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This paper reports on the findings of a visual text analysis of selected infographics and data visualisations used in news websites during the COVID-19 pandemic in Sydney, Australia. Infographics and data visualisations used in news website articles disseminated and communicated local and national information to the public about the COVID-19 pandemic and related social implications. For the first time live data, animation and interaction were used in reporting health and societal information to a general news readership, contributing to the knowledge base and visual literacy of the public. The information presented was not only clear but also aesthetically appealing. This paper examines the styles of news digital infographics and data visualisation of three longitudinal studies using lessons learned from Grainger "et al." (2016), Dick (2020) and Tufte (2001) and contextualises the context, narrative, aesthetics, communication, data, functionality and examines the collaboration between communication designers, journalists and the development team. The implications for communication design education are explored in the context of skills, tools and teamwork needed for future communication design students.

Presenting research findings outside of the form of a traditional research report requires different modes of making and communicating. This paper offers an account of how "The #FEAS Report," a satirical news video, was made to communicate the findings from interviews and a survey as part of the mixed-methods study, "Sexism, Higher Education, and COVID-19: The Australian Perspective" to a wider public. Three creative tactics for research communication were used: "DIY aesthetics," "humour," and "situated bodies." These communication tactics enabled the researchers to think differently about what research findings mean, and how to articulate them in ways that are intelligible. The paper shows how these tactics worked to bring findings to audiences beyond the academy and ask audiences within the academy to think differently about research reporting and knowledge communication. The paper considers how performing research in this way generates different conversations that compliment those started by more common ways of presenting research findings, and most importantly, how crucial it is for feminist researchers to make space for the creative within contemporary higher education.

In this paper, we show how children's creativity manifests in literary aesthetics and how they explore moral subjects as a result. Literary aesthetics involve a range of artistic elements or expressions within a textual work. Writers may use aesthetic properties to express individual appreciation or how people view the world, often in relation to moral values. This paper takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the relation between aesthetics and moral value in children's writing. First, we situate our discussion within the context of reflexivity theory, which framed the larger study from which these data are drawn. Second, we apply appraisal theory within the lens of reflexivity to analyse children's writing samples for their aesthetic representations of moral qualities. As a result of our study, we show how teachers may improve and complicate the way children practice literary aesthetics in their writing. We argue it is important for students to learn about aesthetics in writing as aesthetics are a key quality of literary expression and may educate readers on the perception and moral values of others.

Academic underachievement of students from disadvantaged backgrounds is an ongoing and unresolved problem. Schools serving vulnerable communities often fail to meaningfully engage their students who are often exposed to significant family and environmental adversities. However, where the educational landscape is overwhelmed with neoliberal processes of accountability and testing, education generally comes to be understood as a cognitive process with little attention to the bodily or affective dimensions of learning. This paper draws on new theoretical ideas in affect and embodiment to build a case for an embodied, affective and creative pedagogy for students who live with poverty and adversity. Specifically, I report on research that investigates how two teachers utilised "Creative and Body-based" (CBL) provocations to redesign curriculum for disadvantaged students in their sites. In utilising the analysis of two narrative portraits, I highlight examples of bodily affectivity as well as affective pedagogical practices that impact on students' capacity to learn and teachers' capacity to teach. Analysis suggests that embodied and creative approaches enable new forms of communication and learner identities through bodies, senses and imaginings. Such approaches provide much needed affective conditions that 'hook' students in, encourage dialogue and help them to realise their potential as learners. Outcomes of this work signal an epistemological and pedagogical shift toward understanding bodies and creativity as agents of learning and knowledge production. By engaging with notions of a 'learning body' potential exists to challenge neoliberal practices in complex classrooms and support young people to foster stronger connections, hope and a re-inspired aspiration to learn.

How do we dwell tenderly in the ruins of the modern university? This paper engages a hopeful, collaborative, and sensory methodology to imagine possibilities for research and researcher. As academic women navigating the decay of the neoliberal university amid the shadowy spectre of the 'ideal' academic, we explore our lived experiences, identities, and questions. For us, managing modernity's disorientation and dislocation means showing up differently, with new tools, new theoretical frames, and new ways of relating. From our experiential and aesthetic inquiry, tendrils of possibility for what research does, has been, is, and could be, are emerging. Our dwelling together (co-sensing in radical tenderness) helps us see beyond the thicket of institutional requirements towards a more hopeful and collective existence -- for if the sense of separation instilled by modernity is a social disease, healing must be a communal endeavour.

Global policy development in schooling often looks to solutions that embrace technology and articulate a 'what works' approach to practice. This paper takes as a case study the Australian Government's "Through Growth to Achievement" report on achieving school excellence. It analyses the report through the lens of 'sublimes', which provide insight into the way certain policy rhetoric can become reified. "Through Growth to Achievement" emphasises technological solutions which align with and reify an aesthetic notion of good teaching that draws on the 'what works' literature. This analysis argues that certain assumptions about technology, teacher practice and the 'evidence' for good policy are based on these reifications. A sublimes analysis makes these unspoken assumptions explicit and reveals the way they reinforce globalised policy approaches and foreclose others.

This paper develops a cosmopolitical approach to multi-species inquiry in environmental education and its associated research. Drawing on Isabelle Stengers' concepts of "etho-ecology" and an "ecology of practices", the paper explores ethical and political questions of what it means to think-with nonhuman animals as sentient creatures who participate (often unwillingly) in environmental science studies. The author argues that ecology as a scientific practice cannot be disentangled from a process of becoming-ecological in the field, including the affective concerns and ethico-esthetic values produced through encounters amongst people, nonhuman animals, technologies, and their associated milieus. This conceptual work is extended through etho-ecological accounts of a three-day field excursion with environmental science students and their lecturers in the intertidal zones of Bundjalung National Park in NSW, Australia.

In this paper, we analyse results from one classroom session within an 8-week program in which Year 10 students constructed 'trash' puppets of endangered Australian animals. In making the puppets and using them as part of a 'theatre in a suitcase' performance at Melbourne Zoo, students were expected to integrate both scientific and artistic goals to demonstrate knowledge of specific endangered species. In this process, students needed to learn how their more immediate, everyday positive and negative aesthetic responses could be made continuous with a scientific aesthetic to produce both a coherent puppet and an advocacy performance. Through micro-ethnographic practical epistemology analysis of video data of this session, we demonstrate how this mix of everyday and subject-specific aesthetic responses, judgements and intentions interacted to shape and promote students' learning in science. In addressing this multimodal and multi-purpose task, students learnt and applied science knowledge to a real-world issue of species endangerment.

This paper uses a Gwen Harwood poem to open up questions of "knowing" around the teaching of Literature. Following our own brief reading of the poem, we particularly discuss ways in which questions of knowing/knowledge have been considered in Literature teaching historically, such as: - the binary of "knowledge" and "experience" - the role of the cognitive in teaching/studying Literature - forms of knowing that include the aesthetic and affect - how knowledge might be "made" in the Literature classroom: the role of pedagogy and the question of "producing culture" The article concludes with a discussion of how such issues have arisen in a set of interviews with a small number of teachers in Australia and England. Their views on the teaching of Literature help us reflect on the knowledge issues opened up earlier in the article.

This paper examines Chinese migrant young people's lifestyles and physical activity experiences in relation to the values and cultural investments of their families in Australia. The data in this paper were taken from a larger-scale study underpinned by a critical and interpretive ethnographic method conducted in two school sites. The young people's lives were significantly shaped by dominant Chinese cultural norms and traditional notions of gender. Bourdieuian concepts are drawn upon to explain the (re)production of the Chinese young people's habitus cultivated at home. Based on the young people's pursuit of cultural capital as a consequence of familial values, discussion also focuses on the agency of these young people in relation to their lifestyle choices. Dominant discourses in the "talk" of these young people included their notions of excelling, hyper-investment in academic success and, especially for the girls, skin colour and safety. Traditional Chinese family power relations limited the choices these young people had regarding physical activity which was complicated by the cultural and social fluidity of their lived experiences. The inter-generational flow of habitus and capital of these Chinese migrant young people's families tended to privilege a particular set of discourses based on gender, race, social class and hierarchical practices that resonated with traditional Confucian philosophy.

This paper explores how aligned arts and play experiences can extend child and family engagement in a public outdoor space. The importance of outdoor play for children is strongly advocated and in response local governments provide playgrounds and recreational open spaces. To extend further the experiences afforded in such spaces some local governments now employ "play workers," whose role is to prompt exploration and facilitate connections. With the intention of animating an uninviting and underused outdoor public space, the ArtPlay Backyard program presented a series of artist-facilitated experiences that encouraged children and families to explore, interact and transform. Research into this program, undertaken through observations and in-situ interviews, mapped the views and actions of children, parents, early childhood professionals and artists. The study concluded that the program was highly engaging to families who were animated by "artful play": experiences guided by artists, who, acting like "play workers," stimulated imaginative, aesthetic, creative and social encounters with people, place, and materials.

Researchers navigating the ontological turn in educational research have increasingly looked to art as an alternative to conventional modes of qualitative inquiry. However, the rapprochement between art and post-qualitative research remains problematic. While some see this turn coinciding with established genealogies in arts-based research, others suggest that existing models of arts-based inquiry are largely incompatible with the radical onto-epistemological orientations associated with post-qualitative research. This paper argues that the integration of art into the social sciences is far from settled, while also offering a series of speculative propositions for an inhuman aesthetics that is responsive to the ontological turn. This inhuman theory of art is elaborated through Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy, and extended through an analysis of collaborative artworks produced by undergraduate visual art students. This leads to a consideration of how post-qualitative approaches might enable mutual activations among art, philosophy, and social research.

This paper explores the teaching of beauty therapy in the Australian Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector. It uses the theoretical concept of bio-power to examine how the body is compliant with intimate treatments in the name of beauty. Bio-power makes visible the anatomical and biological transformation and re-formation of the human body. Bio-power constructs and is in turn constructed by the work of beauty therapy teachers in the practice of transforming the body, regulating the physical functions of the body and disciplining the choices of teachers working with training packages. Through this conceptual framework, a unit of competency is analysed to determine the association of bio-power with two training packages when teaching beauty therapy. It will show that working intimately with the human body from the inner mechanisms at the cellular level to managing the therapist/client relationship is both physically and emotionally laborious. Consequently, the two training packages that are meant to frame and conceptualise this work may not provide adequate explanations of its complexity.

Introduction: Why was the study undertaken? What was the research question, the tested hypothesis or the purpose of the research? The research question is: What are the implications of disciplinary aesthetics when marine science meets art in educational research? Children in schools from Victoria, Australia were engaged in a series of marine science fieldtrips, workshops and lessons based on the Great Southern Reef, a temperate marine environment of Australia. They created drawings based on provocations, to depict their knowledge of marine species, before and after these education experiences. Methods: When, where, and how was the study done? What materials were used or who was included in the study groups (patients, etc.)? This paper shares the mixed methodology used by focusing on the qualitative methods used, that arose out of a need to understand the role of aesthetics in this research project. This paper documents the analysis of data that included children's drawings and dialogue between researchers and children from interviews. We discuss insights into the role of aesthetics that were revealed in the visual and narrative data from perspectives of children's learning and how the researchers were able to understand this. These findings are discussed considering the teaching intentions and procedures used, the importance of this multimodal approach to research that revealed aesthetics of science, visual art and language in education. Results: What answer was found to the research question; what did the study find? Was the tested hypothesis true? The research reveals the important role drawing has when trying to understand the students' varying degrees of understanding marine science education. Variables include: their prior experience with marine environments, students' drawing abilities, stylistic elements (that can render an image 'confident' or 'sketchy'), compositional devices and use of perspective that their drawings depict (looking at a pier from underwater or through snorkel goggles). It also includes interpretations and explanations of their drawings and other uses of language such as the use of written labels to reinforce or clarify parts of their drawings. Discussion: What might the answer imply and why does it matter? How does it fit in with what other researchers have found? What are the perspectives for future research? This research reveals the important role of multi-modal approaches in science learning and the significant and dependent role of visual art and words, for students to communicate their learnt content knowledge. It highlights the aesthetic experiences that must be taken into consideration when teaching, learning and when understanding what has been learnt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have a responsibility as science educators to work with young people to enact education that enables collective rebalancing of relationships between humans and more-than-humans that are disturbed by human-induced climate change. However, to date, climate change education has not been prioritized in school science at a policy, curricula, classroom and community level, due to an aesthetic which does not sufficiently value climate science or recognize the social impacts of science as part of the discipline. We argue in this conceptual research paper from a pragmatist perspective that an aesthetic shift is required to include science as part of climate change education as a transdisciplinary endeavor that focuses on addressing socio-ecological challenges through student agency and community action. We explore the synergy between science education aesthetics and climate change aesthetics as we advocate for a transformative aesthetics of climate change education. We do so through a process of reflection on and conceptualization of our stories of climate change education in Australia. We propose that such an aesthetic (how we ought to value) should not be considered in isolation but rather that it forms the basis for the ethics (how we ought to conduct ourselves) and logic (how we ought to think) of young people being with us in a community of inquiry in the Anthropocene. We argue that we (teachers and students) ought to conduct ourselves in loving ways toward human and more-than-human kin that necessitates that we think as a community of inquiry to address the challenges of the Anthropocene. In doing so we suggest that we can realize a radical pragmatist meliorism for climate change education that is underpinned by the three normative sciences, the most foundational of which is aesthetics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I use an ecologies approach to present reflections on the history of disability and deaf theatre in Australia, in light of the distinctive local policy, industry, and production frameworks that have supported or failed to support its development in particular directions. After tracing and categorising developments in the field to date, I signal specific policy changes in the local landscape and specific impacts these policy changes could have on the way we conceive, categorise, and fund different types of disability theatre in Australia in the years to come.

Purpose: Employee satisfaction is critical in any workplace. Research suggests that the environment that people work in can contribute greatly to levels of satisfaction as well as productivity. Limited research exists, however, on how the aesthetics of a workplace impact both employee satisfaction and well-being. This paper aims to identify whether the aesthetics in a workplace environment at one university influences employee satisfaction and well-being. Design/methodology/approach: This paper shares data from a survey that determined whether the workplace environment at one university in Queensland, Australia supports its workers' job satisfaction and well-being. The survey was distributed amongst all staff at three campuses with a total of 73 usable responses. Findings: Findings showed that there is a strong need for an aesthetically pleasing workplace and its positive impacts on employees. In addition, an aesthetically pleasing workplace was perceived to have a positive impact on the respondents' likelihood of spending more time at work, hence, a greater sense of satisfaction. The respondents indicated a moderate level of satisfaction with the aesthetics of their workspace and environment including feeling safe. Research limitations/implications: Implications show that further improvements could be attained in the workplace through the addition of natural lighting, plants and artwork. The employees also indicated they would like more control over the aesthetics of the work environment. Originality/value: This research is original as it was not known whether aesthetics in the workplace influenced worker satisfaction and/or well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the language of the 2009 NSW Stage 6 English Syllabus. I argue that the language of the syllabus aims to create two distinct subjects: Subject English, that is, what students learn; and the subject position of its students, that is, what students are expected to become. Analysis reveals themes of personal development and moral regulation are deeply embedded within the subject and have an important influence on how the subject positions itself and its students. Systemic Functional Linguistics is used to examine six pages of the Syllabus, focusing in particular on the document's Rationale section. A "transitivity" and "appraisal" analysis reveal that the syllabus document assigns the subject a difficult set of goals; ranging from developing communicative competence and literary knowledge, to creating a sensitive, aesthetically appreciative, reflective individual. An analysis of Commands within the syllabus shows that the language places much of the responsibility with the students. The implications of this analysis for teaching and learning are then discussed; in particular, the need for teachers of English to cognisant of the values and aims that are embedded within the syllabus and the subject.

Ralph Balson (1890–1964) was an English plumber and house painter who emigrated to Australia in 1913 and subsequently became a key member of Sydney’s artistic avant-garde. He is credited with having the first solo exhibition of purely abstract painting in Australia in 1941. Despite his role in developing Australian non-objective painting, Balson remained principally a house painter, working on his art practice at weekends. In 1955 he retired on a state pension and became a full-time artist. Balson’s artistic education and methods were critically shaped by his working-class background. He did not travel abroad until 1960 and was an avid auto-didact. His materials, palette, techniques and compositional strategies were likewise informed by his trade. Balson’s profession as a painterdecorator made him conspicuous within the predominantly middle-class Sydney art scene, though his painting partner Grace Crowley considered it an advantage in their pursuit of constructive painting. This paper explores the impact of Balson’s trade on his trajectory towards pure abstraction. While his art was at odds with the predominantly figurative mode of class-conscious art in Australian Modernism, we argue that it is embedded in the experience of class through its creative adaptation of labour into aesthetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes up Howard's (1999) suggestion that sentimentality can be a lens on self-world relations. It focuses on human-bird relations in a Facebook site dedicated to Australian wild birds: Birds in Backyards (Australia). We argue that the traditional ideal of intellectual and affective distance through which critiques of sentimentality are still so often couched is not very useful in understanding and valuing the dynamic, interactive and immersive forms of social media. A study of Birds in Backyards suggests that there quite different ways that the love of wild birds can manifest and that sentimentality is not inimical to the generation of a community of care for, and celebration of, birds. Moreover, an older assumption that sentimentality might be the opposite of, or an impediment to, practical action seems hard to justify in the discursively and emotionally complex milieux of the digital age. Today, there is no place for an opposition between feeling and doing, and scientific action often requires and mobilizes emotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early years of the discovery of Indigenous bark paintings in Australia, anthropologists regarded this artform as part of a static and unchanging tradition. Inspired by the images of Arnhem Land rock art and ceremonial body design, the bark paintings were innovatively adapted by Indigenous Australians for the bark medium. Today, this art is recognised for its dynamism and sophistication, offering a window into how the artists engaged with the world. Within the context of recent art and anthropological scholarship, the paiFntings are understood as artefacts of Indigenous 'agency'. They are products of the intentional action of artists through which power is enacted and from which change has followed. This paper reveals how the paintings were influential to their audiences and the discourses arising from their display through the agency of the artists who made them, and the curators who selected them. It underlines how Indigenous agency associated with the aesthetic and semantics values of bark painting has been and continues to be a powerful mechanism for instigating cultural, social, economic and political change. As such, it points to the wealth of Indigenous agency yet to be documented in the other collections of bark painting that are held in institutions in Australia and throughout the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the professionalization of literary studies in Australian universities. It traces ways in which its interdisciplinary formations have been shaped not only by the cultural contexts of colonialism and postcolonialism, but also by institutional factors and budgetary pressures. Nevertheless, it argues this framework has also created intellectual opportunities for positively reshaping the subject so as to bring it into discursive conversation with cognate fields. It suggests that the repositioning of Australian literature and literary studies in relation to World Literature may offer the prospect of opening up the field for the benefit of scholars the world over. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Harvey N. and Dew, R.E.C. 2016. Coastal Impacts of Onshore Wind Farms in Australia In: Vila-Concejo, A.; Bruce, E.; Kennedy, D.M., and McCarroll, R.J. (eds.), Proceedings of the 14th International Coastal Symposium (Sydney, Australia). Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue, No. 75, pp. 992 - 996. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208. The global expansion of wind-generated power has resulted in a rapid proliferation of both onshore and offshore wind farms, particularly in Europe. Australia like the rest of the world has experienced a rapid increase in wind power over the last decade but unlike Europe, its coastal wind farms are all located onshore mostly in the southern part of the country where wind energy resources are high. Around half of the wind farms are located in rural coastal locations. This paper discusses the various environmental, social and political issues associated with coastal wind farm development in Australia by assessing the coastal impact of wind farms and the adequacy of coastal management strategies for dealing with such impacts. The paper concludes that the technological pace of coastal wind farm development has outstripped the development control process, which has resulted in a largely unforeseen cumulative impact on the Australian coast. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes up Todd McGowan's rethinking of psychoanalytic film theory to consider what such approaches might disclose in the work of a national cinema. I focus on Australia's national cinema where it is caught, I argue, between the Imaginary gaze of an aestheticized nationalism and a traumatic 'Real' gaze that disturbs the field of cultural vision. I show how Ted Kotcheff's 1971 Wake in Fright introduces the Real gaze to Australia's cinematic vocabulary where it is taken up in the film Renaissance and disturbs the aesthetic inquiry into nationalism with the traumatic Real frequently repressed in national discourses. Here I suggest that if a national cinema can be seen to function as a form of 'public dreaming,' this Real gaze functions as a national symptom that, as in the psychoanalytic clinic, troubles the story the subject tells about itself. After mapping the emergence of this Real gaze in Wake in Fright, I consider where this visual trope is reworked in more recent Gothic landscape films, such as Joel Anderson's Lake Mungo (2008), before considering how post-Mabo history films reverse the terms of this gaze such that what haunts the national Imaginary is put before the viewer without relent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aesthetic responses to landscape may be emotional, sensory, or experiential, or a combination; it is a difficult value to identify and assess. This paper considers changing perceptions of the aesthetic values of the Yarra Valley landscape using a heritage methodology that involves examining artistic, creative, and published sources accounting for a lengthy period of changing land use. Scenic quality mapping, where available, is used as a support, and extensive reference is made to Australian impressionist art. Artworks for Yarra Valley landscapes may be considered as being among the cultural heritage indicators of significance and there is a new aesthetic of land art in private venues for the visiting public. The paper also illustrates how aesthetic values have been more broadly recognised in the post- World War II era and become the domain of planning authorities as well as artists. It is for regional planners to be aware of and maintain these aesthetic values in the landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how culturally displaced brand owners help construct imagined worlds with their selection and use of brand visual aesthetics (BVA). Using the theoretical lens of habitus, we focus on the role of owners' design-related decisions in this process and use brand owners of Middle Eastern origin as the research context. Through a multiple-case study with five distinct small-to-medium-sized enterprises in Australia, our research finds how habitus shapes an owner's selection and use of BVA to help construct an imagined Middle Eastern identity through dimensions of autobiography, heritage, and aesthetic sensibility. These BVA dimensions are represented on a continuum of incremental and radical innovation in relation to the owner's cultural origin. This research contributes to research on brands constructing imagined worlds by helping us better appreciate the role of a brand owner's cultural origin in designing connections to markets and spaces with visual aesthetics in a brand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our Ancestors, Our History, Our Lost Culture was a devised theatre performance that I developed with women inside Brisbane Women's Correctional Centre (BWCC) Australia in 2017. The performance was based on a memoir from the Stolen Generations: the thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children who were forcibly removed from tribal homelands and separated from family in Australia throughout the early nineteenth century up until the 1970s. The intergenerational trauma of these forced removals continues, as do the wider structural inequalities brought about by the colonial project, including the crisis of Indigenous over-incarceration. Indigenous leaders refer to this as the "torment of powerlessness" (Referendum Council, 2017) and believe that there must first be a process of truth-telling before healing and reconciliation can occur. An example of Applied Theatre as Research (ATAR), the purpose of the project was to investigate how a group of incarcerated women would engage aesthetically in representing a story from the Stolen Generations; and how applied theatre in this contemporary carceral context might be used as a mode of truth-telling. This paper describes how the project reflected an aesthetics of truthtelling, where Indigenous and non-Indigenous women came together to interpret and represent the complexities of this troubling history, and to gain a deeper understanding of its place in contemporary Australian culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the uniquely Australian leisure activity of calisthenics. The term 'calisthenics' has multiple applications; initially, it described a variety of exercise prescribed for physical and mental health. Australian calisthenics defies easy definition, representing a confluence of sport, music and dance; it is a highly structured competitive activity, affording the opportunity for a study of bodies, spaces and places. Individuals' movements are nestled within the framework of the team, and the synchronous corporeality that is a feature of each calisthenics discipline serves as a stimulus for spatial awareness and the construction of a shared physicality. Calisthenics provides an ideal exemplar of various kinds of leisure work, including somatic, emotional, cultural and community-building labour. Competitions underpin the activity, producing aesthetic strictures and perpetuating the requirement for considerable economic investment. Thus, the article represents a multi-faceted analysis of an important aspect of Australia's leisure and social histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Trash, dirt, glitch' offers an introduction to a cluster devoted to trash, dirt and glitch – concepts that, in aesthetic and artistic domains, firmly merit joint exploration. In fashion and urban design, music, art and other aesthetic practices, the trashy, the dirty and the glitchy interconnect in complex choreographies, in discourses and practices where they are framed as benefit rather than bother. For this cluster, the authors asked four scholars in media, design and fashion to examine the interconnections between trash, dirt and glitch as affirmatively charged categories. They do so through in-depth studies of 'dirt(y)' and glitch-based sound-making practices and media art in Australia (Caleb Kelly); German electronic and glitch music (Jakko Kemper); dirt and trash aesthetics in sneaker fashion and (especially but not only) US-based grunge subcultures (Ekaterina Kulinicheva); and discourses of dirt and disorder in the creative industry in Russia (Margarita Kuleva). This introduction contextualizes their findings and offers tools to theorize the present-day interest in dirt-, trash-, and glitch-based aesthetics as an imperfect turn. This turn we envision not as an unprecedented shift, but as the latest in a series of socio-technologically motivated historical imperfect turns. The imperfect turn that we witness today is not without its flaws – but, as we argue below, it can facilitate important social interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of innovation for architectural products in the building industry increases due to global competitive markets and users' increased value given to the visual aesthetics of products. Visual appearance is crucial in architecture and product design and influences users' product choices in many ways. Substantial research on innovation exists concerning users' purchasing, adopting, and recommending it to others, but little research investigates the link between product innovation and aesthetic preference. This gap in knowledge prompted our investigation. Quantitative analysis of a survey of 114 respondents from Australia was conducted in this study to examine whether innovation plays a significant role in perceiving the aesthetic preference of an architectural product more than other visual appearances. Standard multiple regression using SPSS V28 was applied for statistical data analysis. Results uncovered that innovation explained the highest percentage of variance in overall aesthetic preference, and the innovativeness of a product strongly influences the visual appearance and aesthetic preference. The findings of this study offer new insight into the level of innovation for new product development where visual appearance is of high importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The largest underwater sculpture in the world, the 'Coral Greenhouse' by artist Jason deCaires Taylor, was commissioned by the Museum of Underwater Art and installed at John Brewer Reef, Australia, in December 2019. The planning process required certified engineering design drawings associated with design life, durability and suitability of materials, and baseline ecological surveys. Following approval, the operational phase required annual monitoring of substrate, ecology, social values, and marine debris. We geo-referenced three permanent transects and designed a before/after rapid monitoring assessment of substrate, fish, and invertebrates. Substrate surveys indicated 11% concrete and 89% sand. Fish surveys indicated significant increases of diversity and abundance, with 12 species and 65 individuals recorded in 2018 compared to 46 species and 365 individuals recorded in 2022. Macroinvertebrate species maintained no significant trends in abundance, species richness, and diversity with respect to time between 2018 and 2022. We monitored coral restoration and natural recruitment at the site, measuring aesthetics, survivorship of planted corals, and coral recruitment. Of 131 corals transplanted in March 2020, survivorship was 100% at 1 month, 92% at 6 months, and 91.6% at 12 months. Hard and soft corals were recruited to the structure at a density of 8.35 hard corals/m2 and 10.9 soft corals/m2 over 26 months. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay outlines the contribution that Australia-based scholars have made to aesthetic politics: the exploration of creative and interdisciplinary approaches to International Relations. The struggle to legitimise aesthetic insights is indicative of a larger challenge: how academic disciplines discipline thought in ways that constrains innovative scholarly contributions and their potential to address concrete political problems. The essay advances an argument in favour of seeing beyond the discipline of International Relations. The international is not some higher-order realm that is separate from the rest of the social and political world. The most pressing challenges, from terrorism to climate change, are too complex to be understood as uniquely international phenomena. They implicate the local as much as the global, the psychological as much as the institutional and the relational as much as the structural. Finding practical and policy-relevant solutions to complex transnational problems requires insights from fields as diverse as psychology, neuroscience, literature, demography art and economics, to name just a few. Needed, then, is greater acceptance and support for creative approaches that can understand and address political challenges from multiple parallel perspectives and without having to adhere to preconceived disciplinary conventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space represents the largest international gathering of performance designers, researchers and academics. When the first Quadrennial was held in 1967, a dozen Australian stage and costume designers travelled around the globe to showcase Australian scenography and connect with the international community. Fifty years later, PQ 2019 marked half a century of Australia's involvement in this pivotal international event. During this time, national scenographic practice has evolved in response to Australia's unique geographic, cultural and political context, as well as international developments in the field. This article celebrates the fifty-year anniversary of Australia's involvement with the Quadrennial through a critical examination of the evolutions in our national performance design aesthetic: what we term our national scenographic identity. Combining previously unpublished images and historical information from the PQ Archives with critical reflections of the 2019 exhibition, this article identifies various markers of Australian scenographic identity as evident through our involvement with the Quadrennial. From here, the discussion adopts an international focus as we examine two design traits emblematic of contemporary practice as evident at PQ 19 - immersive scenographies and performance technologies - and how each relates to and impacts Australian design. This article offers new insight into Australian scenography through the lens of the Prague Quadrennial and furthers the national conversation on performance design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses amenities that are shared by anyone in public space, such as public barbecues in Australia. The idea is generalized to a range of domestic-related amenities, from kitchen-related to bathroom-related, etc. As these domestic-related amenities relate to usage that is typically conducted within a dwelling, the amenity and its architecture can be considered a "pocket of privacy" in public space (Pocket). Our discussion explores how these publicly shared domestic-related amenities can address particular needs of society in the context of their economic, symbolic, aesthetic and ethical value. Specifically, we suggest that Pockets productively address the politics of public space and private place in three key ways: through the negotiation of the presence of people in public space, through the negotiation of individual and collective usage of the amenity, and through the gap between the symbolic and economic power created by the usage of these amenities. We conclude by proposing planning principles that may enable the economic, symbolic, aesthetic and ethical value of these amenities to be fully realized in ways that balance the politics of public space and private place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Relationships between several built environment factors and physical activity and walking behavior are well established, but internationally-comparable built environment measures are lacking. The Microscale Audit of Pedestrian Streetscapes (MAPS)-Global is an observational measure of detailed streetscape features relevant to physical activity that was developed for international use. This study examined the inter-observer reliability of the instrument in five countries. Methods: MAPS-Global was developed by compiling concepts and items from eight environmental measures relevant to walking and bicycling. Inter-rater reliability data were collected in neighborhoods selected to vary on geographic information system (GIS)-derived macro-level walkability in five countries (Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Hong Kong-China, and Spain). MAPS-Global assessments (n = 325) were completed in person along a ≥ 0.25 mile route from a residence toward a non-residential destination, and a commercial block was also rated for each residence (n = 82). Two raters in each country rated each route independently. A tiered scoring system was created that summarized items at multiple levels of aggregation, and positive and negative valence scores were created based on the expected effect on physical activity. The intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) was computed for scales and selected items using one-way random models. Results: Overall, 86.6% of individual items and single item indicators showed excellent agreement (ICC ≥ 0.75), and 13.4% showed good agreement (ICC = 0.60–0.74). All subscales and overall summary scores showed excellent agreement. Six of 123 items were too rare to compute the ICC. The median ICC for items and scales was 0.92 with a range of 0.50–1.0. Aesthetics and social characteristics showed lower ICCs than other sub-scales, but reliabilities were still in the excellent range (ICC ≥ 0.75). Conclusion: Evaluation of inter-observer reliability of MAPS-Global across five countries indicated all items and scales had “good” or “excellent” reliability. The results demonstrate that trained observers from multiple countries were able to reliably conduct observations of both residential and commercial areas with the new MAPS-Global instrument. Next steps are to evaluate construct validity in relation to physical activity in multiple countries and gain experience with using MAPS-Global for research and practice applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]