Boats on the roof of the house: the shadowy flux of alterity

Freud’s ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ focuses upon the relationship between the signs, in the surface content of the dream, and the operation of thought that produces these signs, in the latent content of the dream. Freud’s analysis is a means for tangling with a discontinuous narrative style because Freud’s analysis provides a methodological approach to the question: how does the novel bear witness to the writer’s subjective consciousness?

Spatio-temporal analysis of house price convergence based on a demographical distance

Convergences of house prices have been studied for over three decades, but yet have been confirmed because of spatial heterogeneity and autocorrelations in house prices. A spatio-temporal approach was recently proposed to address the spatial and temporal issues related to house prices. However, most previous studies placed the focus on the spatial heterogeneity and autocorrelations from geographical locations, which neglected other spatial factors. In order to overcome this shortfall, this research argued a demographical distance, constructed by demographical structure and housing market scales, to investigate the house price convergences in Australian capital cities. The results confirmed the house price levels in Canberra, Brisbane and Perth converged to the house price level in Sydney.

The house of service: the Gulen movement and Islam's third way

David Tittensor offers a groundbreaking new perspective on the Gülen movement, a Turkish Muslim educational activist network that emerged in the 1960s and has grown into a global empire with an estimated worth of $25 billion. Named after its leader Fethullah Gülen, the movement has established more than 1,000 secular educational institutions in over 140 countries, aiming to provide holistic education that incorporates both spirituality and the secular sciences.

Despite the movement's success, little is known about how its schools are run, or how Islam is operationalized. Drawing on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey, Tittensor explores the movement's ideo-theology and how it is practiced in the schools. His interviews with both teachers and graduates from Africa, Indonesia, Central Asia, and Turkey show that the movement is a missionary organization, but of a singular kind: its goal is not simply widespread religious conversion, but a quest to recoup those Muslims who have apparently lost their way and to show non-Muslims that Muslims can embrace modernity and integrate into the wider community. Tittensor also examines the movement's operational side and shows how the schools represent an example of Mohammad Yunus's social business model: a business with a social cause at its heart.

The House of Service is an insightful exploration of one of the world's largest transnational Muslim associations, and will be invaluable for those seeking to understand how Islam will be perceived and practiced in the future.

Predicting house damage class using artificial intelligence method

The unsatisfactory performance of light structures founded on expansive soils subject to seasonal movements is frequently reported since the early 1950's in Australia. Excessive movements have caused damage to numerous structures that have not been adequately designed to accommodate soil volume changes. However, the sole presence of expansive soil is not necessarily the main cause of damage. Other factors such as vegetation, climate factors, types of construction materials and geology type may also contribute. This paper presents a model which predicts the damage class by analyzing combinations of the contributing factors using artificial intelligence methods. This model can help to identify if any serious and urgent repairs are necessary and immediate actions could be initiated without delay.

A dish-rack full of crockery : social significance and the Sydney Opera House

The sculptural roof forms of the Sydney Opera House regularly attract visual analogies in the public mind. Although they are mostly referred to as a??sailsa?? or a??shellsa?? they have also been described through humorous metaphors like a??a dishrack full of crockerya??. This particular visual pun, is a reference to a linocut by Eric Thake, produced in 1972, the year before the official opening of the Sydney Opera House. This analogy and its continued popularity to date evidences the social and cultural life of this building. Much of the scholarly on the Sydney Opera House investigates the architecture and the circumstances of its realisation, whilst its reception and social significance, has received little systematic attention. Through Thakea??s linocut, the paper discusses the current limitations in evaluating social significance in an Australian heritage context and proposes an alternative perspective to this problem through two scholars who bring a??subjective experiencea?? to bear on the production of meaning. For Gillian Rose, visual artefacts become significant through their embodied experience, whilst Ann Game argues for the inclusion of such usually-excluded subjects like desire, memory, time and the body in the construction of meaning. By bringing these theories to bear on a specific example - Eric Thakea??s visual metaphor for the Sydney Opera House - the paper investigates a new approach to social significance.

Tourist snapshot : the mediating gaze of the Sydney Opera House

There has already been much scholarly work produced about the Sydney Opera House, discussing the production of its architecture, historical and political context, and its symbolic meaning to Sydney. However little scholarly attention has been paid to the way this building is represented through tourist practices of photography. The essay attempts to bring an architectural perspective to the study of this tourist practice, which is usually addressed from the disciplines of cultural geography, sociology and anthropology. The essay considers the above questions by the analysis of some 300 images sourced from the photo sharing website Flickr (www.flickr.com). It draws on John Urry's notion of the 'tourist gaze' which describes how places are structured and regulated by the visual. The essay then uses Jonas Larsen's work, which position tourist photography as a performance of social relations to argue that the activity of photographing the Sydney Opera House is more than a ritual of consumption, and can be seen as an embodied performance located at the intersection of space, experience and image.

Souveniring the Sydney Opera House

The Sydney Opera House attracts over four million visitors each year to experience its architecture, events and cultural narratives. This experience consciously engages tourists in a constructed spatial encounter, in which the tourist has the opportunity to experience the architecture of this canonical modernist building. This experience often culminates with the purchase of a souvenir, a seemingly innocuous act, but one that is highly revealing of the interrelation between the tourist's experience, the architecture and the souvenir. There has already been much scholarly work on the Sydney Opera House, discussing its architecture, the historical and political context of its commission and its symbolic meaning within the City of Sydney. Less attention however has been paid to the relationship between architecture, experience and memory, as embodied by the souvenir. The tea towels, snow domes, table lights and key rings which depict the Sydney Opera House are, as Celeste Olalquiaga states "static and idealized blueprint... of an experience." This raises debate over what exactly is souvenired; is it the building? The experience? Cultural cachet? What can be revealed about the architecture of the Sydney Opera House, through its souvenirs? Architecture, like souvenirs is party to questions of representation, abstraction and scale. By drawing upon the work of Stewart and Olalquiaga, on the experience of souvenirs, the essay takes an architectural position from which to discuss the way models as objects of architecture and souvenir miniatures are the material representations which commemorate and facilitate a dynamic and ephemeral experience of this building. In this way revealing souvenirs as more than markers of travel, but as Stewart asserts, containers of the cultural narratives, desires and myths, which surround such an iconic architectural destination

Orphan DNA: Indigenous samples, ethical biovalue and postcolonial science in Australia

Thousands of blood samples taken from Australia’s indigenous people lie in institutional freezers of the global North, the legacy of a half-century of scientific research. Since those collections were assembled, standards of ethical research practice have changed dramatically, leaving some samples in a state of dormancy. While some European and American collections are still actively used for genetic research, this practice is viewed as unethical by most Australian genetic researchers, who have closer relationships with indigenous Australians and postcolonial politics. For collections to be used ethically, they require a ‘guardian’ who has an ongoing and documented relationship with the donors, so that consent to further studies on samples can be negotiated. This affective and bureaucratic network generates ‘ethical biovalue’ such that a research project can satisfy Australian ethical review. I propose in this article that without ethical biovalue, collections become ‘orphan’ DNA, divorced from a guardian and often difficult to trace to their sources. Such samples are both orphaned and functionally sterile, unable to produce data, scientific articles, knowledge or prestige. This article draws on an ethnographic study of genetic researchers who are working in indigenous communities across Australia. I present tales of researchers’ efforts to generate ethical biovalue and their fears for succession; fears that extend to threats to destroy samples rather than see them orphaned, or worse, fall into the wrong hands. Within these material and affective  networks, indigenous DNA morphs from biological sample to sacred object to political time bomb. 

Inspirited landscapes: the anthology project

 

Do spatial effects drive house prices away from the long-run equilibrium?

Long-run equilibrium of house prices has been investigated by researchers in multiple countries. The identification of this equilibrium not only provides references against contemporary house price levels, but also contributes to creation of stable-development policies and healthy investment strategies. However, there is little research investigating the factors that drive house prices away from the long-run equilibrium.
Based on a framework of the conventional stationarity test process, this research develops a panel regression model and a spatial regression model to investigate the roles of spatial heterogeneity and correlations on house prices preceding the long-run equilibrium, respectively. Housing data generated from the capital cities in Australia are used to illustrate the models. Spatial effects can have a strong influence in the long-run performance of house prices, while the short-run performance of house prices is not influenced by the spatial effects.