From impact assessment to user-friendly risk management decision-making

In earlier cultures and societies, hazards and risks to human health were dealt with by methods derived from myth, metaphor and ritual. In modem society however, notions of hazard and risk have been transformed from the level of a folk discourse to that of an expert centred concept (Plough & Krimsky, 1987). With the professionalization of risk and hazard analysis came a preferred framework for decision making based on a range of 'technical' methodologies (Giere, 1991 ). This is especially true for decision processes relating to risk assessment and management, and impact assessment. Such approaches however, often entail narrow technical-based theoretical assumptions about human behaviour and the natural world, and the· methods used. They therefore carry 'in-built' error factors that contribute considerable uncertainty to the results.

The Medics - "Foundations"

The Medics “Foundations” is a full-length album of popular music completed over a 13-month period and released in 2012, with work taking place in Byron Bay’s 301 studios and Brisbane’s Airlock studios. “Foundations” contributes to studies in the field of music production, as well as furthering research into the place of Indigenous youth culture within contemporary rock music. The music draws on elements of folk, post rock and hardcore to create a dynamic and cinematic sound, framed by lyrics that focus on spirituality, nature and a connection to the land. Artists such as At the Drive In and Mars Volta were referenced in the production of the record. Scholars such as Joe Bennett have argued that the relationship between songwriting practice and song product is an under-explored area in popular musicology, and, by using a practice-led research methodology, the production of “Foundations” extends these creative inquiries. “Foundations” was produced with the assistance of a competitive grant, the Cultural Minister’s Council Breakthrough initiative, which assists emerging Indigenous contemporary musicians. The album was well received and positively reviewed, resulting in the band signing a record deal with Warner Music and a publishing deal with Albert’s Music. It was album of the week on Triple J and several singles were placed on high rotation. A review on Themusic.com.au highlighted the production work: “Producer Yanto Browning has captured the impassioned live intent the band have built their reputation on and bottled it into 11 impeccable tracks, the album maintaining their onstage vigour while polishing it just enough to allow it to burn brightly through the speakers.” As a result of the record, The Medics were invited to play Splendour in the Grass, the national Big Day Out tour and a series of shows in South America.

Physical activities and sedentary pursuits in African American and Caucasian girls

The purposes of this study were to describe and compare the specific physical activity choices and sedentary pursuits of African American and Caucasian American girls. Participants were 1,124 African American and 1,068 Caucasian American eighth grade students from 31 middle schools. The 3-Day Physical Activity Recall (3DPAR) was used to measure participation in physical activities and sedentary pursuits. The most frequently reported physical activities were walking, basketball, jogging or running, bicycling, and social dancing. Differences between groups were found in 11 physical activities and 3 sedentary pursuits. Participation rates were higher in African American girls (p<.001)for social dancing, basketball, watching television, and church attendance but lower in calisthenics, ballet and other dance, jogging or running, rollerblading, soccer, softball or baseball, using an exercise machine, swimming, and homework. Cultural differences of groups should be considered when planning interventions to promote physical activity.

Altered copy

In 2008, Jenny Roche commissioned Jodi Melnick to make the solo Business of the Bloom on her. Four years later, Roche re-enters this piece and draws on their many years of working together to inhabits its ideas and impulses from a new perspective. In this new 'altered copy', Roche refers to this previous work; embellishing, redirecting and abstracting moments. By reinterpreting both her earlier self and footage of Melnick dancing a reworked version of the solo in performance, Roche connects with the polyvalent nature of both interpretation and memory. This reworked version outlines the relationship that dancers have to movement traces that circulate after a dancing event. Suzanne Ravn (2009) found that dancers experienced the reapperance of movement traces from previous works when moving. Martin Nachbar (2012) writing from his first-person perspective as a dancer, describes the dancer who discerns between the past of movement that is remembered and the current moment of its performance. He outlines how past and present movement experiences cohabitate in the embodied present. Timmy de Laet (2012) identifies the emerging trait of re-enactment in contemporary dance, in which contemporary artists such as Nachbar dialogue with past choreographies to comment on the various mnemonic dimensions of dance. De Laet (2012) explains that the function of these works are not to preserve the past choreographies as might be achieved through reconstruction but to contemplate creatively issues of ephemerality and preservation of dance. Altered copy addresses this dialogue between the past and present body.

“My hands are plunged in oranges”…: an experiential account of a working process

This presentation incorporated the live performance throughout, by the author, of movement from “The All Weather Project” by Liz Roche. Movement sections are indicated by italics. “I am going to start by dancing for you… Movement: Live performance of solo approximately 10 minutes in duration This is the introduction... Through my PhD research, I am examining the choreographic process from the perspective of the independent contemporary dancer, through embodying this role as a researcher/participant. My methodological frameworks, which utilise video documentation and journal writing, could be characterised as ethnographic, multi-modal embodied theorising, leading to “multi-dimensional theorising” (I adopt this term from Susan Melrose). In this way, I am unwinding the embodied practice of dancing, through the co-existent layers of experience, towards forming a theoretical understanding of the issues that arise for the dancer. The issues that I have identified as relevant to my research are those relating to the dancer’s ‘moving identity’ or way of moving, as a mutable and adaptable form that must alter and re-adjust to each different choreographic engram or movement vocabulary, that she/he encounters. I am examining this interplay between stability and change. I also reflect on the impact of destabilisation and flux on the dancer’s identity in a wider sense, as she/he relates outwardly to signifying factors within the social strata. Today I am going to bring you through a reflection on the working process of a dance piece as experienced from the inside. By doing so, I hope to capture and elucidate the multi-dimensional layers which existed for me within this process. Through displaying these fragments together, I endeavour to invoke the ‘totality’ of the experience...

Juana Molina : left-field folktronica at the Brisbane Festival

Argentine singer-songwriter Juana Molina is one of those fearless artists. The kind of fearless artist who abandons a successful TV show at the height of its popularity to pursue a solo career in making and performing slightly left-field South American folk-tinged electronica...

Mapping the unmappable

Mapping the Unmappable? the Choreography Shared Material on Dying through the Lens of the Technogenetic Dancer. If choreographic movement is a trace, which is already behind at the moment of its appearance, the impulses that move the dancer could be understood to reside in the virtual. Whether they are the internalized instructions of the choreographer, the inscriptions of concepts on the dancing body which shape how the dancer moves, or movement material that has been incorporated over time, this gestalt is somewhat mapped before is materialized. Erin Manning describes the moment before it manifests as the preacceleration of the movement, when the potentialities of the gesture collapse and stabilize into form. This form is transient, appearing as a trace that is dissolving as soon as it appears. In her critique of some approaches to collaborations between dance and technology she describes technology as a prosthetic that constrains the dancer's movement by inducing this collapse into stability and thus limiting the potentiality of the technogenetic body of the dancer. Thus the technology becomes the focus rather than the sophisticated sensorial skills of the dancer in movement. Using this challenge as a provocation, I have explored methods for mapping a choreographed phrase of movement from the piece entitled Shared Material on Dying by Irish choreographer, Liz Roche. I will explore the virtual space before this dance is materialized, through the frame of a technogenetic body. I will uncover, through phenomenological enquiry, the constituent elements that are embedded in this virtual map, that is, the associations, sensations and spatio-temporal reference points that have been incorporated over time. The purpose is to point to possible directions in mapping the virtual dance space and to understand choreographed movements not just in terms of their material trace but also in terms of the associations, sensations and perceptions that give a specific choreography its identity. This undertaking has relevance for archiving dance. This presentation will involve danced choreography alongside documented material to explore multiple perspectives on the piece and the experience of dancing it.

Machine learning for activity recognition : hip versus wrist data

Problem addressed Wrist-worn accelerometers are associated with greater compliance. However, validated algorithms for predicting activity type from wrist-worn accelerometer data are lacking. This study compared the activity recognition rates of an activity classifier trained on acceleration signal collected on the wrist and hip. Methodology 52 children and adolescents (mean age 13.7 +/- 3.1 year) completed 12 activity trials that were categorized into 7 activity classes: lying down, sitting, standing, walking, running, basketball, and dancing. During each trial, participants wore an ActiGraph GT3X+ tri-axial accelerometer on the right hip and the non-dominant wrist. Features were extracted from 10-s windows and inputted into a regularized logistic regression model using R (Glmnet + L1). Results Classification accuracy for the hip and wrist was 91.0% +/- 3.1% and 88.4% +/- 3.0%, respectively. The hip model exhibited excellent classification accuracy for sitting (91.3%), standing (95.8%), walking (95.8%), and running (96.8%); acceptable classification accuracy for lying down (88.3%) and basketball (81.9%); and modest accuracy for dance (64.1%). The wrist model exhibited excellent classification accuracy for sitting (93.0%), standing (91.7%), and walking (95.8%); acceptable classification accuracy for basketball (86.0%); and modest accuracy for running (78.8%), lying down (74.6%) and dance (69.4%). Potential Impact Both the hip and wrist algorithms achieved acceptable classification accuracy, allowing researchers to use either placement for activity recognition.

Multiple iterations : mapping the trace

This paper explores the concept that individual dancers leave traces in a choreographer’s body of work and similarly, that dancers carry forward residue of embodied choreographies into other working processes. This presentation will be grounded in a study of the multiple iterations of a programme of solo works commissioned in 2008 from choreographers John Jasperse, Jodi Melnick, Liz Roche and Rosemary Butcher and danced by the author. This includes an exploration of the development by John Jasperse of themes from his solo into the pieces PURE (2008) and Truth, Revised Histories, Wishful Thinking and Flat Out Lies (2009); an adaptation of the solo Business of the Bloom by Jodi Melnick in 2008 and a further adaptation of Business of the Bloom by this author in 2012. It will map some of the developments that occurred through a number of further performances over five years of the solo Shared Material on Dying by Liz Roche and the working process of the (uncompleted) solo Episodes of Flight by Rosemary Butcher. The purpose is to reflect back on authorship in dance, an art form in which lineages of influence can often be clearly observed. Normally, once a choreographic work is created and performed, it is archived through video recording, notation and/or reviews. The dancer is no longer called upon to represent the dance piece within the archive and thus her/his lived presence and experiential perspective disappears. The author will draw on the different traces still inhabiting her body as pathways towards understanding how choreographic movement circulates beyond this moment of performance. This will include the interrogation of ownership of choreographic movement, as once it becomes integrated in the body of the dancer, who owns the dance? Furthermore, certain dancers, through their individual physical characteristics and moving identities, can deeply influence the formation of choreographic signatures, a proposition that challenges the sole authorship role of the choreographer in dance production. This paper will be delivered in a presentation format that will bleed into movement demonstrations alongside video footage of the works and auto-ethnographic accounts of dancing experience. A further source of knowledge will be drawn from extracts of interviews with other dancers including Sara Rudner, Rebecca Hilton and Catherine Bennett.

When sexuality is in a research topic! The methodological challenges in sexuality and street healing research in Bangladesh

This paper is a bridge between two studies by the author: (i) completed MA research; and (ii) on-going PhD research, on male sexual health and the street healing system in Bangladesh. Street healing, a traditional healing system in Bangladesh, is at the centre of the studies. This is a popular form of folk healing in Bangladesh, where male impotency is a central issue. The author has been researching street healing to understand male sexual health-seeking behaviour in Bangladesh. In this paper, the author brings in experiences from his MA research to explore the challenges of studying sexuality and street healing in Bangladesh and concludes by describing his plan to address those issues in his on-going PhD research.

Cultural beliefs about societal change: A three-mode principal component analysis in China, Australia, and Japan

People’s beliefs about where society has come from and where it is going have personal and political consequences. Here, we conduct a detailed investigation of these beliefs through re-analyzing Kashima et al.’s (Study 2, n = 320) data from China, Australia, and Japan. Kashima et al. identified a “folk theory of social change” (FTSC) belief that people in society become more competent over time, but less warm and moral. Using three-mode principal components analysis, an under-utilized analytical method in psychology, we identified two additional narratives: Utopianism/Dystopianism (people becoming generally better or worse over time) and Expansion/Contraction (an increase/decrease in both positive and negative aspects of character over time). Countries differed in endorsement of these three narratives of societal change. Chinese endorsed the FTSC and Utopian narratives more than other countries, Japanese held Dystopian and Contraction beliefs more than other countries, and Australians’ narratives of societal change fell between Chinese and Japanese. Those who believed in greater economic/technological development held stronger FTSC and Expansion/Contraction narratives, but not Utopianism/Dystopianism. By identifying multiple cultural narratives about societal change, this research provides insights into how people across cultures perceive their social world and their visions of the future.

Multiplicity, Embodiment and the Contemporary Dancer: Moving Identities

In recent years, the practice of contemporary dancers has altered significantly in the transition from canonical choreographic vocabularies to a proliferation of choreographic signatures within mainstream and independent dance. Dancers are often required to collaborate creatively on the formation of choreographic material, thus engaging conceptually with emerging cultural paradigms. This book explores the co-creative practice of contemporary dancers solely from the point of view of the dancer. It reveals multiple dancing perspectives, drawn from interviews, current writing and evocative accounts from inside the choreographic process, illuminating the myriad ways that dancers contribute to the production of contemporary dance culture. A key insight of the book is that a dancer's signature way of being is a 'moving identity', which incorporates past dance experience, anatomical structures and conditioned human movement as a self-in-process. The moving identity is the movement signature that the dancer forms throughout a career path.

Warmwaters

This project originated from both investigation of the musicalisation of theatre and impact of gender upon contemporary physical comedy. Developed as a ‘music first’ proposition, the initial experiment was to blend music and theatre so they were indistinguishable. Musicalising theatre, and theatricalising music. This established a covert intermediality with the potential to work in theatre or music venues. An iterative cycle of writing, performance, and videography over two years in venues ranging from small cafes to Woodford Folk Festival resulted in a full-length performance premiering at Brisbane Powerhouse’s Queensland Cabaret Festival 2015. The soundtrack to the show was recorded as a full-length album at QUT’s Gasworks Studio and released in 2014. It’s become clear that male/female musical comedy acts are an extremely rare pairing. Certain preconceptions about gender and comedy complicate the field; indeed the comic tropes of the double act which the Warmwaters flow around and through. Brian Logan (2011) even poses that “the male-female dynamic militate[s] against comedy”. This performance-led research draws on Comedy Studies to examine three classic formulations of the comic duo as they are manifested at critical incidents in the Warmwaters’ show. These moments are examined in terms of comic functionality and gender, evaluating and potentially reformulating them, whilst working towards a better understanding of the relative scarcity of the male/female musical comedy duo. Prototypes have been performed in various venues, utilising performance as research: cycles in which discoveries made during unpredictable gigs in music venues are captured on video, transcribed, rewritten, then fed back into live performance.

Lab coats and leggings: When science and dance connect it’s quite a show

Dancing is an activity most people associate with after-hours exploits: parties, weddings, the lounge rooms of friends with great vinyl collections, a night out at the ballet – or television shows such as So You Think You Can Dance, Dancing With The Stars or Got To Dance...

State Library Queensland

Sheona Thomson writes about the transformation of a public institution in relation to a study on post-occupancy. "Brisbanites like me, with memories of long hours of study in the former buildings of the State Library of Queensland, can only marvel at the living institution we have in our city today. For most of the 80s, our bookish pursuits were hosted in the fustily intimate reading rooms of Centennial Hall, the late 1950s extension to the nineteenth-century building (formerly housing the state museum) by F. D. G. Stanley in William Street on the north bank of the Brisbane River. At the time, the wheels of an expansive cultural ambition were turning, and piece by piece on the south bank of the river the rambling Queensland Cultural Centre was realized. The fourth stage of the complex opened in 1988 as the new home for the State Library and for many years after, countless studious, transient folk whiled away time in the deep interiors of the straight-faced concrete and glass edifice by Robin Gibson and Partners..."