Disrupting state spaces : asylum seekers in Australia's offshore detention centres

The Australian government has spent over a billion dollars a year on managing offshore detention (Budget 2018–2019). Central to this offshore management was the transference and mandatory detention of asylum seekers in facilities that sit outside Australia’s national sovereignty, in particular on Manus Island (Papua New Guinea) and Nauru. As a state-sanctioned spatial aberration meant to deter asylum seekers arriving by boat, offshore detention has resulted in a raft of legal and policy actions that are reshaping the modern state-centric understanding of the national space. It has raised questions of sovereignty, of moral, ethical and legal obligations, of national security and humanitarian responsibilities, and of nationalism and belonging. Using a sample of Twitter users on Manus during the closure of the Manus Island detention centre in October– November 2017, this paper examines how asylum seekers and refugees have negotiated and defined the offshore detention space and how through the use of social media they have created a profound disruption to the state discourse on offshore detention. The research is based on the premise that asylum seekers’ use social media in a number of disruptive ways, including normalising the presence of asylum seekers in the larger global phenomena of migration, humanising asylum seekers in the face of global discourses of dehumanisation, ensuring visibility by confirming the conditions of detention, highlighting Australia’s human rights violations and obligations, and challenging the government discourse on asylum seekers and offshore detention. Social media is both a tool and a vehicle by which asylum seekers on Manus Island could effect that disruption

Evaluation of the Impact of an Additive Manufacturing Enhanced CubeSat Architecture on the CubeSat Development Process

Additive manufacturing (AM) is a fabrication method ideally suited to low-quantity, highly customized builds, leading to interest in its application to satellite development and manufacturing, where each build is unique. Due to the issues of long development schedules and high development and manufacturing costs, methods are needed in the CubeSat development process to reduce the weight and volume of subsystems and decrease integration time. The work develops an architecture for an AM-augmented CubeSat and examines the AM techniques of embedded electronics, embedded thrusters, and custom radiation-hardened materials can impact the subsystems of a CubeSat. The AM-augmented architecture shows a shift in CubeSat development and manufacturing from a modular approach to an integrated approach where most of the CubeSats internal bus components, such as electronics, thrusters, and propulsion, are integrated directly into the structure. This integrated approach results in decreased time spent in assembly and integration, decreased mass and volume, and also allows for key components to be embedded in materials with improved radiation attenuation characteristics

Transversal borderings: Territory and mobility for human rights activists in the Thai-Burma borderlands

The Thai-Burma borderlands has long been an operational site for human rights activists. It is the location for human rights violations and associated documentation, as well as the site of resources, training and dissemination to larger global audiences. In this article I use an interpretation of Saskia Sassen’s ‘cross-border geographies’ as a framing mechanism for the operations of human rights activists in the Thai-Burma borderlands. I argue that these activists use aspects of the national territories they traverse, such as who belongs and associated rights and obligations, as well as state capital and services. But they also act outside of state sovereignty, in particular through digital infrastructures and transnational networking that connect to other national territories, and their irregular movement across the national border. In this way, human rights activists both operate within national territories and in ways that violate their sovereignty. Activist operations are enabled by an informality attached to the Thai-Burma border, its marginal status to central control, its pragmatic approach to state operations, and its porous nature to flows of information and people. However, tighter regulation of these territories, particularly as the adjoining states attempt to exert their exclusive authority over their territory, is likely to impact the ongoing operations of human rights activists in the Thai-Burma borderlands. Cross-border geographies therefore provides a means for the critical examination of activist operations that occur within and across state and non-state spaces

Asian Australians' experiences of online racism during the COVID-19 pandemic

Between 13 November 2020 and 11 February 2021, an online national survey of 2003 Asian Australians was conducted to measure the type and frequency of self-identified Asian Australians’ experiences of racism during the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey also aimed to gauge the relationships between racist experiences and targets’ mental health, wellbeing and sense of belonging. In this paper, we report findings on the type and frequency of online racist experiences and their associations with mental health, wellbeing and belonging. The survey found that 40 per cent of participants experienced racism during the COVID-19 pandemic. Within that group, 66 per cent experienced racism online. The demographic pattern of those most likely to experience online racism were younger age groups, males, those born in Australia, English speakers at home, non-Christians, and migrants who have been in Australia less than 20 years. Analysis also found a strong correlation between Asian Australians’ experiences of online racism and poor mental health, wellbeing and belonging. The relationship between experiencing racism, non-belonging and morbidity were more pronounced for those who experienced online racism compared to those who experienced racism in other offline contexts. This points to the corrosive nature of online racism on social cohesion, health and belonging

Countering Islamophobia in the Victorian Population

Islamophobia underpins extremist verbal and physical attacks on Muslim communities. It has become widespread in Australian society, and normalised in everyday settings such as in mainstream media. There is general agreement among Australian researchers and community representatives that the concept of Islamophobia is a useful tool for understanding and developing ways to challenge anti-Islam attitudes. However, despite it becoming widespread, Islamophobia should not be treated as a singular problem as it takes many different forms (see Peucker and Smith 2019), which require targeted responses. This brief provides contemporary empirical insights into the extent of Islamophobia in Victoria, and how it is manifest, in order to help develop policy responses. In November 2019, we undertook an online representative survey of 4019 Victorians to examine Islamophobia in Australia. We asked questions about respondents’ attitudes towards cultural diversity, racial equality and privilege; trust and fairness; Muslims and Islam; and other ethno-cultural groups in Australian society; their experiences of racism and discrimination; their contact with Muslims and knowledge of Islam; their trust of institutions; political affiliation; and support for extreme politics (e.g., violence, non-democratic governance). To our knowledge, this was the largest representative survey undertaken in Victoria with the purpose of measuring Victorians’ perceptions of and attitudes towards Muslims and Islam. Based on respondents’ answers, we used latent class analysis to reveal groups in the Victorian population. Latent class analysis is an advanced statistical method that identifies related sets of responses in a dataset that may be hidden even from trained observers (Hagenaars and McCutcheon 2002; Uebersax 1993; Heinen 1996)

Enhanced Engraftment of a Very Low-Dose Cord Blood Unit in an Adult Haemopoietic Transplant by Addition of Six Mismatched Viable Cord Units

The report describes the feasibility of the addition of multiple viable HLA-mismatched unrelated cord blood units, to a low cell number matched unrelated cord, to assist clinical engraftment. An ablative stem cell transplant was performed in an adult with relapsed acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL), using a single HLA-matched cord blood unit (mononuclear cell dose 0.8 × 107), supported by six mismatched cord blood units (one unit per 10 kg recipient weight). No adverse reaction occurred following the infusion of mismatched units and engraftment of the suboptimal-dose matched unit occurred rapidly, with no molecular evidence of engraftment of mismatched cords. Early molecular remission of ALL was demonstrated using a novel PCR for a mitochondrial DNA mutation in the leukaemic clone. The cell dose of the matched cord was well below that recommended to engraft a 70 kg recipient. We suggest that a factor or factors in the mismatched cords enhanced/supported engraftment of the matched cord

Psychological stress, cognitive decline and the development of dementia in amnestic mild cognitive impairment

To determine the relationship between psychological stress with cognitive outcomes in a multi-centre longitudinal study of people with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) we assessed three parameters of psychological stress (Recent Life Changes Questionnaire (RLCQ); the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) and salivary cortisol) and their relationship with rates of cognitive decline over an 18 month follow up period and conversion to dementia over a 5.5 year period. In 133 aMCI and 68 cognitively intact participants the PSS score was higher in the aMCI compared with control group but neither the RLCQ scores nor salivary cortisol measures were different between groups. In the aMCI group the RLCQ and the PSS showed no significant association with cognitive function at baseline, cognitive decline or with conversion rates to dementia but high salivary cortisol levels were associated with RLCQ scores and poorer cognitive function at baseline and lower rates of cognitive decline. No relationship was found between salivary cortisol levels and conversion rate to dementia. We conclude that psychological stress as measured by the RLCQ or PSS was not associated with adverse cognitive outcomes in an aMCI population and hypothesise that this may reflect diminished cortisol production to psychological stress as the disease progresses.</p

An Epistemic-Deontic-Axiologic (EDA) agent-based Energy Management System in office buildings

In the UK, buildings contribute about one third of the energy-related greenhouse gas emissions. Space heating and cooling systems are among the biggest energy consumers in buildings. This research aims to develop a novel Building Energy Management System (BEMS) to reduce the energy consumption of the heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) system while fulfilling each occupant’ thermal comfort requirement. This paper presents a newly developed novel method, Epistemic-Deontic-Axiologic (EDA) Agent-based solution to support the Energy Management System meeting the dual targets of occupant thermal comfort and energy efficiency. The multi-agent solutions are applied to the BEMS. The problem decomposition method is used to define the architecture of the system. The Epistemic-Deontic-Axiologic (EDA) agent model is applied to develop the rational local and personal agents inside the system. These EDA-based agents select their optimal action plan by considering the occupants’ thermal sensations, their behavioural adaptations and the energy consumption of the HVAC system. The Newly-developed personal thermal sensation models and group-of-people-based thermal sensation models generated by support vector machine (SVM) based algorithms are applied to evaluate the occupants’ thermal sensations. These models are developed from the data collected in a real built environment. Simulation results prove that the newly-developed BEMS can help the HVAC system reduce the energy consumption by up to 10% while fulfilling the occupants’ thermal comfort requirements