Dwelling in discordant spaces: Material and emotional geographies of parenting in apartments

In recent decades, many cities in the industrialised west have witnessed unprecedented residential densification. The scale and pace of development is largely driven by population growth and speculative real-estate investment, enabled by strategies of urban consolidation, and manifest materially within planner’s visions for future cities shaped by notions of order and control, standardisation and homogeneity. What remains opaque is the lived experience of diversity within this seemingly more ordered, consolidating landscape. To what extent are apartments produced to accommodate diverse needs and evolving senses of home and belonging? This thesis seeks to answer this question through examination of Australian parents’ experiences raising children in apartments. Despite being framed as the domain of singles, childless couples and empty nesters, increasing numbers of families with children are living in apartments. This presents a pronounced departure from hegemonic discourses that position a detached house as the ideal home for families with children, especially in the Australian context. When such families live in apartments, they are at risk of being seen as out-of-place, their needs poorly accommodated. Urban researchers have begun to document the challenges families with children face in higherdensity residential settings, but as yet, researchers have seldom explored the material negotiations and emotional work of parenting and making home in apartments. With planning agendas prioritising the expansion of higher-density living within a narrow format of apartment buildings, our cities are being reshaped in ways that may fail to support a diversity of needs across the life-course. This thesis responds by examining the everyday experiences of parents living with children in apartments in Sydney, Australia’s most populous city. Qualitative methods and feminist and cultural geographic insights on housing and home foreground narratives that reveal connections between material, cultural and emotional dimensions of apartment life. Positioned as a contribution to the interdisciplinary field of housing studies, I bring together urban planning discourses and cultural norms (as they affect apartment design, materials and regulations), with the lived and embodied experiences of families who dwell in this setting. A mixed-method approach incorporating interviews, floor plan sketches and home tours, allowed insight into eighteen families’ everyday practices and emotions, the materiality of their dwellings and accompanying interactions. Spending up to four and a half hours with families over repeat visits provided in-depth understanding of homemaking processes. From this empirical base, I adopt a narrative format throughout the thesis to privilege the voices of parents and support readers’ insight into the complexity, emotion and depth of their accounts

With apartment living on the rise, how do families and their noisy children fit in?

A growing number of Australians live in apartments. The compact city model presents many benefits. However, living close to each other also presents challenges. Rapid growth in apartment developments in recent decades has led to a rise in noise-related complaints and disputes across urban Australia. Households with children are on the front line of such tensions. They are one of the fastest-growing demographics living in apartments. Analysis of the latest census data show, for instance, that families with children under the age of 15 comprise 25% of Sydney\u27s apartment population. Apartment design and cultural acceptance of families in the vertical city have not kept pace with this shift in housing forms. Cultural expectations that families with children ought to live in detached houses are persistent. Apartment planners and developers reproduce these expectations by neglecting children in building design and marketing. With children\u27s sounds being difficult to predict or control, changing apartment demographics are an issue for planners and residents alike

Attracting private investment into REDD+ projects: An overview of regulatory challenges

To date, forest carbon projects around the world have faced common challenges within what are nonetheless unique, country-specific legal and political systems. These issues include the role of land tenure in forest carbon projects, the importance of legal frameworks in clarifying the legal foundations for forest carbon projects (such as with respect to the right to carbon or the process under which forest carbon projects can be approved) and the need to properly address leakage, additionality, permanence, and community and biodiversity benefits within forest carbon project design. By addressing these issues, both international and national regulation has a role to play in creating the enabling conditions for private sector investment. This paper will provide an overview of the regulatory issues that need to be addressed to enable private sector investment into REDD+ projects by 1) outlining current international policy, noting the role of the private sector in REDD+ implementation and describing the voluntary market’s role as a testing ground for early forest carbon projects; 2) discussing REDD+ implementation from a project-level perspective, including both the general and legal issues that need to be addressed in REDD+ project design; and 3) considering how these lessons (drawn largely from land-based forest carbon projects) apply to mangroves, peatlands and other wetlands as sites for implementing REDD+ activities

The Trypanosoma brucei AIR9-like protein is cytoskeleton-associated and is required for nucleus positioning and accurate cleavage furrow placement

AIR9 is a cytoskeleton-associated protein in Arabidopsis thaliana with roles in cytokinesis and cross wall maturation, and reported homologues in land plants and excavate protists, including trypanosomatids. We show that the Trypanosoma brucei AIR9-like protein, TbAIR9, is also cytoskeleton-associated and colocalises with the subpellicular microtubules. We find it to be expressed in all life cycle stages and show that it is essential for normal proliferation of trypanosomes in vitro. Depletion of TbAIR9 from procyclic trypanosomes resulted in increased cell length due to increased microtubule extension at the cell posterior. Additionally, the nucleus was re-positioned to a location posterior to the kinetoplast, leading to defects in cytokinesis and the generation of aberrant progeny. In contrast, in bloodstream trypanosomes, depletion of TbAIR9 had little effect on nucleus positioning, but resulted in aberrant cleavage furrow placement and the generation of non-equivalent daughter cells following cytokinesis. Our data provide insight into the control of nucleus positioning in this important pathogen and emphasise differences in the cytoskeleton and cell cycle control between two life cycle stages of the T. brucei parasite

Tren hidup di apartemen terus meningkat, bagaimana keluarga dengan anak kecil beradaptasi?

Di Sydney, satu dari empat penghuni apartemen merupakan keluarga dengan anak. Tetapi desain serta bayangan akan kehidupan di apartemen belum mengimbangi perubahan demografi yang pesat ini

Research on regulation of cytokinesis in Trypanosoma brucei

Trypanosoma brucei is a protozoan parasite, and the causative agent of Human African Trypanosomiasis and Nagana in cattle. The life cycle and cell cycle of the parasite is complex and unusual. In particular, cytokinesis regulation in T. brucei is divergent, and significantly does not involve the formation of an actomyosin contractile ring; instead, a furrow ingresses longitudinally along the cell following the axis of the subpellicular microtubules which form a cytoskeletal cage around the cell body. As the organelles are positioned longitudinally in the posterior half of the cell, and in different positions according to life cycle stage, the cleavage axis is therefore subject to a number of constraints which must be overcome for symmetrical allocation of organelles to the daughter cells. It is highly likely that the subpellicular microtubule cytoskeleton plays important roles in cytokinesis furrow ingression. Presumably this process must involve microtubule and membrane remodelling at the site of the furrow apex to form the two discrete daughter cell bodies, and this is likely to require changes in microtubule dynamics, at least locally. Additionally, the cytoskeleton could influence the position of the cleavage plane by denoting polarity, or the timing of furrow initiation through mechanosensing. The divergent nature of T. brucei cytokinesis implies that regulators of this process could be exploited as a source of potential novel drug targets. The Polo-like kinase, PLK, has previously been shown to be required for furrow ingression during cytokinesis in bloodstream form T. brucei. This study aimed to further our understanding of the regulation of cytokinesis by PLK by investigating how its activity is regulated in vitro and in vivo. In other organisms, PLK is known to influence microtubule dynamics, and given the likelihood that microtubule dynamics are important for furrow ingression in T. brucei, this study also aimed to investigate the role of the cytoskeleton in cytokinesis. An orthologue of a microtubule-associated protein required for cytokinesis in plants, AIR9, was functionally characterised in T. brucei, and the role of subpellicular microtubules in cytokinesis was investigated via the use of microtubule inhibitors. Soluble and active recombinant PLK was purified from E. coli as a 6X Histidine fusion protein (6XHis:PLK). 6XHis:PLK autophosphorylated prolifically, and removal of these phosphorylations with lambda protein phosphatase significantly reduced the ability of 6XHis:PLK to transphosphorylate generic kinase substrates. Further, the importance of a conserved threonine residue (T198) in the T-loop of T. brucei PLK, which is a major site for regulation by upstream kinases in other organisms, was investigated. Substitution of T198 with a non-polar (alanine or valine) or a phosphomimetic (aspartic acid) residue revealed that this residue was important for PLK activity in vitro. However, expression of T198 variants in vivo showed T198V and T198D to be functional, suggesting that PLK activity is not regulated in vivo by phosphorylation at this site. The role of the polo box domain (PBD) of PLK in regulating PLK activity was also investigated. In PLKs from other organisms, the PBD autoinhibits PLK activity. Here, while recombinant 6XHis:PBD could pull down full length ty:PLK from T. brucei lysates, kinase assays indicated that the PBD did not inhibit the activity of full length PLK. Thus, regulation of the activity of PLK in T. brucei appears to be divergent. Functional characterisation of T. brucei AIR9 by RNAi mediated depletion revealed roles for this protein in the relative positions of organelles and the position of the cleavage plane in both life cycle stages. However, the phenotypes observed during RNAi experiments differed between procyclic and bloodstream form parasites. For procyclic form parasites, the defective cytokinesis resulting in non-equivalent progeny seemed to occur in cells with organelle positioning defects suggesting that problems with cytokinesis were secondary to the major organelle positioning defect. Abnormal organelle positioning was far less frequent in bloodstream form parasites, which none the less seemed impaired in the accurate positioning of the cleavage axis. AIR9 was shown to localise to the cytoskeleton of bloodstream and procyclic trypanosomes using two different epitope tagging approaches, and following induction of AIR9 RNAi, AIR9 was preferentially depleted from the posterior end of the cell, supporting a designation of AIR9 as a microtubule-associated protein. However, data do not support a role for AIR9 in cytoskeletal stability, since transmission electron microscopy showed the structure of cytoskeletal microtubules was not affected following depletion of AIR9. Hence, I suggest that AIR9 is more likely to be a scaffold protein potentially involved in the integration of signalling pathways to control cell polarity and cytokinesis. This study also demonstrated through the application of inhibitors of microtubule dynamics that microtubule dynamics are important for cytokinesis in T. brucei. Vinca alkaloid treatment of bloodstream form parasites arrested furrow ingression, while taxol inhibited initiation of cytokinesis in bloodstream form parasites and affected cleavage plane positioning in procyclic cells. In addition, organelle positioning was inhibited through the application of the vinca alkaloid, vinblastine, to procyclic form cells. Thus, although these studies indicate that there are differences in the cytoskeleton makeup of bloodstream and procyclic trypanosomes, the data obtained are consistent with microtubule dynamics playing crucial roles in cell polarity and cytokinesis in both life cycle stages

Parramatta 2035: Community Views on the Future of Our Region

This report documents diverse community voices on the Future of Greater Parramatta, as captured through a public consultation undertaken from September to October 2022. The public consultation was launched as a part of The Glover Review on Parramatta 2035: Vibrant, Sustainable Global', and reflects the Centre for Western Sydney's commitment to a politics of listening. This research seeks to engage with local communities and reflect their vision for the future of Parramatta and the Central River City. The report documents the region's most pressing challenges, and the solutions required for a thriving future in Greater Parramatta as identified by its communities. It is these communities that are most invested in the future of the region, and ultimately most impacted by decisions made when planning for its development. By listening to these valuable voices, we highlight the importance of capturing the knowledge and experience of various communities when planning for regional futures. We argue that through engaged community consultation, planners and policymakers can build cities that respond to community needs and visions

Project Reach: Implementation of Evidence-Based Psychotherapy Within Integrated Healthcare for Hurricane Harvey Affected Individuals

Project Reach was established to deliver evidence-based mental healthcare services to children and adults affected by Hurricane Harvey and its aftermath. Through Project Reach, an innovative multi-component assessment and treatment service is utilized to identify and treat in integrated healthcare settings both children and adults exhibiting significant behavioral health concerns in Houston. The aim is to provide sustainable, integrated mental health services through primary care and school-based settings to post-Harvey affected individuals whose emotional needs remain unmet. This paper describes the design and implementation of Project Reach as well as special considerations for implementation. The overall goal of Project Reach is to form a platform for expanding integrated services for those affected by Harvey that will maximize behavioral health outcomes while reducing cost and improving access

In Conversation: Mundane Methods and Material Methods

In this video, Professor Vanessa May is in conversation with her colleagues from the University of Manchester, Professor Sophie Woodward, Dr Helen Holmes, and Dr Sarah Marie Hall. They discuss two books on methods that they have recently published and share some of their research experiences. Professor Sophie Woodward discusses her book material methods, which will appear to people interested in research and material culture who want to think about methods as well as those interested in exploring creative methods. Dr Helen Holmes and Dr Sarah Marie Hall discuss their book, Mundane Methods, aimed at a broad audience to engage those interested in exploring the theory. This book brings a range of interdisciplinary approaches provides a practical, hands-on approach