Moving identities : multiplicity, embodiment and the contemporary dancer

Currently, across dance studies, choreographies are usually discussed as representational of the choreographer, with little attention focused on the dancers who also bring the work into being. As well as devaluing the contribution that the dancer makes to the choreographic process, the dancer’s elision from mainstream discourse deprives the art form of a rich source of insight into the incorporating practices of dance. This practice-based research offers a new perspective on choreographic process through the experiential viewpoint of the participating dancer. It involves encounters with contemporary choreographers Rosemary Butcher (UK), John Jasperse (US), Jodi Melnick (US) and Liz Roche (Ire). Utilizing a mixed-mode research structure, it covers the creative process and performance of three solo dance pieces in Dublin in 2008, as well as an especially composed movement treatise, all of which are documented on the attached DVD. The main hypothesis presented is that the dancer possesses a moving identity which is a composite of past dance experience, anatomical structures and conditioned human movement. This is supported by explorations into critical theory on embodiment, including Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘the habitus’. The moving identity is identified as accumulative, altering through encounters with new choreographic movement patterns in independent contemporary dance practice. The interior space of the dancer’s embodied experience is made explicit in chapter 3, through four discussions that outline the dancer’s creative labour in producing each choreographic work. Through adopting a postmodern critical perspective on human subjectivity, supported by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Alain Badiou, among others, the thesis addresses the inherent challenges which face independent contemporary dancers within their multiple embodiments as they move between different choreographic processes. In identifying an emergent paradigmatic shift in the role of dancer within dance- making practices, this research forges a new direction that invites further dancer-led initiatives in practice-based research.

Polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE) human half lives estimated from North Americans moving to Australia

Human half-lives of PentaBDE congeners have been estimated from the decline in serum concentrations measured over a 6-12 month period for a population of exchange students moving from North America to Australia. Australian serum PBDE concentrations are typically between 5 -10 times lower than in North America and we can therefore hypothesize that if the biological half-life is sufficiently short we would observe a decline in serum concentration with length of residence in Australia. Thirty students were recruited over a period of 3 years from whom serum were archived every 2 months during their stay in Australia. Australian residents (n=22) were also sampled longitudinally to estimate general population background levels. All serum samples were analyzed by gas chromatography high resolution mass spectrometry. Key findings confirmed that BDE-47 concentrations in the Australians (median 2.3;

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.

Moving from theory to praxis on the fly: Introducing a salutogenic method to expedite mental health care provision in disaster situations

Not a lot is known about most mental illness. Its triggers can rarely be established and nor can its aetiological dynamics, so it is hardly surprising that the accepted treatments for most mental illnesses are really strategies to manage the most overt symptoms. But with such a dearth of knowledge, how can worthy decisions be made about psychiatric interventions, especially given time and budgetary restrictions? This paper introduces a method, extrapolated from Salutogenics; the psycho-social theory of health introduced by Antonovsky in 1987. This method takes a normative stance (that psychiatric health care is for the betterment of psychiatric patients), and applies it to any context where there is a dearth of workable knowledge. In lieu of guiding evidence, the method identifies reasonable alternatives on the fly, enabling rational decisions to be made quickly with limited resources.

Ergonomic assessment of hospital bed moving using DHM Siemens JACK

While the indirect and direct cost of occupational musculoskeletal disorders (MSD) causes a significant burden on the health system, lower back pain (LBP) is associated with a significant portion of MSD. In Australia, the highest prevalence of MSD exists for health care workers, such as nurses. The digital human model (DHM) Siemens JACK was used to investigate if hospital bed pushing, a simple task and hazard that is commonly associated with LBP, can be simulated and ergonomically assessed in a virtual environment. It was found that while JACK has implemented a range of common physical work assessment methods, the simulation of dynamic bed pushing remains a challenge due to the complex interface between the floor and wheels, which can only be insufficiently modelle

Disciplining the screen through education: The Royal Commission into the moving picture industry in Australia

In this article, we investigate the complex relationship between concerns about children and young people’s exposure to cinema in 1920s Australia and the use of film in education. In part, the Royal Commission into the Moving Picture Industry in Australia aimed to ‘ascertain the effect and the extent of the power of film upon juveniles’ and Commissioners spoke to educationalists, psychologists, medical professions, police officers and parents to gain insight into the impacts of movies on children. Numerous issues were canvassed in the Commission hearings such as exposure to sexual content, ‘excesses’ in film content, children’s inability to concentrate at school following cinema attendance and the influence of cinema on youth crime. While the Commission ultimately suggested it was parents’ role to police children’s engagements with cinema, it did make recommendations for restricting children’s access to films with inappropriate themes. Meanwhile, the Commission was very positive about film’s educational role stating that ‘the advantage to be gained by the use of the cinematograph as an adjunct to educational methods should be assisted in every possible way by the Commonwealth’. We draw on the Commission’s minutes of evidence, the Commission report and newspaper articles form the 1920s to the 1940s to argue that the Commission provides valuable insight into the beginnings of the use of screen content in formal schooling, both as a resource across the curriculum and as a specific focus of education through film appreciation and, later, broader forms of media education. The article argues debates about screen entertainment and education rehearsed in the Commission are reflected today as parents, concerned citizens and educators ponder the dangers and potential of new media technologies and media content used by children and young people such as video games, social media and interactive content.

Moving from evaluation to trial: The case of cloud ERP adoption in SMEs

This study proposes that the adoption process of complex-wide systems (e.g. cloud ERP) should be observed as multi-stage actions. Two theoretical lenses were utilised for this study with critical adoption factors identified through the theory of planned behaviour and the progression of each adoption factor observed through Ettlie's (1980) multi-stage adoption model. Together with a survey method, this study has employed data gathered from 162 decision-makers of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Using both linear and non-linear approaches for the data analysis, the study findings have shown that the level of importance for adoption factors changes across different adoption stages.

Moving on (part 2): Power and the child in curriculum history

This paper is the second in a two-part series that maps continuities and ruptures in conceptions of power and traces their effects in educational discourse on 'the child'. It delineates two post-Newtonian intellectual trajectories through which concepts of 'power' arrived at the theorization of 'the child': the paradoxical bio-physical inscriptions of human-ness that accompanied mechanistic worldviews and the explanations for social motion in political philosophy. The intersection of pedagogical theories with 'the child' and 'power' is further traced from the latter 1800s to the present, where a Foucaultian analytics of power-as-effects is reconsidered in regard to histories of motion. The analysis culminates in an examination of post-Newtonian (dis)continuities in the theorization of power, suggesting some productive paradoxes that inhabit turn of the 21st-century conceptualizations of the social.

Moving on (part 1): The physics of power and curriculum history

This is the first of two papers that map (dis)continuities in notions of power from Aristotle to Newton to Foucault. They trace the ways in which bio-physical conceptions of power became paraphrased in social science and deployed in educational discourse on the child and curriculum from post-Newtonian times to the present. The analyses suggest that, amid ruptures in the definition, role, location and meaning given 'power' historically in various 'physical' and 'social' cosmologies, the naming of 'power' has been dependent on 'physics', on the theorization of motion across 'Western' sciences. This first paper examines some (dis)continuities in regard to histories of motion and power from Aristotelian 'natural science' to Newtonian mechanics.

Making apartments affordable: Moving from speculative to deliberative development

Urban planning policies in Australia presuppose apartments as the new dominant housing type, but much of what the market has delivered is criticised as over-development, and as being generic, poorly-designed, environmentally unsustainable and unaffordable. Policy responses to this problem typically focus on planning regulation and construction costs as the primary issues needing to be addressed in order to increase the supply of quality, affordable apartment housing. In contrast, this paper uses Ball’s (1983) ‘structures of provision’ approach to outline the key processes informing apartment development and identifies a substantial gap in critical understanding of how apartments are developed in Australia. This reveals economic problems not typically considered by policymakers. Using mainstream economic analysis to review the market itself, the authors found high search costs, demand risk, problems with exchange, and lack of competition present key barriers to achieving greater affordability and limit the extent to which ‘speculative’ developers can respond to the preferences of would be owner-occupiers of apartments. The existing development model, which is reliant on capturing uplift in site value, suits investors seeking rental yields in the first instance and capital gains in the second instance, and actively encourages housing price inflation. This is exacerbated by lack of density restrictions, such as have existed in inner Melbourne for many years, which permits greater yields on redevelopment sites. The price of land in the vicinity of such redevelopment sites is pushed up as landholders' expectation of future yield is raised. All too frequently existing redevelopment sites go back onto the market as vendors seek to capture the uplift in site value and exit the project in a risk free manner...

Classical Langevin dynamics of a charged particle moving on a sphere and diamagnetism: A surprise

It is generally known that the orbital diamagnetism of a classical system of charged particles in thermal equilibrium is identically zero —the Bohr-van Leeuwen theorem. Physically, this null result derives from the exact cancellation of the orbital diamagnetic moment associated with the complete cyclotron orbits of the charged particles by the paramagnetic moment subtended by the incomplete orbits skipping the boundary in the opposite sense. Motivated by this crucial but subtle role of the boundary, we have simulated here the case of a finite but unbounded system, namely that of a charged particle moving on the surface of a sphere in the presence of an externally applied uniform magnetic field. Following a real space-time approach based on the classical Langevin equation, we have computed the orbital magnetic moment that now indeed turns out to be non-zero and has the diamagnetic sign. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of the possibility of finite classical diamagnetism in principle, and it is due to the avoided cancellation.

Cyclic plastic deformation characteristics of subgrade under moving train wheel load

Cyclic plastic deformation of subgrade and other engineered layers is generally not taken into account in the design of railway bridge transition zones, although the plastic deformation is the governing factor of frequent track deterioration. Actual stress behavior of fine grained subgrade/embankment layers under train traffic is, however, difficult to replicate using the conventional laboratory test apparatus and techniques. A new type of torsional simple shear apparatus, known as multi-ring shear apparatus, was therefore developed to evaluate the actual stress state and the corresponding cyclic plastic deformation characteristics of subgrade materials under moving wheel load conditions. Multi-ring shear test results has been validated using a theoretical model test results; the capability of the multi-ring shear apparatus for replicating the cyclic plastic deformation characteristics of subgrade under moving train wheel load conditions is thus established. This paper describes the effects of principal stress rotation (PSR) of the subgrade materials to the cyclic plastic deformation in a railroad and impacts of testing methods in evaluating the influence of principal stress rotation to the track deterioration of rail track.

Characteristics of Alfven surface waves along moving cylindrical plasma columns

The dispersive and stability characteristics of Alfven surface waves (ASW) along the boundary of the moving cylindrical plasma column, surrounded by a stationary medium embedded in a parallel magnetic field is studied. The nature of the symmetric and asymmetric modes on the interface parameters is also discussed.

Moving Up in the New Economy: Career Ladders for U.S. Workers

[Excerpt] This book is about restoring the upward mobility of U.S. workers. Specifically it is about the one workforce-development strategy that is currently aimed at exactly that goal – the strategy of creating (or re-creating) not just jobs but also career ladders. Career-ladder strategies aim to devise explicit pathways of occupational advancement.

The relationship between the determinants of rental housing satisfaction and considering moving in Finland

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to discuss the relation between dissatisfaction with housing conditions and considering moving among residents of Finnish rental multifamily buildings. The paper examines physical attributes, socioeconomic factors, and subjective opinions related to housing conditions and satisfaction with housing. Design/methodology/approach Logistic regression analysis is used to examine survey data to analyse which factors contribute to dissatisfaction with the housing unit and the apartment building and whether dissatisfaction is related to consideration of moving. Findings The findings indicate that dissatisfaction with the building and individual housing unit are associated with greater probability of considering moving. Satisfaction with kitchen, living room, storage, and building age are the most important indicators of satisfaction with the housing unit, and satisfaction with living room, bathroom, storage, and building age are associated with satisfaction with the apartment building. These are the areas in which landlords could invest in renovations to increase satisfaction in an attempt to reduce turnover. Research limitations/implications The study is conducted with Finnish data only. The sample is not a representative sample of the Finnish population. A longitudinal study would be needed to determine whether dissatisfied residents indending to move actually change residence. Originality/value This study is the first of its kind in the Finnish housing market. It tests a general model that has been suggested to be customized to local conditions. In addition, much of the research on this topic is more than 20 years old. Examination of the model under current housing and socioeconomic conditions is necessary to determine if relationships have changed over time.