195 research outputs found

    Critical Incidents in Ways of Experiencing Ethical Engineering Practice

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    Background: Ethics is a required outcome for engineering education programs, but few studies focus on how workforce experiences lead to changes in how engineers experience ethics in practice. By identifying what incidents influence the ways that engineers come to experience ethical engineering practice, we can more effectively design post-secondary pedagogy based on these experiences. Purpose: We address the research question, What types of critical incidents influence engineers ways of experiencing ethical engineering practice? By identifying and categorizing critical incidents, we aim to provide the engineering education community with strategies and stories that they can embed in post-secondary engineering ethics curriculums. Design/Method: We employed a semi-structured interview protocol to solicit experiences with ethical engineering practice among 43 engineers from a variety of engineering disciplines and who were all currently working in the health products industry. While the interviews focused on ways of experiencing ethical engineering practice, many participants discussed critical change-inducing incidents therein. Thus, we used critical incident technique to identify and synthesize influential workforce experiences in their ethical practice. Results We identified 106 critical incidents, or workforce experiences that led to a change in how engineers viewed or practiced ethical engineering. We grouped incidents into 17 critical incident types, which represent patterns of events or behaviors that led to a change or reinforcement in ethical practice. We grouped incident types into five categories: (1) Cultural Immersions, (2) Interpersonal Encounters; (3) Ethical Actions, (4) Ethical Failures, and (5) Mentorship Events. Conclusion: This study can inform educational change efforts by ensuring that such efforts are grounded in and based on the lived experiences of practicing engineers. We found that Cultural Immersions was the most prominent type of critical incident among participants, and thus we emphasize the import of supporting student awareness of organizational culture, including how it informs ones ethical views and practices. Based on the range of incident types, we also emphasize how instructors might consider and build the multitude of incident types and categories to implement pedagogy aligned with workforce experiences

    'They Seem Like a Good Bunch': Liberal Party Support for Violent Croatian Nationalism in Australia 1949-1972

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    The phenomenon of violent Croatian nationalism during the Cold War over the years 1949-1972 was a bitter partisan chapter of Australia's political history. The issue, a small number of emigre Croatians prepared to use violence to achieve their political goals, grew into a significant political controversy in Australia and became a microcosm for the deep political chasm between Australia's major political parties during the Cold War. When violent Croatian nationalists in Australia began to commit acts of violence, the Liberal Party-led government that presided over this period faced fierce criticism. They were accused of inaction, allowing their ideological support for Croatian nationalism to cloud their judgment, and hypocrisy in not prosecuting this issue with the same fervour they had demonstrated in repressing left wing and communist movements. The opposition Labor Party and other elements of the political left became increasingly outraged as acts of suspected Croatian nationalist violence occurred and re-occurred over this period with little reaction from the Liberal-led government. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the role of the Liberal Party in the endurance of this issue in Australia. It considers what they did and did not do to address the violent Croatian nationalist problem in Australia. It does not seek to condemn nor vindicate the Liberal Party and its policies on this issue, rather, to understand and contextualise them. In doing so it reveals a chapter of Australian history far richer and more nuanced than the partisan literature from the period conveyed. This thesis returns to the wealth of rarely examined primary source documents that clearly lay the progression of this issue from the post-war migrant wave that brought a significant number of Croatian nationalists to Australia, to the fall of the Liberal-led government in December 1972 amidst the worst outbreak of nationalistic Croatian violence in Australia. Thus-far this issue has never been considered in isolation in the Australian context, but significant efforts understand Croatian emigre violence have been made in recent years. Further, this thesis connects to diverse range of scholarship considering migration, security, political history, and terrorism studies. The historical record reveals that the Liberal Party was not active supporters of violent Croatian nationalists, but were rhetorically supportive, reluctant to concede that there was any problem, and consistently took light touch policy options that did little to dissuade violent Croatian nationalists in Australia. This conclusion is not only evident in the primary sources, but it is also the conclusion that the Liberal Party cabinet reached in the final weeks of its government

    How We Use Stories and Why That Matters

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    How We Use Stories and Why That Matters guides the reader through the tangled undergrowth of communication and cultural expression towards a new understanding of the role of group-mediating stories at global and digital scale. It argues that media and networked systems perform and bind group identities, creating bordered fictions within which economic and political activities are made meaningful. Now that computational and global scale, big data, metadata and algorithms rule the roost even in culture, subjectivity and meaning, we need population-scale frameworks to understand individual, micro-scale sense-making practices. To achieve that, we need evolutionary and systems approaches to understand cultural performance and dynamics. The opposing universes of fact (science, knowledge, education) and fiction (entertainment, story and imagination) – so long separated into the contrasting disciplines of natural sciences and the humanities – can now be understood as part of one turbulent sphere of knowledge-production and innovation. Using striking examples and compelling analysis, the book shows what the New York Shakespeare Riots tell us about class struggle, what Death Cab for Cutie tells us about media, what Kate Moss’s wedding dress tells us about authorship, and how Westworld and Humans imagine very different futures for Artificial Intelligence: one based on slavery, the other on class. Together, these knowledge stories tell us about how intimate human communication is organised and used to stage organised conflict, to test the ‘fighting fitness’ of contending groups – provoking new stories, identities and classes along the way

    Mytholudics:understanding games as/through myth

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    This dissertation outlines a mythological framework for understanding how games produce meaning. I first theorise mythology as it applies to games and play. This is expressed through a cycle showing how mythology is embedded in the production of games and how it impacts the interpretation of games. This is then operationalised as a method for the analysis of games. I call my theorisation and analytical approach mytholudics. I then apply mytholudics in ten analyses of individual games or game series, split into two lenses: heroism and monstrosity. Finally, I reflect on these analyses and on mytholudics as an approach.Mythology here is understood through two perspectives: Roland Barthes’ theory outlined in Mythologies (1972/2009) and Frog’s (2015, 2021a) understanding of mythology in cultural practice and discourse from a folklore studies perspective. The Barthesian approach establishes myth as a mode of expression rather than as an object. This has naturalisation as a key feature. Otherwise-arbitrary relations between things are made to seem natural. Frog’s mythic discourse approach understands mythology as “constituted of signs that are emotionally invested by people within a society as models for knowing the world” (2021a, p. 161). Mythic discourse analysis focuses on the comparison of mythic discourses over time and across cultures.Barthes and Frog broadly share an understanding of mythology as a particular way of communicating an understanding of the world through discourse. Mythology is then not limited to any genre, medium or cultural context. It can include phenomena as diverse as systems, rules, customs, rituals, stories, characters, events, social roles and so on. What is important is how these elements relate to one another. Games consist of the same diverse elements arranged in comparable configurations, and so this perspective highlights the otherwise hidden parallels between mythology and games.I argue for analysing games as and through myth. Games as myth means viewing the game as an organising structure that works analogously to mythology. Elements are constructed and put into relation with one another within a gameworld, which the player then plays in and interprets. Games through myth means seeing games as embedded within cultural contexts. The cultural context of development affects the mythologies that can be seen to influence the construction of the game, while the cultural context of the player affects how they relate to the game and the mythologies channelled through it.A mytholudic approach helps us to understand how games make meaning because it focuses on the naturalised and hidden premises that go into the construction of games as organising structures. By analysing the underpinnings of those organising structures, we can outline the model for understanding the world that is virtually instantiated and how they are influenced by, influence and relate to models for understanding the world—mythologies—in the real world

    Agency in and around videogames

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    This thesis conceptualises player agency in avatar-based videogames as an affordance of game design (Gibson 1979). By examining how agency is discussed in different discourses surrounding videogames, such as those of game studies and game design, it puts forward a multidimensional heuristic framework for conceptualising agency in avatar-based games. Game studios with a particular design focus that draw on ‘game design lineages’ (Bateman and Zagal 2018) feature as case studies to demonstrate the analytical power of this framework, examining how agency is designed, and how developers discuss how it is designed. The combined methods of textual and paratextual analysis provides insight not only into how game designers think about agency but also into how design intentions can translate into features of the released game. Such an approach facilitates a way of looking at agency as designed, which is informed by the vocabularies of academic discussions concerning videogames, as well as the language used to refer to these phenomena by industry practitioners, thereby grounding abstract theory in production practices and discourses

    Ten Journeys to Cameron’s Farm

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    Three decades after what he called ‘a dreadful air crash, almost within sight of my windows’ Robert Menzies wrote ‘I shall never forget that terrible hour; I felt that for me the end of the world had come…’ Ten Journeys to Cameron’s Farm tells the lives of the ten men who perished in Duncan Cameron’s Canberra property on 13 August 1940: three Cabinet ministers, the Chief of the General Staff, two senior staff members, and the RAAF crew of four. The inquiries into the accident, and the aftermath for the Air Force, government, and bereaved families are examined. Controversial allegations are probed: did the pilot F/Lt Bob Hitchcock cause the crash or was the Minister for Air Jim Fairbairn at the controls? ‘Cameron Hazlehurst is a story-teller, one of the all-too rare breed who can write scholarly works which speak to a wider audience. In the most substantial, original, and authoritative account of the Canberra aircraft accident of August 1940 he provides unique insights into a critical, poignant moment in Australian history. Hazlehurst’s account is touched with irony and quirks, set within a framework of political, social, and military history, distinctions of class, education, and rank, and the machinations of parliamentary and service politics and of the ‘official mind’. The research is meticulous and wide-ranging, the analysis is always balanced, and the writing at once skilful and compelling. This is a work of an exceptional historian.’ (Ian Hancock, author of Nick Greiner: A Political Biography, John Gorton: He Did It His Way, and National and Permanent? The Federal Organisation of the Liberal Party of Australia) ‘Ten Journeys to Cameron’s Farm is a monumental work of historical research pegged on a single, lethal moment at the apex of government at an extraordinarily sensitive time in Australia’s history. The book embodies top drawer scholarship, deep sensitivity to antipodean class structures and sensibilities, and a nuanced understanding of both democratic and bureaucratic politics.’ (Christine Wallace, author of Germaine Greer Untamed Shrew and The Private Don: the man behind the legend of Don Bradman

    Easily Read, Easily Forgotten: Reassessing the Effects of Visual Difficulties and Multi-Modality in Educational Text Design

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    The graphic design of a book affects the way the reader receives and processes information. However, design is often focused on aesthetic principles and traditional wisdom, not taking into account how design aspects affect cognitive processes and educational outcomes. This thesis examines the efficacy of page design elements on educational outcomes, specifically disfluent fonts, handwritten fonts and multi-modal design. The traditional wisdom of typography has maintained that the faster the human eye can read a text, the more suited it is for reading materials. However, recent research suggests that disfluent, or difficult-to-read fonts result in significantly improved reading comprehension and retention (Chih-Ming Chen & Yu-Ju Lin 553; Diemand-Yauman, et al. 114; Faber, et al. 914; French, M. M. J., et al. 301; Geller, Jason, et al.1109; Halin, et al. 31; Oppenheimer D.M & Frank M.D. 1178). This body of research suggests that certain visual disfluencies enhance educational outcomes, improving retention and comprehension by encouraging the reader to mentally process material in a slower and deeper way. What if texts that are easily read are easily forgotten? Medieval manuscript design encouraged a reading culture nurtured by deep, contemplative and slow reading methods, enhanced by semiotic images, text and design. The modern book designer, inspired by medieval manuscripts, and their modern incarnation, the graphic novel, can enhance educational outcomes through design that elicits a deep cognitive processing. The aim of this thesis is to present evidence that this inspiration combined with difficult-to-read fonts and multi-modal design can enhance educational outcomes, specifically in the American high school literature classroom

    Changing Lives and Livelihoods: Culture, Capitalism and Contestation over Marine Resources in Island Melanesia

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    TThis thesis is both a contemporary and a longitudinal ethnographic case study of Brooker Islanders. Brooker Islanders are a sea-faring people that inhabit a large marine territory in the West Calvados Chain of the Louisiade Archipelago in Milne Bay Province of Papua New Guinea. In the late 19th Century, Brooker Islanders began to be incorporated into an emerging global economy through the production of various marine resources that were desired by mainly Australian capitalist interests. The most notable of these commodified marine resources was beche-de-mer. Beche-de-mer is the processed form of several sea cucumber species. The importance of the sea cucumber fishery for Brooker Islanders waned when World War I started. Following the rise of an increasingly affluent China in the early 1990s, the sea cucumber fishery and beche-de-mer trade once again became an important source of cash income for Brooker Islanders. With an increasing dependency on cash and a subsequent decline in sea cucumber stocks, a number of conflicts emerged across the Louisiade Archipelago due to competition to access areas that still held sea cucumbers stocks. In October 2009, the National Fisheries Authority imposed a moratorium on the sea cucumber fishery and beche-de-mer trade. This moratorium remained in place until April 2017. This moratorium caused major impacts on Brooker Islander livelihoods. Brooker Islanders have limited alternative income opportunities available and also have to contend with regular environmental shocks such as cyclones and El Nino associated droughts. An increasing population and projected impacts of climate change make for a very uncertain future for Brooker Islanders. This thesis is based on anthropological fieldwork, historical research and continued contact with Brooker Islanders that now spans a 22-year period from 1998 to the present. Using a historical political ecology approach, I argue that the incorporation of Brooker Islanders into the global economy and the unevenness of development has produced profound changes in their livelihoods, local marine tenureship arrangements and social relations with their island neighbours. This thesis provides a case study of the role that capitalism plays in changing livelihoods and institutions over time when market opportunities arise and consumer dependencies become essential to maintaining livelihoods. The contestation over commodified marine resources is also viewed in the context of changing political and legal domains. Issues of governability for the sustainability of sea cucumber stocks are also explored
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