How to pack a bag

The artworks in this exhibition form part of my practice-led PhD research. As a daily task while travelling, packing a bag becomes a complex process, as we juggle the many movements in acquiring, discarding and arranging objects.

These artworks aim to highlight the many material interactions we have during the packing process, emphasising the ways in which we arrange materials and consider spatial constraints. For instance, how much we can “fit” in a bag, or, how we use the space of the room we are within, as well as the many movements our bodies undertake with the materials.

Exhibited works:
"Packing Diagrams", laminated digital prints
"Tracking the packing process", interactive installation
"Packing (exploring)", interactive installation, mixed media
"Packing (puzzle)", interactive installation
"bodies + bags" (excerpt), digital video loop

Snapshots of complexity: using motion capture and principal component analysis to reconceptualise dance

This article brings together the disparate worlds of dance practice, motion capture and statistical analysis. Digital technologies such as motion capture offer dance artists new processes for recording and studying dance movement. Statistical analysis of these data can reveal hidden patterns in movement in ways that are semantically ‘blind’, and are hence able to challenge accepted culturo-physical ‘grammars’ of dance creation. The potential benefit to dance artists is to open up new ways of understanding choreographic movement. However, quantitative analysis does not allow for the uncertainty inherent in emergent, artistic practices such as dance. This article uses motion capture and principal component analysis (PCA), a common statistical technique in human movement recognition studies, to examine contemporary dance movement, and explores how this analysis might be interpreted in an artistic context to generate a new way of looking at the nature and role of movement patterning in dance creation.

Engaging clinicians in research: Issues to consider

The beginning of nursing research is attributed to Florence Nightingale whose research during the Crimean War in the 1850s ultimately shaped health care, including nursing practice. Modern research, like clinical care, is influenced by technological, societal, organisational and environmental changes. However, ‘nursing research’ is a simple term that may not encompass complex inter-related concepts and practices and various research methods: quantitative, qualitative, implementation science, evaluation and audit. All research methods follow a similar basic ‘research process,’ but the way the process is applied and rigor is demonstrated differs among the methods. All nurses must engage in research on some level, given they practice in a climate of evidence-based care and are expected to adhere to evidence-based protocols and guidelines. In addition, they need to be able to implement evidence-based best practice and use clinical judgement to treat each person as an individual.

Advancing community engagement practice for strategic urban planning : learning from allied and remote disciplines

Urban planning has the potential to draw on allied and remote disciplines to improve community consultation processes for strategic planning projects. Urban design and landscape architecture have quantitative and qualitative methods which can be utilised to visualise different options of urban intensification which may fit within communities’ expectations of change. Furthermore political science has long used scientifically established psychometric techniques to collect data from broad sections of the population, analysing demographic profiles of communities and understanding their perceptions and attitudes. By appropriating quantitative and qualitative methods from other disciplines, urban planning policies can be developed which may reflect communities’ aspirations of amenity and neighbourhood character. The aim of this paper is to assist local government urban planners with their community engagement practice in order to form policies which are acceptable to the affected communities. The paper draws on Victoria as a case study of community engagement practice, examines research methods from allied and remote disciplines and proposes a community engagement framework which introduces rigour within the community engagement process.

Publishing choreographic ideas

A growing collection of self-determined reflections on dance practice are being published by choreographers in a variety of formats. Often working in collaboration with researchers, editors and designers, these heterogeneous publication projects make use of text, moving image and more open-ended digital tools and platforms. Many of these projects are either newly available or are in the process of development. In addition to offering practice led contributions to the discourse on dance, they point towards the artist's role in developing alternative forms of documenting, analyzing, notating and archiving contemporary dance.

Motion Bank : Phase One

 Motion Bank Phase One (2010-2013) was a four-year international and interdisciplinary research project of The Forsythe Company providing a broad context for research into choreographic practice. The main focus was on the creation of on-line digital scores in collaboration with guest choreographers, to be made publicly available via this website. For Phase One, the guest choreographers were Deborah Hay, Jonathan Burrows & Matteo Fargion, Bebe Miller and Thomas Hauert. Teams from the Motion Bank Score Partners worked with these artists to make their diverse choreographic approaches accessible in new ways through the digital medium with the results published here: http://scores.motionbank.org/. Alongside this core research, Motion Bank Education Partners and an International Education Workgroup researched ways to integrate the new on-line digital scores and related choreographic resources produced by other artists into their academic programs. Accompanying the Motion Bank education research was an interdisciplinary initiative titled Dance Engaging Science aiming to stimulate new forms of collaborative research involving dance practice. Motion Bank public events offered at The Frankfurt Lab included performances and talks with the guest choreographers as well as a series of Motion Bank Workshops with internationally recognized practitioners from different fields. An extensive series of reports and documentation on all Motion Bank activities and results are available on-line at http://motionbank.org.

Motion Bank Score Partners:
- Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design and Department of Dance at The Ohio State University
- Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD
- Hochschule Darmstadt - University of applied sciences
- Hochschule für Gestaltung (HFG) Offenbach.

Motion Bank Education Partners:
- Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts
- Palucca Hochschule für Tanz Dresden

Thinking with the body: Mind and movement in the work of Wayne McGregor | Random Dance

Thinking with the Body was an exhibition at London's Wellcome Collection, offering a glimpse into Wayne McGregor | Random Dance's interdisciplinary research and the impact it has in the rehearsal studio. Staged in the run-up to the first performances of Atomos at Sadler's Wells (Oct 2013), the exhibition featured the results of over a decade of interdisciplinary research into choreographic creativity which has been applied in the studio, in dance education, and to increase public understanding.

Wellcome Collection is a free visitor destination exploring the connections between medicine, life and art in the past, present and future. Wellcome Collection is part of the Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation dedicated to achieving improvements in human and animal health.

The exhibition finished on 27 October 2013, but the film exhibits are still available to view online.

Improving the practice of subcontract nomination in the UAE construction industry

Subcontracting is a common aspect of procurement strategy in construction. The practice of subcontract nomination has produced many problems to the construction industry in the UAE. Examining the nature of associated challenges and investigating new approaches to improve the nomination practice become more critical and demanding. An initial research on the relevant literature was conducted to establish a better understanding of the problems and possible solutions. Then, a series of semi structured interviews were carried out with senior construction professionals in the UAE to examine how the findings of the initial research apply and relate to the UAE construction industry. The analysis and findings of the interviews formed the basis of a closed questions questionnaire. The respondents of the questionnaire were mainly asked to rate the nomination challenges and the approaches to improve the nomination practice. The research concluded that despite the significant reasons and benefits of nomination, the associated risks and challenges don’t encourage adopting it. The full involvement of the MC in the nomination process from the outset and the better detailed provisions of the contract nomination clauses were found the best possible approaches to improve the practice of subcontract nomination in the UAE.

Rich stuff : review of Jeri Kroll and Graeme Harper (eds), Research methods in creative writing

A review of a cutting-edge collection of scholarly articles engaging with contemporary theories of creativity and a gamut of valid and often exhilarating research methods in contemporary creative writing practice.

Because it takes a village to fund the answers: Crowdfunding University Research

Whichever way you look at it, online crowdfunding is ramifying. From its foundations supporting creative industry initiatives, crowdfunding has branched into almost every aspect of public and private enterprise. Niche crowdfunding platforms and models are burgeoning across the globe faster than you can trill “kerching”. Early adopters have been quick to discover that in addition to money, they also get free market information and an opportunity to develop a relationship with their market base. Despite these evident benefits, universities have been cautious entrants in the crowdfunding space and more generally in the emerging ‘collaborative economy’ (Owyang, 2013). There are many cultural and institutional legacies that might explain this reluctance. For example, to date universities have achieved social (and economic) distinction through refining a set of exclusionary practices including, but not limited to, versions of gatekeeping, ranking and credentialing. These practices are reproduced in the expected behaviors of individual academics who garner social currency and status as experts, legislators and interpreters (Osborne, 20014: 435). Digitalization and the emergent knowledge and collaboration economies, have the potential to disrupt the academy’s traditional appeals to distinction and to re-engage universities and academics with their public stakeholders. This chapter will examine some of the challenges and benefits arising from public micro-funding of university-based research initiatives during a period of industrial transition in the university sector.Broadly then this chapter asks; what does scholarship mean in a digital ecosystem where sociality (rather than traditional systems for assessing academic merit) affords research opportunity and success? How might university research be rethought in a networked world where personal and professional identities are blurred? What happens when scholars adopt the same pathways as non-scholars for knowledge discovery, development and dissemination through use of emerging practices such as crowdfunding. These issues will be discussed through detailed exploration of a successful pilot project to crowdfund university research; Research My World. This project, a collaboration between Deakin University and the crowdfunding platform pozible.com, set out to secure new sources of funding for the ‘long-tail’ of academic research. More generally, it aimed to improve the digital capacity of the participating researchers and create new opportunities for public engagement for the researchers themselves as well as the university. We will examine how crowdfunding and social media platforms alter academic effort (the dis-intermediation or re-intermediation of research funding, reduction of the compliance burden, opportunities for market validation and so on), as well as the particular workflows of scholarly researchers themselves (improvements in “digital presence-building”, provision of cheap alternative funding, opportunities to crowdsource non-academic knowledge). In addressing these questions, this chapter will explore the influence that crowdfunding campaigns have for transforming contemporary academic practices across a range of disciplinary instances, providing the basis for a new form of engagement-led research. To support our analysis we will provide an overview of the initiative through quantitative analysis of a dataset generated by the first iteration of Research My World projects.

Navigating the ethics of cross-cultural health promotion research

Health promotion researchers must consider the ethics of their research, and are usually required to abide by a set of ethical requirements stipulated by governing bodies (such as the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council) and human research ethics committees (HRECs). These requirements address both deontological (rule-based) and consequence-based issues. However, at times there can be a disconnect between the requirements of deontological issues and the cultural sensitivity required when research is set in cultural contexts and settings etic to the HREC. This poses a challenge for health promotion researchers who must negotiate between meeting both the requirements of the HREC and the needs of the community with whom the research is being conducted. Drawing on two case studies, this paper discusses examples from cross-cultural health promotion research in Australian and international settings where disconnect arose and negotiation was required to appropriately meet the needs of all parties. The examples relate to issues of participant recruitment and informed consent, participants under the Australian legal age of consent, participant withdrawal when this seemingly occurs in an ad hoc rather than a formal manner and reciprocity. Although these approaches are context specific, they highlight issues for consideration to advance more culturally appropriate practice in research ethics and suggest ways a stronger anthropological lens can be applied to research ethics to overcome these challenges.

Case formulation in forensic practice: challenges and opportunities

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of current practice in forensic case formulation, describing different approaches and discussing some of the practical and ethical issues that routinely arise. The paper further identifies areas where future practice and research might be strengthened.

Design/methodology/approach – There is only a very small literature to draw upon in reviewing this topic. Therefore a narrative literature review was undertaken, synthesising findings from published, peer-reviewed studies, and papers that addressed case formulation in psychological practice.

Findings – Despite case formation being considered by many to be a core competency of evidence-based forensic practice, it is not currently possible to describe a typical forensic case formulation or advocate for a particular approach to practice.

Practical implications – A number of practical and ethical issues routinely arise in the process of conducting a forensic case formulation. Ultimately, the absence of a consistent approach can lead to lead to poor clinical decision-making and the delivery of inadequate or inappropriate intervention.

Originality/value – This is one of the few discussions of case formulation that have been prepared for forensic practitioners. It is likely to be of interest to readers of the journal given the importance of the formulation process in contemporary forensic practice.

Articulations of teaching practice: a case study of teachers and "general capabilities"

The research reported on in this paper is a qualitative case study of secondary school teachers’ interpretations of how they work with a component of the Australian national curriculum, the seven “general capabilities.” The case study of four secondary school teachers utilized teacher interviews eliciting via descriptive analysis how teachers understand and work with the “general capabilities.” The Australian curriculum listing explicit “general capabilities” alongside endorsed disciplines and cross-curriculum priorities requires teachers and their associated classroom practice(s) bond to practical dexterities. Policy expectations are such that the knowledge, skills, behaviors and dispositions of the “general capabilities,” along with curriculum content and cross-curriculum priority areas will support students to successfully live and work in the twenty-first century. While policy expectations appear well defined, including expectations that teachers navigate and implement relevant curriculum in creative ways, the study underpinning this paper finds that teachers assert their professional and pedagogic authority over the curriculum by enacting and translating it for the benefit of their students.