Equitable Technologies for Smarter Urbanism: Enhancing Priority Car Parking at Western Sydney University

Relocating university campuses to Central Business Districts (CBDs) changes the way people travel to and from campus. While CBDs are often considered accessible due to the increased availability of public transport and non-motorised transit options (e.g. walking, cycling), urban locations can also lead to social exclusion and transport disadvantage for some. For example, people with disabilities and caring commitments who are dependent on private car transport to facilitate their mobility, can find it more difficult to access urban campuses when accessible parking and transport options are not readily available. In 2018, Western Sydney University opened its second city-based campus in the City of Liverpool, located in Southwest Sydney, New South Wales. With limited on-site car parking in the campuses’ basement, plans were implemented to provide staff and students with disabilities and caring commitments with priority parking. DIVVY Parking Pty Ltd was commissioned to deliver a car parking service using their app

The Future of Work and Childcare: Towards Equity and Justice for Western Sydney Communities

This white paper by Western Sydney University researchers advocates for more equitable models of work and childcare that prioritise gender equity, gentle parenting, community building, social support, and climate justice. The care economy in western Sydney is under-resourced and inflexible, and current policies prioritise economic growth over family and community relationships. Women, especially those from disadvantaged or marginalised backgrounds, face greater challenges in accessing education and earning less than men. The COVID-19 pandemic has further highlighted existing inequalities in work and childcare responsibilities. The researchers propose a vision statement and a place-based research agenda to influence socially just policy making and practices. The six proposed research streams include defining gendered workforce participation, understanding the childcare sector, mapping formal childcare services, generating a childcare stress metric, collecting evidence on innovative models and informal childcare supports, and co-creating equitable and just systems through design justice workshops with local people, groups, and the sector

Working tourists

The development of criminological theory has been grounded on urban centres with urban youth as the focus. From Walter Miller’s explanation of the focal concerns to the Chicago School’s development of social disorganization theory, criminological theories have focused almost solely on urban youth and urban centres. The lack of theoretical explanations for crime in rural areas has hampered our understanding of crime and deviant behaviour (see Donnermeyer, 2007 ). Rural areas are distinct from urban areas. Research has demonstrated that drug use, gun availability and poverty diff er in rural and urban centres. Moreover, some crimes are unique to rural areas, such as livestock theft. Scholars have also pointed out that rural areas are often seen as homogenous by criminologists. However, rural areas display a wide variety of characteristics, such as poverty level, racial composition and unemployment. Therefore, there is a need for the development of criminological theory based on rural areas

[In Press] Precarious labour geographies of working holiday makers : querying sustainability

The boundaries between tourism and migration are blurry. this blurring has been beneficial for the governments of wealthy countries enabling them to import a large and flexible temporary work- force that can be directed toward regions and industries where there are labour shortages. such is the case with the Australian Working holiday Program (AWHP); a historically tourism-focused cultural exchange program that began in 1975. since the 1990s, the Australian Government has leveraged the AWHP to support several of Australia’s critical industries. this has been achieved through the tweaking of mobility infrastructures that link Working holiday Makers’ (WHMs) ability to stay in Australia to employment conditions. such conditions increase precarity among WHMs, directing them towards remote regions and industries where there are evident labour shortages. While these mobility infrastructures significantly benefit Australia’s economy, they result in WHMs being highly vulnerable to exploitation. such vulnerability is layered with WHMs from less wealthy, non-english-speaking countries facing the highest levels of vulnerability. this study investigates the way mobility infrastructures in the AWHP influence WHMs’ mobilities, as well as how such mobilities are experienced in uneven and unjust ways. there is urgency to interrogate the role that such programs play in contributing to unjust mobilities, and to query the attendant implications for sustainability

Tinder matters : swiping right to unlock research fields

This chapter takes the position that people, technology and place are intimately and materially entangled in performances of Tinder, the popular location-aware mobile application (app) designed primarily (but not necessarily) for dating. We draw upon personal experiences of using Tinder (mainly in Australian and European contexts) and the experiences of our research participants who have used Tinder and other location-aware apps (e.g. Backpackr, Grindr and Couch Surfer) while travelling across the world to consider ontological, epistemological and methodological issues of researching the ‘digital’. We use new materialist concepts, ideas, theories and approaches to reconsider our approach to researching the use of location-aware social apps during travel, a research focus that stemmed from our own personal observations of witnessing many travellers on Tinder, given our location in the popular travel destination of Sydney, Australia. Our main research methods are the usual suspects: an online qualitative survey and qualitative interviews. But we had essentially ‘swiped [ourselves] right’ into researching screened and technologically-mediated travel experiences in times of the ‘mobile’ and the ‘digital’. Messy and muddled, complex and consuming, Tinder is completely inseparable from the people who use it. Without us, there is no Tinder. We therefore want to orientate towards the question: what we are becoming with Tinder? And how do our methods need to change in order to capture the intra-activity of human-technology-place relations? When the ‘field’ is an app on your phone that is in your hand, in your home and every place else you go, the rules of research need to be rewritten