Conspiracy for good

"Tim Kring, Creator of the hit television show 'Heroes' tells how the big idea began, and where you can jump in. "A few years ago, I started thinking about an entirely new way to tell a story, far different from traditional TV. I didn't just want to talk about 'saving the world' in fiction, I wanted to create a narrative that spilled out into the streets. One that you could live inside of for a while. How cool would it be, I thought, to create a story that exists all around you all of the time? On your laptop, your mobile phone, on your sidewalks, as a secret message hidden in your favorite song or while standing at the bus stop on your way to work. And, taking it further, what if your participation over a few weeks or months actually impacts the story's development and creates positive change in the real world because a philanthropic mission is integrated into the narrative itself? The Conspiracy For Good is the culmination of this dream. This is the pilot project for a first-of-itskind interactive story that empowers its audience to take real-life action and create positive change in the world. Call it Social Benefit Storytelling. To achieve this, I need you to participate. Reality and fiction have to blur. Every story needs a villain and you will meet the villain in the STORY SO FAR section on this site. And every story needs a hero. That's where YOU come in. As part of The Conspiracy For Good you will join a collective of thinkers, artists, musicians, and causes, creating a unified voice to fight the forces of social and environmental injustice. This is our site, where together we can follow the story and build a community that focuses on changing the world for the better, one person and one action at a time. Welcome to the Conspiracy." Tim Kring"

Confessions of a Non-Emigrant

Confessions of a Non-Emigrant is innovative in combining two areas of investigation in creative writing and literature. I investigate both the idea of life writing as therapeutic for the author, and the (reflexive and enabling) blurred boundary between life writing and fiction. I set up a dynamic where the narrative of the story (fictionalised memoir) proposes the therapeutic advantage of utilising one’s life-story in fiction (increased sense of coherent identity and agency) and a perspective (through the device of multiple selves), on the constructedness and instability of identity. I mobilise and explore Pennebaker’s argument that making a narrative of one’s life enhances the writer’s sense of a connection with community and place (represented by Brisbane).

An anticipative reactive control strategy to deal with unforeseen obstacles during a multi-sensor-based navigation task

We address the problem of the rangefinder-based avoidance of unforeseen static obstacles during a visual navigation task. We extend previous strategies which are efficient in most cases but remain still hampered by some drawbacks (e.g., risks of collisions or of local minima in some particular cases, etc.). The key idea is to complete the control strategy by adding a controller providing the robot some anticipative skills to guarantee non collision and by defining more general transition conditions to deal with local minima. Simulation results show the proposed strategy efficiency.

Borrowing from the geeks: What can healthcare facility design learn from IT?

People get into healthcare because they want to help society. And when a new hospital is briefed, everyone tries to do their best, but the process is mired by the impossibility of the task. Stakeholders rarely understand the architectural process, nobody can predict the future, and the only thing for certain is that everything will change as the project unfolds, revealing errors in initial assumptions and calculations, shifts in needs, new technologies etc. Yet there’s always pressure to keep to the programme and to press on regardless. This chaos leads eventually to suboptimal results: hospitals the world over are riddled with inefficiencies, idiosyncrasies, incredible wastage and features that lead to poor clinical outcomes. This talk will sketch out the basics of Scrum, the most popular open-source Lean/Agile methodology. It will discuss what healthcare designers can learn from the geeks in Silicon Valley reduce risk, meet deadlines and deliver the highest possible value for the budget despite the uncertainty.

Destinations: 3 Large Cast Plays for Young People

This book is a collection of three large-cast plays written in response to a very specific problem. My work as a teacher of drama often required me to locate a script that would somehow miraculously work for a cast of unknown number and gender, and most likely uneven skills and enthusiasm, who I hadn’t even met yet. It’s a familiar dilemma for teachers and students of drama in education contexts, at whatever level you’re teaching. I’d first addressed this creative problem with scripts such as Gate 38 (2010). I had tried using scripts that already existed, but found they required such extensive editing to suit the parameters of cast and performance duration that I may as well have been writing them myself. Even in the setting of a closed studio, in altering these plays I felt I was bending the vision of the playwright, and certainly their narrative structure, out of shape. Everyone who’s attempted to stage a performance with a large cast of students in an educational setting knows it takes time to truly connect with a play, its social contexts, themes and characters. It also takes a lot of time to get on top of the practicalities of learning, rehearsing, directing and running a performance with young people. Often the curtain goes up on something unfinished and unstable. I was looking for ways to reduce the complexity of staging a script, while maintaining the potential of this process as a site of rich, enjoyable learning. Two of the plays (Duty Free and Please Be Seated) are comprised of multiple monologues, combined with music-driven ensemble sequences. The monologues enable individuals to develop and polish their own performances, work in small groups, and cut down on the laborious detail of directing naturalistic scenes based in character interaction. The third (Australian Drama) involves a lot of duologues, meaning that its rehearsal process can happily employ that mainstay of the drama classroom: small group work. There’s plenty of room to move in terms of gender-blind casting as well. Please be Seated is mainly young women. The scripts also contain ensemble-based interludes which are non-verbal, music driven, with a choreographic element. They have also springboarded further explorations in form. The ethical and aesthetic complexities of verbatim works; the interaction between music and theatre; and meta-concerns related to the performing of performance: ‘how can the act of acting ‘acted’. The narratives of all three of these plays are deliberately open, enabling the flexible casting and on-the hop editing that large-group, time-poor processes sometimes necessitate. Duty Free is about the overseas ‘adventures’ of young people. Please Be Seated is based in verbatim text about young people falling in and out of love. Australian Drama is about young people in a drama classroom trying to connect with each other and put their own shine on dull fragments of the theatrical canon. The plays were published as a collection in hardcopy and digital editions by Playlab Press in 2015. Please be Seated is a co-write with a large group. These co-author’s names are listed in the publication, and below in ‘additional information’.

Review of 'Kafka Dances'

Review of Timothy Daly's new Australian play, 'Kafka Dances' in Australasian Drama Studies

Romancing the Dane : reviving (and revising) Ophelia in contemporary YA fiction

Shakespeare’s Ophelia has been circulated in recent times as a figure of the adolescent woman at risk. Mary Pipher’s best-selling and influential Reviving Ophelia (1994) argued that the “story of Ophelia […] shows the destructive forces that affect young women” (20). Without undermining Pipher’s project, this paper reads two contemporary YA romance novels—Lisa Fiedler’s Dating Hamlet (2002) and Lisa Klein’s Ophelia (2006)—in order to demonstrate that not only can Ophelia be appropriated as a figure of empowerment for young women today, but that such appropriations are, seemingly ironically, most powerfully rendered within the genre of romance; a genre long-maligned by feminists as recuperative of patriarchy.--------- These two novels stage interventions both into narratives of female adolescence as a time of being ‘at risk’ or ‘under threat’, and also into narratives of canonical literary patriarchy. Rather than a suicidal Ophelia, subject to the whims of men, these authors imagine Ophelias who take charge of their own destiny; who dictate their own romance and agency; who refuse to be subject to or subjected by, those scripts of cultural authority and heteronormative romance so often perceived as antithetical to female agency. In doing so, they force us to revise our own notions of the romance genre and the functions of canonical literary tradition in contemporary YA culture.

Portrayal of librarians in Australian creative writing

An exploration is made of the ways in which librarians have been depicted in Australian creative writing. Reference is made to characters in novels, short stories, drama and poetry. With respect to novels, there is some consideration of characterisation and its relationship to plot.

Sink or Swim? : Revising Ophelia in contemporary young adult fiction

Shakespeare’s Hamlet has in recent years been used by a number of young adult novels to define and authorise representations of gendered adolescent subjectivity. In so doing, these novels attend not only to Shakespeare’s play but also to other adaptations of the play. For example, the long cultural history of Ophelia being used as a template for depicting adolescent femininity as risky or dangerous is as influential as the play itself in early twenty-first century novels. This paper reads such novels for the ways in which codes of gender and of genre circulate in adolescent fiction when linked explicitly with Shakespearean texts and traditions.

The importance of science fiction and other STEM-related mass media in young people’s decisions to enrol in university STEM courses

This paper presents Australian results from the Interests and Recruitment in Science (IRIS) study with respect to the influence of STEM-related mass media, including science fiction, on students’ decisions to enrol in university STEM courses. The study found that across the full cohort (N=2999), students tended to attribute far greater influence to science-related documentaries/channels such as Life on Earth and the Discovery Channel, etc. than to science-fiction movies or STEM-related TV dramas. Males were more inclined than females to consider science fiction/fantasy books and films and popular science books/magazines as having been important in their decisions. Students taking physics/astronomy tended to rate the importance of science fiction/fantasy books and films higher than students in other courses. The implications of these results for our understanding of influences on STEM enrolments are discussed.

Gender Dilemmas in Children's Fiction

Gender Dilemmas in Children's Fiction examines how fictional texts – picture books, novels, and films – produced for children and young adults are responding to the tensions and dilemmas that arise from new gender relations and sexual differences. The book discusses a diverse range of international children's fiction published between 1990 and 2008. Some of the key dilemmas that emerge are around the texts' treatment of romance, beauty, cyberbodies, queer, and comedy.