al. 2016), but the precise molecular mechanisms by which these gd T cells exert their protective effect are yet to be defined. In mice, intravenous injection with radiation-attenuated sporozoites (RAS) confers sterile protection against challenge with live sporozoites. This protection is mediated by responding antigen-specific CD8+ and CD4+ T cells that migrate to the liver and form resident-memory T cells (TRM). In the absence of gd T cells, protective CD8+ liver TRM are not generated, leaving mice susceptible to reinfection. Using Plasmodium-specific T cells as a readout for effective immunity, we determined that IL-4 is important for the accumulation of CD8+ and CD4+ T cells. By utilising complex in vivo systems including mixed-bone marrow chimeras and adoptive transfer of gd T cells, we revealed that gd T cell-derived IL-4 is crucial for the expansion of antigen-specific CD8+ T cells. In addition, in vivo neutralisation of IL-12 or IFN-g confirmed a partial dependency for these cytokines, despite their traditionally opposing function to IL-4. Given IL-4, IFN-g and IL-12 all have a clear role in CD8+ T cell priming following RAS vaccination, we hypothesised that IL-4 and IFN-g synergise to enhance cDC1 activity. These findings led to our development of a novel model to reconstitute cDC1-deficient mice using CRISPR-edited primary dendritic cells. This model enabled the investigation of the mechanism by which gd T cell derived IL-4 leads to DC activation and therefore effective CD8+ T cell expansion for memory development. Collectively, this project has shown a significant role for IL-4 in the priming of malaria-specific CD8+ T cells and demonstrates a novel pathway for collaboration between gd T cells, cDC1s, and CD8+ T cells, revealing the potential for harnessing gd T cells in vaccination strategies against malaria.
-
ItemFictions, Knowledge, and Justice( 2023-10)Fictions are a cornerstone of human cultures: they are created, shared, discussed, modified, and valued. Yet, philosophical accounts which privilege the ‘classical knower’ struggle to explain how fictions can affect us so deeply. Further, the fact that fictions seem to impact broader society and whole populations is largely overlooked, despite being observed in other disciplines. In this talk, I will draw on theories from philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, and epistemology to argue that fictions offer us epistemic resources of a unique kind, and that these resources lead to knowledge practices which can eventuate in harm."
-
Item"There's more to care than just healing from incisions" Examining the health care experiences of gynaecology patients with a history of trauma( 2023-12)This qualitative study examined the health care experiences of fifteen gynaecology patients who have experienced traumatic life events. Semi-structured interviews were conducted, and data analysed using a trauma-informed lens. Current research suggests that hospitalisation can expose this patient group to re-traumatisation, however there is little research on their perspectives and care preferences. This study provides an original contribution to the knowledge of the care experience of gynaecology patients with a history of trauma, particularly those with endometriosis.
-
ItemTracing The Drop: composing with an ethics of affirmation( 2023-10)This portfolio showcases works that reflect my compositional processes, which are informed by my practice as a contrabass guitarist and improviser, my regional and working-class origins, as well as my technical, conceptual, and philosophical grounding(s).
-
ItemRepetitions That Differ: A Recording Analysis of Repeated Musical Material in Schubert’s G-major Piano Sonata, D. 894 and Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze, Op. 6( 2023-12)Many of Schubert’s and Schumann’s piano works are characterised by a profusion of repeated musical materials, which poses challenges for pianists as to how to repeat them creatively and whether or not to repeat them. While a substantial amount of literature has recognised repetition as the hallmark of Schubert’s music, there have only been scattered scholarly allusions to the repetitive attribute of Schumann’s music. Despite the relative inattention to the latter, two piano works prove to be remarkable examples of both composers’ deep engagement with repetition: Schubert’s G-major piano sonata, D. 894 and Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze, Op. 6. This thesis presents a practice-led recording analysis that examines divergent manners in which some of the repeated musical materials in the first movement of Schubert’s G-major piano sonata and three pieces from Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze, Op. 6, Book 1, No. 2 and No. 7 and Book 2, No. 2, are performed by a selection of pianists, including Alfred Cortot, Ernst von Dohnányi, and Mitsuko Uchida, among others. More precisely, this analysis examines, within the aforementioned scope of written music, 1) whether the written repeat sign is actualised by the pianists and 2) the sounding differences between the pianists’ performances of the same musical material. Unlike most of the existing literature which only concerns repetitions in their written form, this recording analysis takes as its analytical object the sounding repetition that the act of playing produces. The analysis entails a practice-led research process, for which my musical intuition, my haptic knowledge of this repertoire and insights formed through my extensive musical practice, serve as the precondition. It is my hope that this recording analysis will become a source of inspiration for pianists who are facing the decision-making on whether or not to repeat, and who are searching for creative ways of repeating the repeated material.
-
ItemWhat is logical deduction, in relation to physics, and how can students improve in this?( 2023-11)This research was done in the context of the increasing emphasis on thinking in education and the contention by many researchers that improvement in thinking leads to improvement in learning. The other context is the difficulty of physics as a subject at high school and the constant search for better methods of teaching the subject. The objective was to investigate the suitability of logic education as a method to improve students understanding of physics. The current state of physics and thinking education was explored in the Literature Review. This included an analysis of methods aimed at improving student performance in physics, improving thinking and improving performance in physics by improving the thinking that occurs in this subject. Consequently, logical deduction in physics was deemed an area with the potential to support such improvement. As well, the process of logical deduction was found to need clarification. The nature of logical deduction was, therefore, explored using a philosophical method. The first outcome of this was that the process usually thought of as ‘logical deduction’ was reconceptualised as ‘deductive inferring’. This was to better reflect its nature as a thinking process. Wittgenstein’s critique of solitary rule-following was then applied to the processes of deductive and inductive inferring, and they were problematised accordingly. Consequently, a more accurate delineation of these processes was given as deductive-like and inductive-like inferring. To assess the suitability of logic education for physics education, the thinking involved in physics problem-solving was investigated empirically using a think-aloud method. It was found that deductive-like inferring played a key role in this thinking. For instance, it was implicated in moving from the information given in a question, alongside assumed knowledge, towards an answer. The results strongly suggested that logical deduction should be an element in a suite of thinking skills explicitly taught to high school physics students, and that more emphasis should be placed on logic and thinking more generally in education. The results of these analyses also motivate further research in this area and suggestions for these were made.
-
ItemBe a body: from experiential self-awareness to a truly bodily self( 2023-08)Dan Zahavi has defended a systematic and influential account of our most basic form of experiential self-consciousness, pre-reflective self-awareness (PRSA). For Zahavi, PRSA explicates the subtle way in which we are always immediately aware of the experiences we are having, are aware of them as being our experiences, and, in being so aware, are minimally self-aware. Zahavi’s model of PRSA (hereafter Z-PRSA) has proven influential in contemporary debates on the nature of self-consciousness and selfhood across analytic, Buddhist and continental philosophical traditions. However, one aspect of Zahavi’s model that is underdeveloped is its relation to the body. In his first major work, Self-Awareness and Alterity ([1999] 2020), Zahavi argued that Z-PRSA is intrinsically bodily by drawing on the analyses of bodily self-experience developed by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Yet, in more recent works, Zahavi has either remained silent on the topic of the body or indicated newfound neutrality on the question of embodiment, without adequately accounting for this change. By contrast, over this period, body awareness has become the focal point of philosophical and empirical investigations into self-consciousness and minimal phenomenal selfhood. Various forms of body awareness have been proposed to play a foundational role in grounding self-consciousness: the sense of body ownership, proprioceptive self-awareness, interoceptive self-awareness, spatial self-awareness, and the implicit self-awareness we have in perceiving the world as ripe for bodily action. An important question arises of how these modalities of bodily self-consciousness relate to Z-PRSA. Should we identify Z-PRSA with one of these forms of bodily self-consciousness, in a deflationary move? Alternatively, does bodily self-consciousness constitute a phenomenological condition of possibility for Z-PRSA? To find an answer, in this thesis I examine a series of descriptive and transcendental phenomenological arguments to determine whether, as Zahavi originally claimed, Z-PRSA is intrinsically bodily. I show first that Z-PRSA should not be identified with any of the above forms of bodily self-consciousness. Except for spatial self-awareness, they do not share with Z-PRSA its key phenomenological characteristics as a mode of awareness. While spatial self-awareness does, Zahavi’s strident opposition to any identity between it and Z-PRSA motivates me to consider an alternative connection between them: transcendental dependence. In evaluating Zahavi’s Husserlian enactivist argument from Self-Awareness and Alterity, I consider objections to its claim that object perception depends on spatial self-awareness, bodily movement, and kinaesthetic self-awareness. I show that Zahavi’s original argument for embodying Z-PRSA must be adapted to overcome an empirical challenge from cases of locked-in syndrome. While identifying a path for future research to more definitively determine the character of bodily experience in long-term locked-in syndrome, I provisionally conclude that the adapted argument succeeds in proving that Z-PRSA is only possible for a bodily subject of experience. Through my investigations, I aim to bring together a diversity of philosophical and empirical perspectives towards a perspicuous understanding of pre-reflective self-awareness and bodily self-experience.
-
ItemNo Preview AvailableInvestigating the Use of Augmented Reality Game-Based Learning in Classrooms to Support Student Learning in Victoria( 2023-09)In our rapidly changing world, technology has become an inescapable part of people’s lives. Unprecedented availability of cost-effective technology offers opportunities to innovate teaching practices to match the demand for young people to understand and use emerging technologies. Despite the importance of augmented reality as an emerging technology that affords students access to tools and environments not available previously, and the opportunities it offers when combined with game-based learning to form augmented reality game-based learning (ARGBL) for innovative practice in education, there has been limited research conducted into the emerging area of ARGBL. Specifically, there is a lack of research into teachers’ perceptions and use of ARGBL in classrooms in Victoria, Australia. This two-phase qualitative case study that consisted of an online survey and semistructured interviews investigated how ARGBL is used in classrooms across Victoria and identified how teachers use ARGBL in classrooms and for what purpose. The online survey and semistructured interviews had eleven and four participants, respectively. The study found that a range of teachers in different school settings across Victoria use AR and ARGBL across nearly all learning areas. The affordances of ARGBL were focused on the unique presentation that ARGBL facilitates and how this benefits student engagement and learning outcomes. The main areas teachers found challenging when implementing ARGBL were cost, technical issues, easy-to-use technology, and the ability and confidence to employ an emerging technology in their classrooms. This research also demonstrated how the TPACK Framework can be used to model and analyse the knowledges required to integrate ARGBL into the classroom. This study contributes a new understanding of the ways in which teachers integrate ARGBL into their classrooms to support student learning in Victoria, providing a new perspective on Victorian teachers’ practice, experience, and perspectives on using ARGBL in their classrooms.
-
ItemEmbryo survival in the critically endangered Southern Corroboree frog (Pseudophryne corroboree) at Melbourne Zoo( 2023-10)The Southern Corroboree frog (Pseudophryne corroboree) is one of Australia’s most critically endangered amphibians and relies on captive assurance populations for survival. However, captive breeding at Melbourne Zoo is limited by high embryo mortality, previously found to be associated with hyphal fungal infections in abnormal embryos. To investigate the aetiology, I examined disease co-factors by characterising the epidemiology of embryo mortality as well as manipulating and assessing various husbandry conditions during the 2022 and 2023 Melbourne Zoo captive breeding seasons. I investigated 1) the epidemiology of embryo mortality, 2) the affect of three substrates on embryo survival, 3) the affect of physically separating eggs on embryo survival, and 4) fertility rates. Intense monitoring in 2022 revealed an overall 52.4% embryo survival rate with most loss occurring within two weeks of laying, and that mortality was higher for eggs laid later in the season. For males that fertilised multiple clutches, there was no decrease in survival in later clutches. Our experiments incubating embryos on three substrates (moss, live plants, gravel) and a trial of egg separation found no differences, indicating that altering these husbandry factors is unlikely to improve outcomes. Fertility did not appear to be a major issue in most of the clutches examined during the 2023 breeding season with a mean fertilisation rate of 77.2%. However, the high loss soon after laying suggests embryo quality rather than husbandry is an issue. A change in captive management in 2023 enabled more females to lay from the beginning of the breeding season rather than holding some for the second half, and embryo survival improved (63.5%). This suggests that egg quality reduces over time if laying is delayed, possibly related to over-maturation, but assessments in further years are needed to confirm that breeding females early in the season improves embryo survival rates. As most Southern Corroboree frog embryo loss occurs within the first two weeks after laying, further work is needed to determine the extent of infertility versus early embryonic death affecting this early period, and whether the fungi impacting unhealthy embryos is opportunistic or pathogenic. This may guide the development of other management options.
-
ItemTranssystematic Scale: Media Philosophy Beyond Collapse and Difference( 2023-09)Scale and scaling techniques have become crucial to handling the constitutive limits of systematicity – that is, scale involves a revision of the systematic itself, within, through, and beyond its own limits. While recent media-theoretical work has made great strides in thinking the functions and nature of scale, its precise philosophical status and situation within larger ontological and epistemological debates still requires clarification. Taking scale as a core question for media philosophy, this thesis argues that scale must be read in the register of what I call the ‘transsystematic’: the multifarious attempts to think and work through the constitutive partiality, contingency, and plurality of systematicity itself. The transsystematic indexes various contexts, legible across mathematics, engineering, the sciences, politics, literature, and philosophy, where systematicity runs up against its own limits, but functions through and across those limits nevertheless. Scale becomes a key way such problems are situationally navigated: as such, it functions as a deep and nonarbitrary feature of any conceivable systematicity and their interrelation. To demonstrate how scale emerges as problem and solution in this way, I trace the antinomic functions of scale across contemporary theorisations of climate, capital, and – centrally – computation, observing how scale continually emerges as a crucial means for handling the impasses between collapse and difference, completeness and contingency, determination and the indeterminable that irrupt in these contexts. Scale functions here as both more and less than an ontological or epistemological concept, neither inhering in objects, nor being adequately understood as an arbitrary cognitive artifice. To account for its antinomic functions, I argue that scale is transcendental to systematicity, a necessary condition of any possible individuation and mediation. Understood via this transsystematic revision of the transcendental, scale is the fundamental conceptual term for the structures of localisation and generalisation that mediate between the poles of totalising collapse and irreducible difference. Ultimately, I suggest that thinking scale in this way lets us better address the transsystematic dimensions of contemporary media.