"The Basement" composition

A short piece composed for Piano and performed by Debbie Nisbet at the Piano Day show on 29 March 201

2015 Performance: The heartbreak kids music month show

Local Hamilton bands The Changing Same & The Heartbreak Kids, along with solo artist Bry Louise perform in celebration of New Zealand Music Month

Sustainability As: An Analysis of the Alberta Oil Sands Industry’s Metaphorical Discourse

Analysis of the Alberta oil sands industry’s sustainability perspectives from a communication, and specifically metaphorical, standpoint is a valuable endeavour due to the importance of the oil sands (both in Alberta and elsewhere) today with the world’s reliance on fossil fuels. Learning how sustainability is used and conceptualized by the industry will reward us with a more comprehensive understanding of how to approach industry sustainable development. Moreover, analysing the industry’s sustainability metaphors in a systematic manner will allow a greater variety of metaphors to be introduced and investigated, allowing us to more succinctly articulate metaphorical conceptualizations of sustainability, sustainable and energy development, environmentalism, nature, and the oil sands

The Intersecting and Additive Nature of Vulnerability: Dehumanizing or Protecting?

Recent research has examined how extra-legal factors such as emotions and stereotypes impact legal judgment decisions regarding traditionally vulnerable populations. Less work has explored not only what makes a group vulnerable, but how people perceive, interpret, and apply that vulnerability. The current research therefore integrates psychological theory and legal models to understand vulnerability and its implications. Three studies examined the roles of various factors, including dehumanization and empathy, in understanding how people respond to vulnerable individuals in general and then to women who have survived sexual violence. In Experiment 1, I manipulated sex (female vs. male), age (older: 60 years or older vs. younger: 25 years or younger vs. control: between 26 and 59 years old), experience of poverty (yes vs. no), and experience of sexual violence (yes vs. no) to understand how person and context vulnerabilities explain judgments of vulnerability. I found that poverty and sexual violence emerged as the strongest predictors of how individuals conceptualize vulnerability, showing contextual factors drive perceptions of vulnerability most consistently. Next, in Experiments 2 and 3, I manipulated vulnerability status and legal vulnerability to explore how different perceptions of vulnerability lead to negative or harmful legal judgment outcomes for female victims of two types of sexual violence – sex trafficking and sexual assault. Vulnerabilities were more protective for sex trafficking survivors because they elicited more empathy, but more harmful for sexual assault survivors because they elicited more dehumanization. Essentially, the type of sexual violence did matter, and participants’ reactions to survivors’ vulnerabilities were more important than the vulnerabilities themselves. Indeed, it is not vulnerability alone but the reactions it elicits that drive legal judgments. Together all three studies showed that vulnerability can be both protective and dehumanizing – depending on certain factors. Advisor: Richard L. Wiene