Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

In a departure from traditional approaches to learning which often heighten the divide between theory and practice, this thesis proposes that the core aim of health science courses is to foster the emerging development of professional artistry to a level of competency sufficient for students to enter the workforce. The development of professional artistry is a complex, multifaceted process which requires the integration of theoretical knowledge in practice, development of a professional identity and recognition of the influence that past experience, both personal and professional, has on each student’s learning and understanding of practice. Recognising the development of professional artistry as the core educational goal requires a reassessment of how best to facilitate learning. Implicit in adopting this view of learning is the recognition that the authenticity of learning contexts is essential for ensuring that theoretical knowledge is sufficiently integrated with clinical practice. The context of learning must also situate theoretical knowledge into authentic clinical scenarios in a manner that encourages role taking to foster the development of professional identity. In this thesis an educational framework is proposed that describes both individual and social processes of learning and how they combine to facilitate the development of professional artistry. The challenge of how to situate learning in authentic contexts outside of clinical placements is discussed through the development of an online learning module based on an integration of principles of authentic learning, situated learning and instructional design. The importance of learning in authentic contexts was explored by examining the influence of context on the performance of 44 psychology students and 43 speech pathology students when they independently completed the online learning module. Results indicated that exposure to the online learning module resulted in a significant improvement in test performance for speech pathology students but no significant difference in performance for psychology students. The role of collaborative learning in facilitating the development of professional artistry was also explored by examining interactions between a second-year, third-year and fourth-year student when paired with a clinical educator to complete the online learning module. Research revealed important insights into the role of socialisation and interaction in the development of professional artistry and how this process evolves as student experience increases. Future research directions and implications for education are discussed.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Pauli Murray (1910 - 1985) was involved in many of the social struggles that defined U.S. domestic history during the twentieth century and achieved many pioneering “firsts.” As an African American female of non-heteronormative gender identity and sexuality, who struggled for upward social mobility, she embodied many of the central divisions over race, class, gender, and sexuality that characterized the zeitgeist of her time and place. Her struggle to overcome institutional and cultural barriers to success can be seen through the lens of identity politics. Murray struggled to reconcile the many divergent identities she embodied into a cohesive whole that reaffirmed the heteronormative values and culture of her society; at the same time that she recognized the impossibility of doing so and sought to challenge the social hierarchies of her society. This thesis explores that struggle via an excavation and analysis of her rich personal archive. Murray’s published life writing testifies to her extraordinary public achievements, which scholars have begun to acknowledge. What remains to be done, however, is to bring together evidence from her archives and published memoirs to evaluate Murray’s attempts to fashion a unified sense of self. Murray occupied spaces on the margins of already marginalized social groups and, consequently, continually sought a unifying thread to fashion a cohesive personal identity. Her life opens up multiple conversations about what it means to sit outside of social constructions surrounding race, class, gender, sexuality, and mental health; indeed, it forces a consideration of what it is to be American and, more fundamentally, human. Examining Murray’s identity performances, rather than simply commemorating her public achievements, also facilitates a critique of traditional biographical approaches, which often distort lived experience by having a commemorative focus, purporting to uncover a ‘true self,’ and selectively imposing a purpose on a life.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis explores the history and heritage of the Newcastle Government Domain from its origins in the first European settlement at Newcastle in 1801 to its uncertain present as a largely vacated site of mental health care. The Domain is a significant holding of land at the centre of a growing urban area which has remained unalienated from the imperial, colonial and now state government because it has been seen as an asset to be applied to solving a series of contemporary challenges. Drawing upon public records, works of art and newspaper reports, the shifting uses of the Domain from centre of local administration, to military base, girls’ reformatory and asylum are traced demonstrating how the site contributed to meeting the responsibility for caring for the residents of New South Wales which fell to its governments. It is argued that rather than careful planning, decisions about the use of the Domain were largely the result of outside pressures. This is followed through in detail with regard to the establishment on the site in 1871 of an Asylum for Idiots and Imbeciles. A close reading of the extant records of this institution reveal that for several years, it served mainly as a repository for long term residents of older asylums. Only in the 1890s did it become populated by the intellectually disabled. Although it was an “accidental asylum”, the site was well suited to its purpose and has successfully hosted mental health services through to the present day. Its fraught transition from active health care campus to heritage site is traced to explore contemporary issues in heritage, in particular the rising interest in cultural landscapes, the role of interdisciplinary non-governmental organisations in heritage advocacy and the possibility of overtly recognising the positive benefits of heritage conservation for mental wellbeing at this and other sites. The Newcastle Asylum represented a new form of care in the colony of NSW and as such needs to form part of the cultural heritage of Newcastle because it contributed significantly to the social welfare of people in New South Wales.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) comprises of a number of clinically and theoretically distinct therapies and practices, many becoming increasingly incorporated into the health care regimens of Australians. The lack of trust in biomedical practices is seemingly contradicted by evidence including from my study, that CAM and biomedical treatments are used concurrently. Despite real concerns over health risk form the adverse effects of pharmaceutical medications the CAM users interviewed for this study, with one exception, have continued using biomedical treatments. Interestingly, the CAM users in my study also express uncertainty in the practices of CAM and establish boundaries over what is acceptable and unacceptable use. For these users, there are clearly tensions between CAM and biomedicine and the interest is how they work with this tension in their everyday lives. To explore this tension, the theoretical underpinnings of the study draw on the sociology of trust. The research method of constructivist grounded theory is used to produce an interpretative social constructionist account of trust in CAM use. The analysis is based on the accounts of 16 regular CAM users, selected on the basis of being frequent, intensive users of CAM. The interest in this thesis is in exploring the accounts of these users to establish the basis for trust in CAM treatment decision-making. Being self-reliant in their information seeking, desiring a level of self-control and experimental in their use of health treatments the CAM users exemplify Gidden’s concept of a self-reflexive consumer. Utilising the sociological trust theories of Giddens and Luhmann trust is understood to be formed in both interpersonal and institutional contexts. To this end, the central argument of the thesis is that trust is mediated between CAM and biomedical approaches. The thesis argues further that trust is developed through a leap of faith in the practice of CAM, and this represents having faith in the derivative benefits of CAM treatment, rather than faith in CAM as a curative. Trust also arises from interpersonal experiences of health and illness, and from the meanings given to CAM practices. For some the meanings relate to CAM as pleasure and relaxation and as a spiritually embodied experience while for others, in the face of biomedical health risks CAM represents a safety valve. Further, I argue that trust develops according to the context of CAM use; that is, when CAM is used for achieving health outcomes, then trust is mediated between CAM and biomedical approaches, which are used pragmatically, in an ad hoc manner. When CAM is used to experience derivative benefits such as relaxation and feeling good, then trust is based in the construct of faith, and relates to CAM much more in terms of a leisured experience.

Masters Research - Master of Philosophy (MPhil)

The initial despondency that followed my mother’s death and the realisation of the total erasure of the landscape that featured in my early childhood propelled my need to recover it all. Writing down my story seemed the only recourse to transform it from mere memory into tangible material encapsulating the Philippines, that beloved home of my birth, its people and its landscape. There are two parts to this project. The first is the creative component comprising four chapters of a memoir that aims to reclaim the world of my early childhood: its colours, scents, sounds and the beloved voices of the figures peopling it. This is a world reconstructed from fragments of memories, collected and collated with the imagination in order to paint with words a portrait of a time and place that hopefully captures their beauty and innocence. The first three chapters of Part One are a grouping of memories strung together to tell complete narratives of my “Pre-school Years,” the “First Year of School” and the three years spent in “Bamban” with my grandparents. Chapter Four is intended to be a coda to the early childhood memoirs. This coda is reflective writing about the now-adult narrator, who is an immigrant in Australia. In this chapter, two childhoods from the past are interlaced through flashbacks. It is also a story of the interplay of the lives of two immigrant friends as they carve new lives in their adopted homeland of the present. Part Two is comprised of an exegesis in two chapters. There is also a prologue which describes the beginnings of this literary journey: of my trip back home with the passing away of my mother and the decision to write my memoir in English, which is the language of my Pilipino/Australian children and the language of my adopted home, Australia. Chapter One is a short study of the definition of the memoir and the use of memory and imagination in the writing of this reflective autobiographical genre. There are discussions on why we write memoirs and to illustrate these, the works of St. Augustine, Edmund Gosse, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Mark Doty and Maxine Hong Kingston are discussed. Chapter Two is a discussion of the writing process. This chapter includes brief analyses of the styles I used in my memoir: of multiple points of view, which is the interlacing of the child’s and the narrator’s voices and the integration of the second person point of view in order to involve the reader. There is also a discussion about the use of dialogue. The Epilogue includes a brief personal evaluation of the memoir and the writing process.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This study sought to examine evolving social work practice in Nepal among those working in international non-government organisations (INGOs). It also sought to explore the extent to which Nepali social workers, employed in INGOs, perceived the relevance of their social work education to practice. It sought their views on culturally appropriate and contextually situated social work in Nepal. In brief, the study sought to examine what social work education and practice tailored to the Nepali context might look like based on the assumption that social work should be responsive to the socioeconomic, political, and cultural context in which it is practised. Given the paucity of knowledge about the practice of social work in Nepal, this study used a grounded theory approach to examine the perceived synergy between social work education and the practice of social work as it was emerging in INGOs. The resultant model of ‘decolonised, developmental Nepali social work’ reflects the contemporary narratives of social workers engaged in the development activities of INGOs in Nepal. While international and global stakeholders insist on the universalisation and globalisation of social work, this thesis details how, in the mid-1990s, a small landlocked nation, sandwiched between two giant superpowers, India and China, had Western social work thrust upon it, and how some social work graduates have been crafting a unique decolonised, development based social work model in their day-to-day practice. Their narratives affirmed that the uncritical importation of Western social work had resulted in disillusionment among Nepali social workers, due to the tensions between their Western-styled educational training and the competing and complex sociocultural and political processes of Nepali society. The respondents affirmed that the ‘Nepalisation’ of social work would entail an incremental building-block approach to decolonisation. This systematic process involved the integration of local Nepali worldviews in the social work and development discourses, a process that was far less glamourous than those writing enthusiastically about the global movement of social work would have us believe. In this way, the ‘Nepalisation’ of social work would have a permanent legacy of questioning the importation of social work into Nepal. The coming decades will act as a corrective to social work’s historical role in Nepal’s ongoing tumultuous history as Nepali social workers use their cultural and symbolic values, draw on their strengths and social capital, and transform borrowed western social work to fit local fields and spaces. ‘Decolonised, developmental Nepali social work’ reflected Nepali social workers’ creative energy in advocating an emancipatory mindset and interjecting greater autonomy, self-determination, and responsiveness to local social, cultural, and political dynamics. The social work respondents in this study collectively defined development in terms of the needs of the Nepali population…

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis explores the social processes that emanate from the interaction between young people and adults. All adults have been a young person and have at some point in their youth suffered denigration from adults. Yet adults participating in the research for this thesis have, in turn, committed similar denigration of young people. This thesis seeks to address this phenomenon, drawing upon theories of moral panics and the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Conducted from the research position of a Baby Boomer with a lifetime career working with young people, yet also susceptible to denigrating young people, this study finds that notions of popular memory (Brabazon) and musical ‘latching’ (De Nora) combine to privilege youth experiences in the formation of the habitus, especially in regard to attitudes towards popular culture and technology. It is this privileging of each generation’s youth experiences which informs and moulds adult attitudes towards ensuing youth generations. Data collected from semi-structured interviews and focus groups, along with secondary source material (internet, magazine and newspaper articles, contemporary music tracks) provided the raw material for analysis. The methodology used to undertake this analysis was Bourdieu’s theory of practice. The concepts of habitus and misrecognition have been central in analysing how youth cultural experiences inform the evolution of the adult habitus. The embodiment of early youth cultural experiences leads adults to the inescapable conclusion that theirs was the most genuine youth experience and that any youth cultural experience of ensuing generations cannot match this perceived authenticity. This misrecognition then permits the adult to denigrate the youth cultural product and the experiences of ensuing youth generations, as well as the young people themselves.

Masters Research - Master of Philosophy (MPhil)

The Minimum of Getting By is a collection of short fiction in the dirty realist style, set in the urban environment of contemporary Australia. The collection centres on the inner lives of a cast of marginalised characters, all of whom are stuck in some way – in bad relationships, in self-destructive patterns, in the past, in their own heads. There is rarely much in the way of narrative action but, when it does occur, it is often cyclic, returning the characters emotionally, if not physically, to the same place from which they began. The manuscript draws inspiration from the Australian grunge fiction of the 1990s, utilising many of its techniques, including its inner-city settings, its minimal narratives, its emotional bleakness and sometimes-autobiographical/always-confessional tone. Far from merely replicating grunge fiction, however, I have attempted to create a type of ‘post-grunge’ literature by critically engaging with the themes and archetypes of grunge, and reinventing them in a contemporary setting. In the accompanying exegesis, ‘Digging in the Dirt’, I look at the original grunge fiction as well as proposing ‘post-grunge’, a current movement in Australian writing to which the creative manuscript belongs. In the first section of the exegesis, I provide a brief overview of the grunge lit phenomenon of the 1990s, isolating a number of the key techniques and tropes of the genre, including the gritty urban setting; the linear narrative; the ‘confessional I’ narrator; the assumption of autobiographical content; the subcultural affiliations; and, finally, the ‘disrupted individual’ archetype, and its gendered archetypes, the ‘transient female’ and ‘static male’. In the second section, I discuss the work of Kalinda Ashton and Luke Carman in terms of a post-grunge framework, looking at the differing ways both authors have interpreted and reinvented ‘grunge’ in their own writing, with particular emphasis on the archetypes of the ‘post-grunge male’ and the ‘static female’. I also place my own manuscript within this framework, discussing the individual stories in terms of their differing relationships to a grunge and post-grunge style of literatures.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis provides an overview of obstetrics and gynaecology in Australia from 1950 to 2010. The author was an active member of the discipline over that timeframe and draws on his professional experience during the period under review as one of the tools to shape a historical analysis and interpretation of the complexities and significance of change. The care of women is seen as critical to the survival of humanity but many historians do not give this subject a high priority. This thesis seeks to remedy that deficiency by providing a detailed review of the discipline during the marked increase in knowledge in medicine after World War Two, which resulted in a dramatic improvement in safety for mothers and babies. It also includes a detailed outline of the life-saving advances in the discipline over the past 60 years. The thesis also documents the impact of a rapidly changing Australian society on the discipline and its practitioners, by analysing the historical background of their education and training, and the necessary adjustments in mindset and practice of the older generations to the confronting social and cultural issues of the 1960s and beyond. Many of the controversies explored have a long history, and include the background of role delineation in the discipline, the increasing impact of legal issues, the feminist debate, the changing site of delivery, and interventions in obstetrics. But the growing awareness of ethical dilemmas, obligatory continuing professional development and bureaucratic intrusion into practice needed inclusion. A focus of the thesis is the manner in which all these issues affected the region where the author spent his practising life, illustrated by graphs, diagrams and private files acquired over that period. The thesis should be a valuable resource for historians and others interested in the medical care of women and their babies in Australia during the second half of the 20th Century.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The birth in 1903 of Marguerite Yourcenar, the acclaimed French writer who was the first immortelle to be admitted to the centuries-old male bastion of the Académie française, was followed ten days later by the death of her mother, Fernande. Accordingly, she received an unconventional education almost uniquely at the hands of her father, Michel, whose erudition and passion for history underpinned his persona and heavily influenced the literary corpus of his daughter. Yourcenar’s oeuvre was initiated in her teens with two collections of poetry, the foundations of which lay in myth — a reflection of her father’s influence. Following subsequent collaboration with her father, the creation of a pseudonym to replace her birth name of Marguerite Cleenewerck de Crayencour allowed her rebirth as Marguerite Yourcenar, in which guise she would create an expansive corpus. Her final text was truncated by her death in 1987, providing testament to her tireless literary vitality and drive. Yourcenar’s novels are replete with an atmosphere of pervading death and darkness, and suffused with the motifs of antithesis: birth and death, absence and presence, past and present. Recent scholarship has concentrated on Yourcenar’s torment concerning the circumstances of her birth which suggest the aura of longing, guilt and loss, and maternal abandonment apparent in her texts. Women are portrayed as often mute and pale reflections of the male protagonist, whilst male homosexual liaisons and incest portray unconventional romantic themes, which distance the author’s writing from societal norms. Maternal absence has been suggested as the major catalyst for the spectres which underlie Yourcenar’s texts, whilst paternal absence and/or presence have been overlooked as a motivating force of her corpus. We contend that this is a significant omission in Yourcenarian scholarship which demands the investigation and analysis to be found in the following thesis. This will provide a valuable insight into paternal absence and presence in Yourcenar’s corpus which has until now remained neglected. An investigation of the life of the author and its influence on her self-reflexive style of penmanship, evidence which insistently underlines her texts but which was vehemently denied by Yourcenar, will reveal her literary struggles for liberation from her memories. A study of memory will follow and reinforce the extent to which it acts as a prominent, yet often subconscious catalyst for literary endeavour, whilst an analysis of Denier du rêve, replete with evidence of the author’s torment and resultant quest for ataraxia,1 will demonstrate unrecognised paternal influence in Yourcenar’s oeuvre, heretofore overshadowed by the maternal spectre, and provide the climax for this thesis manifesting the extent to which absence and presence afford powerful inspiration for the Yourcenarian corpus.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis is an exploration of the social processes that produce more effective risk-takers in the practice of high-risk climbing. In a process of dispositional accumulation, climbers must undergo a change in the way that they perceive and embody vertical space. This extends the concept of ‘edgework’ (Lyng, 1990) into what I call critical necessity, where climbers become ‘committed’ and must continually remain engaged in specific and intense practices in order to return. The attributes of vertical space provide the perfect place to experience ‘social weightlessness’ (Bourdieu, 2000: 14). Those who can enter this space are not screened by arbitrary social requisites but instead by the mountain itself. The distinction of entering this space comes with a genuine threat of injury and death. But the climbing field is protected through an interplay of illusio and a doxic misinterpretation of the shift between the epistemological basis of the field, and the ontological experience of climbing itself. Dispositions are argued to be developed through more than a simple transferral (Bourdieu, 1984: 170) but instead can be acquired in a variety of ways that must be considered in their empirical context. Along with thirty five interviews, this research is based on eighteen months of multi-site ethnographic fieldwork with climbers engaged in high-risk rock climbing styles and ice, alpine and expeditionary climbing. The concept of habitus has been a guiding concept for this research, as it allows for a careful study of the dispositional attributes of the climbing body. Habitus has been used with a two-fold purpose. It is firstly used as a means of understanding how agents gain skills and orientate themselves to climbing practice. It has secondly been used, through the researchers own development, as a means of gaining greater embodied awareness of the social process required to become a climber. One of the crucial insights habitus offers is its improvisational and generative components. This is useful for exploring climbing practice, as climbing lacks organisational structures that guide its practitioners with authority – yet climbers maintain regularity. However, habitus is shown to have shortcomings in dealing with accounts of the individual in action because it has been theorised with an insensitivity to the scope of observation and analysis. In order to address this, the concept of the <i>embodied echo</i> is introduced as a means to explore the more radically embodied and experiential components of habitus. Through the use of echoes as an allegory for the construction of dispositions, it is possible to give specific accounts to the processes of dispositional acquisition, mutation and activation. In effect, it functions as a theory of the habitus in motion.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Saul Kripke has argued in favour of constitutive scepticism regarding the existence of meaning. This scepticism is paradoxical in that the more successful it is, the more it undermines its own conclusion. This thesis investigates whether it is possible to produce a satisfactory ‘straight’ solution to this paradox. In this context, a straight solution is one that refutes or disproves the basis of the scepticism by providing the fact, or facts, in virtue of which our words have determinate meaning. The problem of meaning scepticism produces numerous difficulties. It undermines non-theoretic conceptions of language and communication. An example of this is the idea that there is such a thing as meaning something by a particular word. Meaning scepticism also presents serious difficulties for any philosophical theory that relies upon either semantic realism or determinate meaning. Kripke’s own ‘sceptical’ solution does not refute his scepticism. This thesis examines Kripke’s solution to determine whether it alleviates the negative effects of the paradox, and whether it entails further problematic implications of its own. Based on existing accounts of meaning, existing responses to the sceptical challenge are subject to critical examination to test whether they can solve the problem in a satisfactory manner. Based on adaptations of existing theories, three novel solutions are presented and critically examined. It is argued that the sceptical solution that Kripke proposed does not alleviate all of the concerns produced by meaning scepticism. Further, this solution entails a particularly problematic form of anti-realism. All existing accounts of meaning fail to address the sceptical problem. Of the three novel solutions presented, two are argued to be problematic, one particularly so. The last solution presented, based on a causal theoretic approach, is argued to be the best option for addressing the problem of meaning scepticism. This conclusion not only refutes Kripke’s scepticism, but also supports the connection between language and the world that speakers describe when using it.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis puts forward a unique paradigm for understanding the nature of history on film: hyper-linear history. Whilst previous conceptualisations of history on film have tended to emphasise either the possibility for film to represent the past ‘as it was’ or the capacity for film to only represent contemporary concerns this thesis proposes an alternative. This alternative is hyper-linearity, whereby films construct historical connections between the represented past and the period of the filmic release for the purpose of illuminating historical relationships between the two temporalities. Thus, just as historical revisionism in other mediums reflects an attempt to understand the past in a way that is tempered by the present context of the historian, a hyper-linear understanding impresses the capacity of film to construct meaningful historical relationships that privilege both the past and the present. A hyper-linear paradigm creates the possibility of seeing film as a vehicle that makes the significance of the past immediately explicit and relevant, rendering historical understandings complex. This sits at odds with an understanding of the filmic past as removed from historical‘reality’. Hyper-linear history is explored in this thesis through an analysis of American Western films released between 1950 and 1972. Specifically, it is argued that hyper-linear history is communicated not only through explicit historical cues that locate films in a distinct place and time but, more importantly, through the conceptualisation of masculine gender performance as a distinctly historical category. In Westerns masculinity is conceived as both a form of personal identity and a manifestation of national forms of identity; as both a mediator of an individual’s access to power and as reflective of broader patriarchal institutional power relationships; and, thus, as a historical connection between past attitudes, identities and modes of being and then-contemporary concerns regarding hegemonic masculinity and its manifestation in national values. The thesis argues that examining hyper-linearity through the prism of gender allows distinct connections to be made between the represented post-Civil War past and the then-contemporary Civil Rights movement present; particularly that each period presented white American men, and associated patriarchal institutions, with a gendered crisis that caused enormous fissures in men’s personal identities and left tears in the national fabric. This hyper-linear history on film thus provides insight into the ways in which masculinities are performed and gender crises expressed, explored, and ultimately resolved to meet patriarchal ends.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis provides a descriptive grammar and investigation into language contact phenomena in Papapana, a virtually undescribed and undocumented, highly endangered Northwest Solomonic (Oceanic, Austronesian) language spoken by 106 fluent speakers in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea. The grammar describes the language on various levels, including phonology, morphology and syntax in noun phrases and the verb complex, and syntax at the clause- and sentence-level. Typologically unusual features of Papapana include its patterns of verbal inflectional reduplication and inverse-number marking in the noun phrase, while other interesting features include its postverbal subject-indexing, which interacts with reduplication or mode markers to express a range of functions. This thesis also investigates language contact phenomena in the Papapana speech community, specifically contact-induced grammatical change, and language shift and endangerment. As a precursor to these topics, it describes in detail the demographic, geographical, historical, cultural and sociolinguistic context within which the language is spoken. Papapana displays a partial shift from left-headed to right-headed typology, especially evident in its clause orders, obliques and possessive constructions, and argued to be the result of contact with neighbouring non-Austronesian languages. The final chapter investigates why and to what extent Papapana is an endangered language; it examines motivations for language shift to the official creole language Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea and in the Papapana community, and applies and critically evaluates ethnolinguistic vitality assessment frameworks. This thesis makes a significant contribution to future comparative linguistic and typological research by writing the first comprehensive grammatical description of Papapana while the opportunity to do so remains. The study of language contact is the first detailed account of the linguistic and sociolinguistic effects of the complexities of language contact in the Northwest Solomonic subgroup, and contributes more generally to research on language contact and language endangerment.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis is a grammatical description of the Nese language, which is spoken in North West Malekula and is a member of the Oceanic subgroup of the Austronesian language family. The language has some characteristics which are typical of Oceanic langauges such as the indirect and direct split in its possessive system. Chapter 1 is an introduction to the thesis, containing information regarding the linguistic setting of Vanuatu and Malekula in general. It also considers previous work on the language. Chapter 2 is an outline of Nese’s phonological structure. This is followed by Chapter 3 which is a description of the different constituents which make up the open and closed word classes in Nese. Chapter 4 analyses the structure of the noun phrase and chapter 5 describes the prepositional phrases. The structure of the verb phrase in Nese is discussed in Chapter 6 and this is followed by an analysis of the simple sentences in Chapter 7. Lastly, Chapter 8 is focussed on complex sentences and contains an analysis of coordinate and subordinate constructions.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis examines the role of the Australian Catholic Church, its leaders and its relevant agencies and organisations in advocating for and welcoming people living with a disability into the life of the Church. It is intended that this thesis will go beyond issues of accessibility and definitions of “disability” and instead explore developments and tensions in the Australian Catholic Church’s response to issues of disability. It is clear from the literature and the qualitative interviews examined throughout this thesis that, at the rhetorical level, the Australian Catholic Church accepts, welcomes and advocates for all people regardless of their intellectual or physical abilities. This inquiry seeks to investigate the relationship between this rhetoric and actual substantive efforts towards inclusion of people living with a disability. It finds, based on the lack of substantive evidence revealing actual inclusionary practices, that there is a significant contradiction between the policy rhetoric and practice. To this end, it will be argued that the Australian Catholic Church is not engaged in sufficient practical action to foster and support communities to genuinely welcome people living with a disability and to enhance their sense of belonging to such communities. While acknowledging some good work being conducted by individual Church agencies, based on the evidence accrued from the qualitative data gathered for this thesis, it is the contention of the researcher that there are few tangible, consistent or concrete strategies or actions towards inclusion and genuine belonging that one can point to in day-to-day practice in the Catholic Church community. It is a central concern of this research to open up a conversation, dialogue and debate that might bridge the gulf between the policy rhetoric and practice, and so foster more positive inclusionary approaches and substantive change in this area of Catholic Church life.

Masters Research - Master of Philosophy (MPhil)

My childhood memoir is set in Sydney’s eastern and inner city suburbs and spans the period from 1966 to 1975. The memoir is made up of short chapters that show the deterioration and inevitable breakdown of my parents’ marriage, the significant events and relationships that occurred during their years spent apart, ending with my father’s suicide at forty-seven years of age. My research discovered significant details about my parents’ histories, principally; my mother’s molestation as an infant, and my father’s incarceration as a prisoner of war. These revelations led to the memoir’s title, which describes the relationship I believe I had with both my parents, as well as the relationship they had with one another – one of deeply held secrets from their pasts. Writing the memoir was a process of experimentation and discovery. What started off as a ‘misery memoir’ evolved, I hope, into a story that shows a balanced view of both of my parents, both of whom I have a better understanding of as a result of this project. The exegesis examines the two narratives that dominate: that of the ‘maternal narrative’ of my mother, and the ‘migrant/paternal’ narrative of my father. While these narratives and the characterisation of my mother and father ring true for me, they are also convenient and selective stories that have, in fact, changed throughout the process of writing my memoir. From the outset of writing about my childhood my intention was always to be ‘truthful’ and accurate, yet, inevitably, I omitted certain incidents, constructed dialogue to ‘show’ not tell, reordered events to ‘fit’ within a timeline, and conflated minor characters. In essence, I found myself fictionalising and employing tropes most commonly ascribed to fiction. According to literary scholar Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir, there is an inherent fictionalised nature in all life-writing. This exegesis engages with contemporary literary criticism on the current phenomenon that is ‘memoir’; where the internal world becomes externalised, where storytelling is the imperative, and where memory and imagination become indistinguishable.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a life threatening mental illness that is “too cunning a problem for any one-size-fits-all approach” to treatment (Maisel, Epston & Borden, 2004, p.2). Applying a critical perspective to treatment experiences and practices is important in adolescent AN because it helps practitioners reflect upon how best to assist families manage the complexities of the illness. A systematic review of the literature revealed that while there is growing evidence for existing types of family-based interventions, such as manualised Maudsley family therapy (Maudsley), (Lock, Le Grange, Agras & Dare, 2001), the evidence for other types of family-based interventions is scarce. Furthermore, qualitative research on the experience of parents or caregivers caring for someone with AN shows high levels of burden and fatigue, difficulties accessing treatment and a sense of alienation from treating teams. The interplay of such findings suggest the need for a fresh approach to thinking and behaving in treating adolescents with AN to assist parents help their child recover from one of the most perplexing and complex disorders with the highest rate of mortality of all of the psychiatric illnesses. This exploratory study of parents’ experiences of treatment for adolescent AN commenced in 2007, with the intent of recognising the experiences from parents and clinicians perspectives. It sought to understand how parents and clinicians made sense of their experiences of either receiving or providing treatment for adolescents with AN. The study aimed to identify the means by which treatment processes for adolescent AN can be optimised and thus enhance the recovery process. A mixed methodological approach was undertaken in two inter-connected studies: one with parents and one with clinicians. Interpretivist and positivist paradigms were fused to provide a flexible approach to the research design and enrich the findings of the small number of participants who took part in this study. The study was carried out in Newcastle, Australia, in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS). Data was collected from 15 parents, who had received family-based treatment for their adolescent with AN and from 20 clinicians experienced in providing this treatment. Parents and clinicians were invited to participate in a survey questionnaire, that yielded quantitative and qualitative data, and/or to participate in a semi-structured interview. Thirteen parents participated in the survey questionnaire and of those, seven participated in a semi-structured interview. Two parents participated in the semi-structured interviews only. All 20 CAMHS’s clinicians participated in both the survey questionnaire and semi-structured interview. Data were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) (Smith, 1996). IPA was chosen as a method of analysis for its focus on understanding the core nature of how people make sense of significant life experiences, while also recognising the dynamic process…

Bachelor Honours - Bachelor of Arts (Honours)

A finely-dressed man stands at the balcony of a Paris apartment, gazing at the city. Gustave Caillebotte’s 1875 painting Jeune homme à la fenêtre captures the man from behind and the viewer cannot see his face. He invites the viewer to observe him but he defiantly hides his identity. There is another figure in the scene, framed in the window and whom the dandy’s steady line of sight appears to meet. An unidentified woman stands on the empty boulevard, wearing a fashionable draped bustle skirt in a dark colour in contrast with the pale architecture. She is unaware of her audience, but through this framing and the eye sight of the man at the window, the viewer is drawn to her. Other artworks of the era show the streets of Paris writhing with activity but here all distractions are removed; the lone man gazing at the lone woman on the street is the only interaction, the only sign of life in the work. Whereas the man is safe in his anonymity, a willing and active observer, the woman becomes an exposed art object, unwillingly gazed at and evaluated not only by the man at the window, but the artist himself and the multitude of art gallery visitors who continue to gaze upon her. The painting is an urban landscape and a portrait of two strangers, a man looking and a woman being seen. One is placed on the streets and the other above them, tucked away in his own, contained piece of the city. The piece is also an artwork about the nature of selecting, containing and framing of objects essential to the artistic process, and the inherent hierarchy of the artistic gaze which searches and judges. Several of the concepts in Caillebotte’s painting can be found in Charles Baudelaire’s collection of prose poetry, Le Spleen de Paris: Petits Poèmes en prose, published posthumously in 1869. Both are defined by the act of searching and looking for art’s sake, relying on this hierarchy of the dominating voyeur and dominated object. The following thesis discussion is concerned with the visual processes and the narrator’s gaze in the work. It is of great significance that Baudelaire engaged in both poetry and art criticism; the two are intertwined and at times interchangeable. Given the focus on the visual register, as well as Baudelaire’s active role in the art world, the discussion of the visual processes and themes of the prose poetry alongside nineteenth-century fine artworks serves to establish new inter-disciplinary connections. The collection’s themes and innovations frequently overlap with those being made in fine art during the same time, and although a historical reading of the texts is not the focus, together they serve to contextualise the role of the artist and his gaze, the nature of the modern city and artistic poetic priorities at the time. Baudelaire’s own influential art criticism can be seen as a theoretical outline for his own creative pursuits. In Baudelaire’s prose poetry, the visual register, fine art and concepts of modernity intersect with the written word, and the…

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This research presents a contemporary snapshot of queer engagement with punk fields in an Australian and UK context. Conducted from an ‘insider’ position, the study finds that queer women and gender diverse people are configuring resistance to hegemonically masculine music scenes by building communities of praxis. Through a Do It Together (DIT) spirit, marginalised groups are dualistically initiating resistance and collectivism at gigs, making zines and forming bands, as well broadly positioning intersectionality as key to creating safe(r) punk spaces. Queer punx are using resistance as practical tool of foregrounding productivity and longevity in their scenes though generating ephemeral archives where remembering is both affective and transformative. Queer punx deconstruct what we know of the spatiality of resistance – how it is invoked, configured, unpacked and reconfigured. Incorporating affective atmospheres into an analysis of queer(ed) punk space as sites of resistance, this research analyses affective, spatial and temporal spaces of collective embodiments. Drawing on interviews, formal participant observation, as well as reflexively drawing on 15 years of lived experience and relationship building within punk scenes, this study revisits Halberstam’s concepts of <i>strategies of resistance</i> and <i>rewriting narratives</i> to add a new perspective to understanding punk practice. Considering Muñoz’s <i>queer futurity</i> as well as Hammers’ <i>collective authorisation</i>, queer women and gender diverse people’s experiential knowledges and identities are explored to contribute new knowledge to a queer archive. Importantly, this research problematises feminist constructions of women and gender diverse people as invisible subjects, instead remarking them as hypervisible but unknowable.

Masters Research - Master of Philosophy (MPhil)

Living Like Common People is a collection of seventeen fictional, interlinked, short stories focusing on the protagonist Kevin Sullivan. The characters within Kevin's circle of intimate and professional associates provide accounts of his life. His decline into recidivism, the unraveling of his relationships and the increased brutality of his crimes are set within the gloom of the prison walls and the small community he inhabits during the short periods of his release. The stories explore these relationships and provide a description of the sub-groups which make up the prison population. The aim is to explore the nature of character motivation and the essence of violence. The exegesis explores the sociological ideas of punishment and sexual violence as well as the themes of retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, deterrence and recidivism evident in the short stories. It also examines the role of prison narrative as a vehicle of reform, which makes it a compelling and vital genre.

Bachelor Honours - Bachelor of Arts (Honours)

Gender is an important aspect of children’s literature, as it provides a point of reference for readers to understand how their own gender is developed, and the cultural forces that dictate what gender looks like. However, typical representations of gender in children’s literature is often stereotypical, and presents rigid notions of how boys and girls, men and women, are supposed to act, speak, or feel, within themselves and towards each other. The Harry Potter series as children’s literature uses these stereotypes to represent fluid notions of gender, providing a hero that is sometimes not typically heroic, and a female protagonist that at times is stronger and braver than her male counterpart. A postmodern view of gender is that an individual does not have to be typecast as masculine or feminine, brave or cowardly, strong or weak; instead, as this analysis of the Harry Potter series shows, characters blend ‘masculine’and ‘feminine’ traits in a way that subverts the typical ideals of male and female characters, to ultimately engender new ways of thinking about how to be masculine or feminine. This analysis will draw upon a post-structuralist, feminist viewpoint, using such theoretical work as R.W. Connell’s theory of hegemonic masculinity, Jacques Derrida’s theory of deconstruction, Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic violence, the idea of the grotesque female body and its link to subversive humour, and Margery Hourihan’s analysis and reimagining of the heroic quest narrative.

Bachelor Honours - Bachelor of Arts (BA)

This thesis examines the roles of exile and communication in the science fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin. Specifically, it examines the exile’s role in the progression from isolation towards unity that has been identified across Le Guin’s oeuvre, and the need for effective communication in maintaining this unity. The argument of this thesis is that the exile’s journey is, in all cases, fundamental to the eventual attainment of unity but that in order for unity to be realised, something must be sacrificed of the individual. The exile must always, therefore, pay a price for unity above and beyond the fact of their exile. Other critics have written, separately, on the concepts of unity, exile and communication as they appear in Le Guin’s fiction. To my knowledge, however, these concepts have never been adequately linked together. Certainly, the concept of exile has not been studied in enough detail, considering its importance to Le Guin’s overarching vision. This thesis aims to rectify this lack by presenting a cogent literary analysis that locates these three concepts within Le Guin’s work and identifies the co-dependency that emerges from their interactions.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The aim of this thesis is to articulate a theoretical framework that will support the application of Burrows-style computational stylistics in a more interpretive context than has previously been the case, and then apply the framework to an area of literary enquiry that up to now has only been considered using traditional critical approaches. My study integrates two, previously unrelated practices, namely Burrows-style computational stylistics and Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar. I argue that the latter offers a theoretical explanation at the linguistic level for the results that are produced in a Burrows-style stylistic analysis, providing a framework for the types of authorship studies that have dominated computational stylistics, and also offering a way of extending the results into more interpretive terrain. The second part of this thesis uses computational techniques to analyse function words in sixty tragedies printed in England between 1580 and 1641. The study compares twelve closet tragedies loosely associated with Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, with forty-eight tragedies written for the commercial stage, before exploring one of the closet texts – Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam – in more detail. Critical responses to Mariam have been somewhat contradictory and I aim to show that the results of a computational stylistic study provide insights that complement criticisms arising from more orthodox approaches. Burrows-style computational stylistics shows that function word analysis highlights differences as well as points of intersection between diverse early modern dramatic traditions. The combination of Cognitive Grammar and computational stylistics shows that although Mariam is identified as a closet play, the text reveals a distinctive use of particular auxiliary verbs, modal auxiliaries, and conjunctions. Using Cognitive Grammar, these features in Mariam can be analysed as part of a rhetorical strategy that contributes to a reading of the play as an exercise in moral philosophy and an exploration of epistemological uncertainty.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

In January, 2009, as part of my research for this award, I discovered my mother had been born in a Nazi concentration camp for the extermination of Slavic infants. The following Palm Sunday, I was the first descendant of a Polish infant survivor to have visited the site of the Frauen Entbindungslager, Birth and Abortion Camp, in Waltrop, Recklinghausen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. I shared communion with a predominantly octogenarian congregation that been young men and women in 1943, some of them the residents of this German Catholic town when it enforced the fates of the pregnant Slav workers. Nearly seventy years after my mother’s escape, I became the custodian of a story I should never have been born to tell. Although more a piece of literary fiction than an autobiographical novel, >>The Glass Mountain<< engages with family stories to explore the depth, transference and healing of trauma across four generations as it weaves between the contemporary Australian lives of Kaz and her autistic 17 year old son, Jason, and the experiences of Zuitka and her infant daughter, Julka, in Germany during the last years of WWII. In 2011, Christophe Laue from the Herford Archive, Herford, North Rhine-Westphalia emailed Nazi documents relating to my mother, as well as an historical book and a museum program in which she is named. Scholars have asked, “What happened to Danuta Anita?” The exegesis, >>The Legacy of Danuta Anita<<, responds to this while exploring practice led research in creative projects involving intergenerational trauma and migration. It engages with the researcher as subject, authorial authenticity and performativity, the science and literature of trauma and intergenerational (transgenerational) trauma, the unreliability of memory in researching trauma narratives, the origins and ongoing influences of eugenics, infanticide and genocide, and the complexities of representing trauma and autism in literature.

Bachelor Honours - Bachelor of Arts (Honours)

'Monsters' focuses on the current representation of sexuality and its potential for change within the Young Adult genre, working to "normalize"- a flawed term in itself, as sexuality is inherently natural, and thus, normal- homosexual protagonists, granting them the same benefits and assumed acceptance that are a given for heterosexual characters. Examined through a largely dystopian viewpoint, as well as the subgenres of paranormal, romance and horror, the piece also explores the destructive versus constructive nature of love in all its variations.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The aim of the current study is to assess the effects of acculturation factors on Saudi students at university language centres in Saudi Arabia and Australia when they studying or using English as a foreign language. Secondary research purposes were first to explore the relationships among participants’ demographic data: age, level of English, prior English training and prior travel to an English-speaking country. Another secondary purpose was to determine the role and influence of cultural change on Saudi students’ religious and cultural perceptions in the Australian context, and how those factors affect their language learning and culture adjustment. To achieve the research’s aims, this study employed mixed quantitative and qualitative research methods, including a questionnaire, in-depth face-to-face interviews and a language test. Two hundred Saudi English-language learners in both Saudi Arabia and Australia—100 participants in each context—participated in the questionnaire section. There were 40 participants in the language testing section (20 participants from each context), and 20 participants for the interviews (10 participants from each context). Research data were collected from two universities: King Khalid University for the Saudi context, and the University of Newcastle for the Australian context. Results from the quantitative and qualitative data collected for the current study revealed that the Saudi context participants were socially, psychologically, and culturally distant from the target language and the target language group, with high levels of rejection. On the other hand, social, psychological and cultural distance was still noticeable for the Saudi students in the Australian context, while integration scored the highest level in the Australian context participants’ responses. Comparisons of the findings of the three scales; rejection, integration, and assimilation for both contexts demonstrated that the contextual atmosphere had an impact on the learners’ degree of acculturation.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The purpose of this investigation was to explore the experiences and motivations of researchers in social work, in engaging with social work practitioners for the purpose of facilitating the use of research knowledge. It sought to examine how researchers conceived, explained and experienced the research utilisation process and the factors that may impact on this process, with the central aim of identifying how interaction can best lead to research use in social work. A mixed methodology grounded in Bhaskar’s critical realist paradigm was employed. This approach included both a fixed and flexible design, whereby quantitative data was gathered to determine regularities and patterns, and qualitative data to ascertain participants’ meanings, intentions, motivations, and reasons. Data was initially collected from 60 participants who were Australian researchers publishing in social work journals. A follow up semi-structured interview was conducted with 26 of the survey’s participants. A comprehensive review of the literature revealed that the knowledge utilisation field is complex and lacks conceptual depth and clarity. Consequently, the literature reflected a tendency toward superficial understandings of research use and the processes by which it might be achieved. This study offered a rich description of research knowledge utilisation in social work. Participants experienced research use as a socially engaged and relational process, rather than a unilinear event whereby research knowledge moves neatly from the context of production to that of application. The nature of the communication and the characteristics of the relationships between researchers and practitioners affected research use in practice. The power of interaction, as an influential factor in research use lies in the particular way in which it is combined with the characteristics of the individual, the organisation and the research content.

Bachelor Honours - Bachelor of Arts (Honours)

Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria is a unique piece of Indigenous Australian literature. Several critics have noted its narrative style as an example of ‘magical realism’. Since the text shares certain characteristics with other novels regarded as magical realist, such as Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, this label seems befitting of Wright’s prose. However, analysis into the origins and development of ‘magical realism’, along with a close reading of these texts focussing on form and content to determine the significance of the presence of the real and magical within their work, reveals the term’s inadequacy in describing Carpentaria. A ‘maban reality’, as defined by Mudrooroo Narogin, is found to be a more accurate label for Wright’s particular techniques and purposes, and thus a case-by-case approach is advocated for the study of future works.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The present research investigated the relationships among four factors: predictors of second language (L2) attitudes, L2 attitudes, motivational intensity and actual learning efforts. The research aimed at achieving five objectives. The first one was to establish what L2 attitudes exist among Saudi learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in relation to: a) English and its speakers; and b) issues associated with the teaching/learning of English, such as the textbook, the learning of English in the classroom and the teacher himself/herself. The second objective was to investigate whether participants’ demographic background had an impact on the two categories of learner attitudes. The third objective was to identify the factors responsible for the formation of existing L2 attitudes—again in two separate categories: a) socio-psychological constructs like in-group identification, para-social contact, in-group contact and perceived out-group threats as predictors of L2 learners’ attitudes towards English and the English-speaking communities; and b) learners’ beliefs about language learning as predictors of attitudes toward the learning situation. The fourth objective was to establish the extent to which learner attitudes affect learners’ motivational intensity (i.e., intended learning efforts) and by extension learners’ actual efforts. The research also addressed the issue of the salience of the English speaking community—the target language group—for learners of English in Saudi Arabia. Research data from 510 male and female university students was collected via a dedicated questionnaire from three campuses of Taibah University across Medina region. A range of statistical procedures were used to analyse the data including factor analysis, reliability analyses, descriptive analyses, one way ANOVAs, correlation analyses, repeated measures analyses of variance, t-tests analyses, regression analyses and path analyses. This research found that Saudi EFL learners have essentially positive attitudes towards English and its speakers, and towards the learning situation, but are generally opposed to accepting the target language group’s social and religious values. This research established that five predictors have significant effects of varying strength on L2 attitudes: in-group identification, para-social contact, in-group contact, intergroup threat and beliefs about language learning, thus extending the theoretical scope of Stephan & Stephan’s (1996) Integrated Threat Theory to the domain of L2 attitudes. Learner attitudes, in turn, were found to be related to both intended and actual learning efforts, although with many of the research participants intended efforts were not necessarily reflected in actual efforts. Overall the research findings demonstrated that the target language group remains salient for Saudi EFL learners. These results suggested that, despite the recent push towards conceptualising L2 motivation from the social psychological perspective (Gardner,…