Transition Broome: Collaborating to Care for Our Common Home

Transition initiatives are locally-guided community development projects that bring individuals and groups together to make their communities happier, healthier, more resilient and gentler on the earth. There are now thousands of these projects in place around the world. Broome’s transition initiative originally started in 2015, and is currently re-emerging through activities generated by many organisations including Environs Kimberley, Broome’s Catholic Parish, groups of local schools and teachers, Incredible Edible Broome and a number of new economic enterprises. The contribution by Nulungu Research Institute to this movement is to support the Collaboration through research. As of semester two 2018, three PhD researchers will be undertaking action-oriented community-engaged research supported by teams of senior professors, many of whom have substantial international reputations. The three PhD scholarship-funded research projects are Community Development for Sustainable Futures (Ms Anne Jennings), Indigenous Knowledges for Sustainable Futures (Ms Bobbie Chew Bigby) and Transformative Learning for Sustainable Futures (researcher not yet appointed). Projects such as this are rarely without paradox, contradiction and constraint. When these tensions are acknowledged and gently re-worked, new creative opportunities arise. This presentation will be a Transition Broome progress report, along with an outline of social theory being developed to support the initiative

‘Studying for a Higher Degree by Research’: A Forum for under-graduates interested in studying towards a Masters or PhD degree at UNDA Broome

You are invited to attend a forum to hear about the possibilities of studying towards a post-graduate degree at the University of Notre Dame, Broome campus

A sense of home: a cultural geography of the Leschenault Estuary district: Report

Executive Summary In 2012, a project was implemented to determine the place-based social values of the people of the Leschenault Estuary district. The project included a historical study, a literature review, a survey with quantitative and qualitative questions, targeted community engagement (five focus groups, six individual interviews) and a photo-elicitation study with a group of high school children. Research Question What is history of the relationship between people and place in the Leschenault Estuary District, and what is the relationship in 2012? What were, and what are the place-based social values of the population

Towards an Indigenous-informed multispecies collaboratory

How does Australia\u27s latest Indigenous defeat relate to Environmental Education? The answer is direct complicity. This paper begins with the premise that the failure of Australia\u27s 2023 referendum on The Voice to Parliament is directly connected with education. The chapter builds on the proposition that local and Indigenous public knowledge could - and should - be the heart of environmental education. We apply a post-qualitative practice that is underpinned by innovative feminisms and the post-qualitative methods within a Multispecies Collaboratory, an experimental way of transforming our learning by attending to the responsive, relational world of all beings. We use this practice to think with while exploring socio-ecological relations, especially our own. Collaboratory colleagues include rivers with their kincentric ecologies, urban park ecosystems and backyard kin or families. Journaling, creative writing and photography record our learning journeys. The article concludes that continuing colonisation, epistemic violence and a culture of denial reinforce the dominant paradigm of silencing Indigenous voices. We argue that an Indigenous-informed onto-epistemology of living place can - and should - inform the heart and practice of environmental education, and an Indigenous-informed Multispecies Collaboratory is one way to deepen the multispecies engagement that underpins environmental education

Endogenous cholinergic inputs and local circuit mechanisms govern the phasic mesolimbic dopamine response to nicotine

Nicotine exerts its reinforcing action by stimulating nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) and boosting dopamine (DA) output from the ventral tegmental area (VTA). Recent data have led to a debate about the principal pathway of nicotine action: direct stimulation of the DAergic cells through nAChR activation, or disinhibition mediated through desensitization of nAChRs on GABAergic interneurons. We use a computational model of the VTA circuitry and nAChR function to shed light on this issue. Our model illustrates that the α4β2-containing nAChRs either on DA or GABA cells can mediate the acute effects of nicotine. We account for in vitro as well as in vivo data, and predict the conditions necessary for either direct stimulation or disinhibition to be at the origin of DA activity increases. We propose key experiments to disentangle the contribution of both mechanisms. We show that the rate of endogenous acetylcholine input crucially determines the evoked DA response for both mechanisms. Together our results delineate the mechanisms by which the VTA mediates the acute rewarding properties of nicotine and suggest an acetylcholine dependence hypothesis for nicotine reinforcement.Peer reviewe

Self-testing in the compiled setting via tilted-CHSH inequalities

In a Bell scenario, a classical verifier interacts with two non-communicating provers, producing a correlation. Certain correlations allow the verifier to certify, or self-test, the underlying quantum state and measurements. Notably, the family of tilted-CHSH inequalities has been used to self-test any two-qubit state. Self-tests underpin numerous device-independent protocols, however, a significant drawback of such applications is the non-communicating assumption. To address the non-communication assumption Kalai et al. (STOC'23) give a procedure which compiles a bipartite Bell scenario into a 2-round interaction between a verifier and a single computationally bounded prover. In this work, we formalize self-testing for compiled Bell scenarios. We prove the maximal quantum value is preserved under compilation for the family of tilted-CHSH inequalities, and that any maximal violation constitutes a compiled self-test. More specifically, we establish the existence of an efficient isometry recovering the state and measurements in the second round

Expanding bipartite Bell inequalities for maximum multi-partite randomness

Nonlocal tests on multipartite quantum correlations form the basis of protocols that certify randomness in a device-independent (DI) way. Such correlations admit a rich structure, making the task of choosing an appropriate test difficult. For example, extremal Bell inequalities are tight witnesses of nonlocality, however achieving their maximum violation places constraints on the underlying quantum system, which can reduce the rate of randomness generation. As a result there is often a trade-off between maximum randomness and the amount of violation of a given Bell inequality. Here, we explore this trade-off for more than two parties. More precisely, we study the maximum amount of randomness that can be certified by correlations exhibiting a violation of the Mermin-Ardehali-Belinskii-Klyshko (MABK) inequality. We find that maximum quantum violation and maximum randomness are incompatible for any even number of parties, with incompatibility diminishing as the number of parties grow, and conjecture the precise trade-off. We also show that maximum MABK violation is not necessary for maximum randomness for odd numbers of parties. To obtain our results, we derive new families of Bell inequalities certifying maximum randomness from a technique for randomness certification, which we call "expanding Bell inequalities". Our technique allows one to take a bipartite Bell expression, known as the seed, and transform it into a multipartite Bell inequality tailored for randomness certification, showing how intuition learned in the bipartite case can find use in more complex scenarios.Comment: 14+18 pages, several figure

A process for transition to sustainability: Implementation

This paper reports the outcomes of the second action cycle of an ongoing project at Edith Cowan University (ECU) called Transition to Sustainability: ECU South West which is located in a small, single faculty regional university campus. The overall project has comprised three action research cycles, the first of which was the planning cycle which established the importance of building a community of practice with a learning stance for sustainability transition. It also highlighted the issue of a common definition of the term sustainability; of including cross-disciplinary perspectives; and of working with the local community. The second action cycle which was the first implementation phase, is the subject of this report. In this phase, we found that by not foreclosing on the meaning of sustainability, important aspects of sustainability were included. Although research participants initially expressed some concern about using an open understanding of sustainability, the problem of the meaning functioned to foster involvement in dialogue. In fact, these ongoing discussions around sustainability and the notion of a sustainable future formed the heart of this action cycle. However there were constraints associated with the subject of dialogue. These included problems of site communication, the maintenance of effective networks and issues around power and authorisation. We observed that each of these elements could work together in ways that enrich and/or obstruct a transition to sustainability. Finally, we found that lack of time hinders participation in sustainability transition projects because of its effect on authentic dialogue, thereby impacting upon the development of collaborative ways of working within the university. Our project is distinctively Australian in that it reflects an emerging movement in Australia to create social frameworks for embedding sustainability education activities. In our project, the transition process by which learning and change has been facilitated comprises the action research itself. (Contains 1 endnote and 1 table.

Embodying our future through collaboration: The change is in the doing

Contributors to this special edition have agreed that we want a future of ecojustice and ecological sustainability. Our paper unpacks experiences of oppression within the context of middle class academic privilege, undertaking resistances and working, in relationship, learning to live more sustainably in the Year of Living Sustainably. In this writing we argue the case for activism in the academy and collaboratively build resilience towards more sustainable ways of being. By co-writing and analysing fictionalised stories we demonstrate how contemporary universities contribute to the unsustainability of social and ecological systems. This paper presents a love story grounded in poststructural ecofeminist epistemology using collaborative autoethnography. Rather than re-presenting a heroic masculinist narrative of transcendence and success, we describe how our loving relationships support our activism

Aboriginal student engagement and success in Kimberley tertiary education

Over recent years, considerable effort has been put into increasing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (First Nations) participation in higher education. While there are signs that enrolments are increasing, the sustained engagement and successful completion of higher education remains challenging, particularly in remote locations. With this in mind, a collaborative research project among researchers from three northern Australian tertiary education institutions was designed to understand student perspectives, particularly from remote contexts, about their engagement and success towards completion in higher education. Based on a qualitative research design situating Indigenist/interpretive research within a critical realism metatheory, we present findings from the study, based in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, and unpack implications for higher education provision in remote contexts. The findings point to the unique challenges faced by students who live in the Kimberley—and perhaps in other remote locations around Australia. In order to meet these needs, we suggest that tertiary education providers must tailor provision to ensure that engagement with Aboriginal students is relational and culturally safe