Heroes, villains and more villains : representations of Arab men on Australian screens

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.This thesis examines the representation of Arab male protagonists in three Australian crime drama productions: East West 101, The Combination and Cedar Boys. Since 2007 Australia has seen a notable increase in the inclusion of Arab and Muslim male characters in various serials and films, particularly as their visibility increased in news media after September 11, 2001. As popular culture reflects and shapes opportunities for belonging within the nation state, this thesis aims to understand whether or not the inclusion of Arab and Muslim minorities is a sign of greater acceptance of these community groups. East West 101 garnered significant media coverage for its realistic portrayal of multicultural Australia. Most notable was its positive depiction of (fictional) Arab Muslim police detective, Zane Malik. Through Malik, East West 101 effectively demonstrates how religion, class and culture can intersect, not to the detriment of a society, but to create skilled and savvy individuals uniquely positioned to contribute to their communities and professions. It further displays the kind of difference that is considered acceptable within a multicultural society; that is, the kind of difference that does not compromise the dominance of the white majority. Likewise both The Combination and Cedar Boys, although lesser known, were reported in Sydney Metropolitan newspapers as ‘edgy’ and importantly were made with the intention of rectifying the image of young Arab and Muslim men, often tarnished in the Australian media. Unlike East West 101, which delves into the struggle of a Middle Eastern man with access to resources and social mobility, these films discuss the realities of life of young Arab males with little social mobility and a strong desire to acquire it, leaving them feeling they have no option but to resort to crime. In choosing to tell these stories in this way, writers George Basha and Serhat Caradee bring their own, often polarising experiences, to the screen in a way that seems to reinforce the existing discourse of Middle Eastern men as thugs and criminals. By drawing heavily on the concepts of Orientalism and Whiteness this thesis attempts to explain the feeling of (un)belonging as experienced by men of ‘Middle Eastern appearance’. It asks how they experience a lack of belonging as depicted in these films/series and enquires into the pursuit of whiteness as an assimilative approach to belonging in a multicultural nation. Furthermore, it asks what these depictions tell us about national identity. These questions point to the central question of this thesis, ‘to what extent do cultural productions such as EW101, The Combination and Cedar Boys open up space for new understandings of the place of Arab and Muslim Australians in contemporary Australia?’ It is argued that, while representations in these three case studies are a much-needed addition to current voices in Australian cinema and television, in one form or another these products still conform to Orientalist discourses

Understanding Sharia Processes

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com Sharia family law processes have attracted increasing debate and controversy in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia in recent years. While the reasons for opposition to sharia processes are complex, they often feature the concern that sharia processes disadvantage Muslim women. However, to date there has been inadequate attention to the experiences of participants in sharia processes. This book studies women’s experiences with these processes in Australia, with attention to the question of how religious communities and liberal legal systems can best respond to the needs of Muslim women who use these processes. In doing so, the book offers unique evidence to inform future policy developments in Australia that will also have implications for other liberal jurisdictions. In this way, the book makes a significant contribution to the international discussion and response to sharia processes

Psychotic Features and Behavioral Dysregulation in a Patient with Tumefactive Multiple Sclerosis

Tumefactive multiple sclerosis (TMS) is a rare variant of multiple sclerosis (MS), mimicking features of infectious, inflammatory, neoplastic, and vascular neurological phenomena1-3. TMS can present asymptomatically, as well as with higher cortical, motor, sensory, cerebellar, and brainstem symptoms4-6. However, there have not been reported TMS cases presenting with psychiatric features. We describe the case of a 42-year-old woman with a chart reported history of schizoaffective disorder who was first admitted for worsening aggression in the context of divalproex and haloperidol non-adherence. She was not psychotic on initial encounter; hallucinations and paranoia last occurred three years prior to admission. She seemed to have improved on divalproex alone and was discharged. The patient was later re-admitted, this time appearing acutely psychotic and aggressive. She demonstrated predominately positive psychotic symptoms, without evident medical abnormalities or concomitant substance intoxication. There was no improvement in symptoms upon re-initiation of divalproex and trials of olanzapine and paliperidone. Due to concern for catatonia, aripiprazole was initiated. Interval development of focal deficits prompted medical hospital admission. Imaging revealed an enhancing, diffusion restricted mass at the left basal ganglia and frontal lobe, which was biopsied. Pathology was consistent with TMS. Primary malignancy, seizures, and infections were ruled out, and following a short course of methylprednisolone, vasogenic edema convalesced. Psychotic behavior progressively improved after administration of high-dose prednisone and re-initiation of divaloproex, and aripiprazole. To our knowledge, this is the first case study to demonstrate psychotic features and aggression as a possible manifestation of TMS. As psychiatric illnesses may occur in the prodromal period or at onset of MS7-8, this patient’s presentation may have been consistent with flares of a unique demyelinating process.https://scholarlycommons.henryford.com/merf2020caserpt/1099/thumbnail.jp

Understanding Sharia Processes

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com Sharia family law processes have attracted increasing debate and controversy in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia in recent years. While the reasons for opposition to sharia processes are complex, they often feature the concern that sharia processes disadvantage Muslim women. However, to date there has been inadequate attention to the experiences of participants in sharia processes. This book studies women’s experiences with these processes in Australia, with attention to the question of how religious communities and liberal legal systems can best respond to the needs of Muslim women who use these processes. In doing so, the book offers unique evidence to inform future policy developments in Australia that will also have implications for other liberal jurisdictions. In this way, the book makes a significant contribution to the international discussion and response to sharia processes

The perceived role of physiotherapists in the promotion of physical activity

Masters of Science - Msc (Physiotherapy)Studies have demonstrated that physical inactivity has been recognised as a major cause of death and disability, and it has been linked to the onset of noncommunicable diseases and risk factors such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart diseases. Several studies have revealed that regular physical activity is essential to the physical, mental, health and wellbeing of people of all ages. Health care professionals such as physiotherapists are in a position to promote physical activity through development of a plan for physical fitness, the promotion of health and wellness, health education and physical conditioning. This study sought to investigate the physiotherapy students' perception of their role in the promotion of physical activity. A mixed method design was used in this study, and data was collected by means of a self-administrated questionnaire and a focus group discussion. The questionnaire assessed knowledge, role perception, level of confidence, barriers, feasibility, and self-efficacy regarding physical activity promotion, while the focus group discussion explored the experience of the physiotherapy students in the promotion of physical activity

A high level approach to Arabic sentence recognition

The aim of this work is to develop sentence recognition system inspired by the human reading process. Cognitive studies observed that the human tended to read a word as a whole at a time. He considers the global word shapes and uses contextual knowledge to infer and discriminate a word among other possible words. The sentence recognition system is a fully integrated system; a word level recogniser (baseline system) integrated with linguistic knowledge post-processing module. The presented baseline system is holistic word-based recognition approach characterised as probabilistic ranked task. The output of the system is multiple recognition hypotheses (N-best word lattice). The basic unit is the word rather than the character; it does not rely on any segmentation or require baseline detection. The considered linguistic knowledge to re-rank the output of the existing baseline system is the standard n-gram Statistical Language Models (SLMs). The candidates are re-ranked through exploiting phrase perplexity score. The system is an OCR system that depends on HMM models utilizing the HTK Toolkit. The baseline system supported by global transformation features extracted from binary word images. The adopted features' extraction technique is the block-based Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) applied to the whole word image. Feature vectors extracted using block-based DCT with non-overlapping sub-block of size 8x8 pixels. The applied HMMs to the task are mono-model discrete one-dimensional HMMs (Bakis Model). A balanced actual scanned and synthetic database of word-image has been constructed to ensure an even distribution of word samples. The Arabic words are typewritten in five fonts having a size 14 points in a plain style. The statistical language models and lexicon words are extracted from The Holy Qur‟an. The systems are applied on word images with no overlap between the training and testing datasets. The actual scanned database is used to evaluate the word recogniser. The synthetic database is a large amount of data acquired for a reliable training of sentence recognition systems. This word recogniser evaluated in mono-font and multi-font contexts. The two types of word recogniser have been used to achieve a final recognition accuracy of99.30% and 73.47% in mono-font and multi-font, respectively. The achieved average accuracy by the sentence recogniser is 67.24% improved to 78.35% on average when using 5-gram post-processing. The complexity and accuracy of the post-processing module are evaluated and found that 4-gram is more suitable than 5-gram; it is much faster at an average improvement of 76.89%

Addressing the Health Needs of the (D/d)eaf and Hard of Hearing Community

Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines deaf to describe an individual who has total or partial hearing loss. However, the term carries much more weight as it breeds its own culture, Deaf culture, to be exact. There’s an emphasis placed on the spelling where deaf, spelled with a lowercase d, refers to individuals who are born deaf and grew up within this deaf culture. Whereas, members who identify as Deaf with a capital D have lost their hearing later on in life, and did not necessarily grow up within deaf culture. There is often a discrepancy whereby members who identify as d/Deaf or hard of hearing (d/D/hoh) are often confused for having a cognitive impairment or are grouped with the disabled. However, members see their deafness as a way of life, a culture, rather than a disability. While variants exist, most members of the d/D/hoh community use American Sign Language (ASL). This often creates gaps within communication, especially in the healthcare setting where medical terminology is not easily understood. This research explores the consequences and proposed interventions for the common trends that negatively impact the d/D/hoh community within the clinical setting. The data used in this study was sourced from various search engines including PubMed and Scopus. Results indicated that d/Deaf individuals are less likely to trust their physicians and are less likely to understand diagnoses or follow-up instructions. While communicating, d/Deaf individuals often experience lack of eye contact from healthcare providers, which is often a great source of frustration. Data also showed that women often feel embarrassed when communicating about their health through an interpreter. Surprisingly, it was found that case-based learning raises awareness of such populations and provides insight on how to provide care that best meets their needs. These consequences and more lead to a great deal of frustration among the d/D/hoh community, often discouraging these members from following up with their health. These findings demonstrate a need for intervention; to increase deaf cultural training within healthcare. Efforts can be put forth to make the clinical setting a more inclusive environment for the d/D/hoh community

Hydrophobic Engineering of a Bacterial Nanodimensional Capsule Protein

Recently, numerous protein-based nanomedicine platforms have been intensively explored. These systems are usually composed of self-assembling proteins that form controllable systems with different shapes and types. A particular type of the self-assembling proteins is the cage protein bacterioferritin (Bfr), a hollow protein that belongs to the ferritin superfamily of iron storage proteins. Bfr is composed of 24 identical protomers with 12 heme cofactors intercalated between adjacent subunits. Bfr has an 8 nm interior diameter and a 12 nm exterior diameter amenable for controllable modification. Previous investigations in the Honek laboratory involved engineering the Bfr cage proteins towards controlling the encapsulation of various guest molecules within its cavity. Polyhistidine amino acid sequences (His6-tags) were added to each of the C-termini of the Bfr protein subunits, which point towards the interior cavity of the protein, and successfully utilized as selective affinity interaction sites to bind several cargos such as a gold nanoparticle (AuNP), and a fluorescently labeled tetrameric protein, streptavidin. Additionally, the intrinsic heme cofactors were modified in different ways and reintroduced to the Bfr cage protein providing another approach for engineering this complex system. In the current study, the previously established engineering methodologies were utilized to investigate the possibility of engineering the Bfr cavity to be more hydrophobic and to examine its capability for encapsulating different hydrophobic molecules. The complexation between two different types of fatty acid-based molecules and the His6-Bfr cage protein was successfully achieved and analyzed. The two proof of concept guests studied in our laboratory were: a synthesized nonadecanoyl-nitrilotriacetic acid micelle and a commercially available lipid that has an NTA functionality preloaded with nickel ion. Also, another approach for labeling the heme propionate groups with long alkyl chains was investigated. Two long alkyl chain primary amines were successfully added to the heme; however, the poor aqueous solubility of these hydrophobic analogues acts like a barrier towards their successful incorporation into the Bfr cage. The results gained from the above investigations highlight novel applications of not only Bfr, but also other cage proteins that have similar characteristics