From Rupture to Rhythm: An Autoethnographic Exploration of Dance as a Somatic Response to Earthquake Trauma

This thesis explores the intricate relationship between dance and trauma, focusing on how embodied practices facilitate psychological recovery. Dominant narratives often prioritise cognitive experiences, limiting our understanding of healing. By employing a qualitative, post-positivist and critical autoethnographic approach, I reflect on my journey through trauma following the Christchurch earthquakes, utilising journal entries from the point of view of my younger self to illustrate the transformative power of movement and dance. The key themes of this research are structure and routine, socialisation, and alleviation of anxious thoughts, demonstrating how engaging with the body challenges conventional notions of recovery. Furthermore, it highlights the complementary role of Dance Movement Therapy in trauma- informed practices, advocating for a holistic approach that recognises the mind-body connection. The findings underscore the necessity of viewing trauma as an embodied experience and propose a shift toward movement-based therapeutic practices that empower individuals through their lived experiences. Ultimately, this research calls for reimagining therapeutic frameworks, emphasising dance's potential to complement current trauma- informed therapies and promote a bottom-up approach to recovery

AutoPenGPT:Highly automated penetration testing framework based on LLM

This thesis explores the integration of LLM to enhance automated penetration testing, addressing the shortcomings of previous models such as poor context memory, high susceptibility to hallucinations, and low automation levels. Existing approaches often fall short in dynamically complex cyber environments, leading to inefficient and errorprone testing processes. Our proposed framework utilizes external knowledge bases to enhance information coherence across multi-step tasks and integrates counterfactual analysis to significantly reduce hallucinations and errors in LLM outputs. The experimental results showcase notable advancements: AutoPenGPT attains a 20% task completion rate in complex scenarios, markedly outperforming traditional tools like Nessus and PentestGPT. Moreover, AutoPenGPT maintains 57.1% accuracy in contextual memory in complex tasks, and reduces hallucination rates to 12.7%, demonstrating its superior adaptability and effectiveness in addressing the critical gaps in automated penetration testing. These improvements highlight our approach’s potential to significantly elevate the efficiency, accuracy, and scalability of security testing in evolving threat landscapes

Lest We Forget and How We Remember : Living Collective Memory in the Returned Services Association

The Returned Service Association (RSA) was founded by soldiers from the Australian New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACs) arriving home from World War I. For many New Zealanders, the return of the ANZACs marked the foundation of a distinctive national character: the ‘Anzac Spirit’ of soldierly virtues: comradeship, courage, and endurance. A century later, the RSA’s 182 local clubhouses are no longer exclusively sequestered spaces for veterans. Today, they function simultaneously as lively hubs of community socialisation and as melancholic war memorials. This research asks what contemporary memory of a wartime event that occurred a century ago can contribute to current theorisation of collective memory 20 years after anthropology’s memory boom. Firstly, I analyse the role of embodied, affective, and everyday social processes in the reproduction of wartime collective memory. Secondly, I demonstrate empirical connections and restrictions between the conventional reproduction of Anzac memory and the capacity for agentive reinterpretations of these narratives as a result of social change and political subjectivities. I explain how these formations are formed through national identity, socio-economic class, colonisation, and relations between working life and pleasure under contemporary capitalism. I argue that Anzac memory manifests within semiotically dense connections between habituated quotidian practices and the intergenerational social reproduction of wartime memory. This thesis is an ethnography of two RSA clubhouses in the working-class suburbs of West Auckland. Through a year of participant-observation, I was socialised as a regular member in these clubs and their memory communities. I describe living collective memory as the vitally embodied practices of doing memory through animated every-day activities such as commensal drinking, after-work games, and valorisation of ‘authenticity’ among remembering subjects. I argue that wartime mythology in the RSA is co-constructed with profoundly habitual, corporeal, and emplaced techniques of relating to remembered national figures. This co-construction unfolds through both quotidian and ritual time. I conclude that this living Anzac memory is harnessed by agentive subjects and disembodied political structures to transform narratives of mass-scale death and violence into ideas about how to live with others in local and national communities

A Comparative Study of Community-led Relocation in the United States and Aotearoa New Zealand: Lessons from the Buyout of Hazard-Prone Properties

This report describes an international comparative study of managed retreat in the United States and New Zealand, where the acquisition of hazard-prone housing (buyouts) in both countries are used to highlight key issues that are germane to this evolving climate change adaptation measure. Based on this assessment, specific policy recommendations are provided for both countries, which is timely as both the United States and New Zealand are exploring the possible development of national managed retreat programs. As part of this assessment, including a review of existing literature, buyout lessons have not been effectively translated from those who have undertaken buyouts to others considering this process (Greer and Brokopp-Binder 2016; Vila and Smith forthcoming). Nor are specific buyout lessons learned being translated into national, state, and local policy recommendations advancing community led relocation (Smith 2014a; National Academies of Science 2024). Given these concerns, an important part of this report includes 68 recommendations describing how this issue can be addressed and how to use these recommendations to improve community-led relocation

Learning Ecologies of Immigrant Indian Science Teachers Teaching in New Zealand Secondary Schools

Many countries face a shortage of qualified secondary science teachers. Economically advanced countries, including New Zealand, are looking to hire teachers from abroad to fill the gap. Research studies have identified a variety of challenges that immigrant teachers face when they learning to teach in a new country and context. Yet, existing studies have not fully acknowledged and embraced the diverse knowledges and experiences that these teachers bring to the countries they move to. This study explores how science teachers from India use their cultural knowledge, informal knowledge and lived experiences to adapt their teaching in New Zealand secondary schools. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with five Indian science teachers currently teaching in New Zealand. Guided by the concept of learning ecologies and Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, the interviews explored how they learn and navigate to teach in the country. Results reveal that these teachers use a range of systems in their professional development and practice to engage students, which include their informal knowledge, personal interests, cultural traditions, New Zealand’s physical environment, and innovative thinking that is special to Indian cultural practice (called Jugaad). The findings suggest that policy makers and the profession, including school leaders and teachers, should promote science teaching grounded in teachers’ lived experiences while maintaining key strengths of New Zealand classroom teaching and learning

The Body Capital: Precariat Contemporary Dancers' Meanings of Wellbeing in New York City

Romanticized in popular culture since the late 18th century, the social concept of the starving artist and the Bohemian lifestyle in Western contexts remains polarized as a badge of honor, or foolish endeavor. Within the hierarchy of artists, dancers are widely acknowledged to be situated at the bottom in terms of economic and social capital. The 21st century model of neoliberal capitalism is further increasing the barrier to entry, cementing the performing arts as a profession only accessible to those situated in a privileged economic class. This thesis examines the wellbeing of economically precarious contemporary concert dance artists in New York City. The study draws upon a quantitative questionnaire and nine in-depth interviews with self-identified precariat dance artists, applying a constructivist methodology through a capitalist critical lens. It allows emerging-mid career New York City based dance artists to construct their personal meanings of wellbeing, and envisions an artistic world in which the market economy does not dictate access to and career sustainability within the field of dance. The narratives amongst the dancers demonstrates a collective need for conscious societal intervention divorced from profit, to sustain the lives of dance artists and ensure a rich and diverse artistic milieu of dancemakers and performers. Among the themes identified in the dancers’ visions of wellbeing are financial stability and predictability, the ability to rest and recover, access to healthcare both physical and mental, and a healthy work/life balance. Discussions of agency and the ability to advocate for oneself combined with the often fused identity of dancer and self, demonstrated across the board, the dedication to the artform beyond industry, and the willingness to make great sacrifices to remain in the dance world. This thesis contributes to the field of dance studies and the sociology of mental health through its critical examination of dance in industry, its impacts on dance artist wellbeing, leading to critical ramifications to the field of dance in terms of increased disparities amongst working artists, burnout, disposability, and loss of creative ingenuity and diverse perspectives within the field. It gives voice to artists typically marginalized and punished for discussing topics of economic concern and will contribute to the body of knowledge surrounding the effects of capitalism on artistic professions in which the full value of its contribution to society cannot be measured by capitalist profitability benchmarks

The role of information on on-line control of queueing

We examine a basic discrete time-controlled queueing system in which the performance of the servers fluctuates based on a Markov-modulated random environment, and the controller can choose which server to employ at each time slot. We investigate the role of information in the region of system stability. We formulate the problem using a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP), where the controller observes the server it has selected, observes the success or failure of the service, and observes the queue length. When there is either full information or no information, the stability regions are trivial. This two-server controlled queueing model reflects many practical settings – for instance, a small call centre with two agents, a cloud service balancing requests across two machines, a clinic with two consultation rooms or a production cell with two machines. Focusing on the two-server case allows us to capture the essential dynamics of parallel service and control in a tractable form, while still representing a large class of real-world systems and providing a foundation for extension to more complex configurations. We consider arrival processes with Binomial, Poisson, Erlang, and Hyperexponential distributions. We use Monte Carlo value iteration to simulate the throughput via the POMDP Bellman equation. We also study a case where the server environment follows a three-state Markov chain. This work highlights the practical significance of the two-server model in capturing the complexity of real-life service systems, while providing a robust framework for adaptive control and performance optimisation

Food security in Aotearoa New Zealand: Barriers, strategies, and aspirational conditions for success

INTRODUCTION: This article reports a practice–research partnership that was aimed at co-creating recommendations for sustainable food practices. We explored the barriers, existing strategies, and aspirational conditions for success in food security. METHODS: A co-created practice–research design included six virtual workshops via zoom with 25 local service providers, food growers, and community organisations across five local board areas in Auckland’s North in 2021. A hybrid thematic analysis was used to identify existing barriers and strategies and to explore aspirational community-identified conditions for food security. FINDINGS: Income instability, isolation, and disconnection from soil were highlighted as the main barriers to food security. Participants detailed three existing strategies used to address food insecurity: food security education, social media, and collaborations between food providers. Participants explicated four aspirational conditions for success in food security: access to healthy food, relationships with and through food, closed-loop food systems, and sufficient resources. CONCLUSIONS: A systems change perspective was applied, highlighting the need for relational and structural changes to support community-led ideas that work toward food security, which demand coordinated, collective, and multi-level responses to create conditions for success. We argue that the changes suggested by this partnership will hold value across regions and are crucial to building food-secure communities across Aotearoa New Zealand

Not just a bunch of stoners! How medical cannabis entrepreneurs pro-actively shape an emerging industry

This teaching case focuses on the influence of contextual features—including regulations, norms, and cultural beliefs—on entrepreneurial activity and the strategies through which entrepreneurs can shape such features in a way that benefits their venture. Drawing on qualitative secondary data from sources such as media outlets, corporate blogs or policy documents, the case recounts the story of Ora Pharm, a New Zealand medical cannabis start-up, and its founder, Zoë Reece. The case elaborates how Ora Pharm and others were not discouraged by prevailing stigmas or restrictive regulations that created barriers to their entrepreneurial aspirations. Instead, they proactively lobbied for regulatory change, educated patients and health professionals and challenged prevailing stereotypes through opinion leadership to facilitate the industry's growth. In doing so, the case sensitises students to the intricate relationship between contextual conditions that influence entrepreneurial activities and the potential of proactively shaping these conditions in a way that benefits a broad set of stakeholders

An ecological survey of Kuranui (Penguin Island) and Waikaia (Rabbit Island), western Bay of Plenty

Kuranui and Waikaia are iwi-owned islands in the Slipper group off the east coast of the Coromandel peninsula that have not been surveyed for 50 years. We visited both islands for one day and night each in April 2024 and undertook rodent trapping and species surveys of birds, reptiles, and vascular plants. The islands have changed little in 50 years. The avifauna remains similar and shared between both islands while the vegetation has continued to recover on a successional trajectory to a native state following burning. Some new weed species have colonised both islands. Kiore are the sole introduced mammal species on both islands and are abundant, though smaller than elsewhere in New Zealand. Ōi (grey-faced petrel) are abundant on both islands, with a historical estimate on Kuranui from the early 2000s of 5500 burrows. Due to their general inaccessibility the islands have retained their natural character from the lack of human disturbance