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[In Press] Racialised queer Chinese migrants in Australia : entanglements of queerness and Chineseness
No full textThis article considers what it means to be queer, Chinese and diasporic in white settler colonial Australian society. Considering the narratives of newly arrived young queer People’s Republic of China’s Chinese immigrants and older queer Chinese second- generation descendants of earlier China-born settler-immigrants, this paper asks specifically how these subjects negotiate the boundary of sexual other of whiteness and racial other of straightness. We interrogate the pernicious binary of the sexual other being white and racial other being straight and explore how queer Chinese migrants negotiate their racialised and queer existence. This article raises important questions on how the subjects’ elaborate display of Chineseness may run the risk of unintentionally reinforcing the very racialising and orientalising frames they seek to reject. We conclude with a call to recognise dominant structures and their impacts and reflect upon our resistance efforts where we do not end up unwittingly reproducing these structures. Instead, we need to consider how we may work to abolish such structures that hurt us all, albeit differently and unequally
Reducing vocational education inequality for students from refugee backgrounds
No full textVocational decisions made at school have significant long term impacts on young people’s life chances, their opportunities for securing decent jobs and economic growth for themselves, their families and communities. In the short term, their aspirations dictate the decisions they make about educational pathways in post-compulsory years of schooling and vocational and higher education. For young people from already marginalised backgrounds, the quality of support they have in making these decisions is crucially important. This paper examines a rapidly
expanding vocational education program specifically designed for students with refugee backgrounds that was codeveloped between a state education authority and a community service provider in Sydney, Australia. Through an ecological understanding of individuals as nested within interrelated networks, this paper explores the perspectives of stakeholders ranging from the educators, careers teachers, employers, civic partners, and, crucially, the young people themselves in order to determine whether and through what means key program elements meet the needs of students from a refugee background and where gaps in the program ecology need to be addressed
Evaluating the feasibility of the Education, Movement, and Understanding (EMU) program : a primary school-based physical education program integrating Indigenous games alongside numeracy and literacy skills
No full textPurpose : The aim of this study was to develop, implement, and evaluate a 16-lesson integrated physical education program focusing on Indigenous games: Education, Movement, and Understanding (EMU). Method : The study aligned with current physical education, English, and mathematics syllabi and involved 105 children (9–12 years) from two primary schools (Awabakal Country, Australia; 2020). Children participated in sixteen 45–60 min EMU lessons over 8 weeks, with feasibility and preliminary efficacy outcomes assessed via mixed methods. Results : EMU was delivered successfully by the research team, with excellent student and teacher evaluations ( M = 4.36–5.0 across 20 items). Improvements resulted for children’s cardiorespiratory fitness ( d = 0.37, p = .001), enjoyment of sport ( d = 0.27, p = .024), physical self-perceptions ( d = 0.27, p = .043), and academic achievement (spelling d = 0.91, addition d = 0.40, subtraction d = 0.53, and division d = 0.68). No significant changes in well-being or multiplication scores resulted. Conclusion : Our results provide support for the feasibility and preliminary efficacy of EMU as a beneficial and enjoyable integrated primary school physical education program
Schelling, Freedom, and the Immanent Made Transcendent: From Philosophy of Nature to Environmental Ethics
No full textThis book offers a cutting-edge interpretation of the philosophy of F.W.J. Schelling by critically reconsidering the interpretations of some of his “successors.” It argues that Schelling’s philosophy should be read as an ontology of immanence, highlighting its relevance for ongoing debates on ethics and freedom. The book builds on a key notion from Schelling’s Philosophy of Revelation where he outlines the process through which transcendence must return to immanence in order to be grasped and understood. The author identifies Jaspers, Heidegger, and Deleuze as the main interpreters of Schelling’s philosophical activity, highlighting their relevance for subsequent Schelling scholarship. Heidegger and Jaspers refer to Schelling’s philosophy in negative terms, namely as an incomplete and unviable philosophical system, whereas Deleuze holds the immanent core of Schelling’s ontological discourse in high regard. The author’s analysis demonstrates that reading Schelling’s philosophy as an ontology of immanence not only avoids Heidegger’s and Jaspers’s criticisms but is also more fitting to Schelling’s original meaning. Accordingly, his reading allows us to fully grasp Schelling’s thought in all its strength and consistency: as a philosophy that avoids metaphysical abstractions and maintains the concreteness of concepts like God, nature, freedom by binding them to a solid and material account of Being. Finally, the author uses Schelling to propose an innovative reading of freedom as a matter of resistance, and of philosophy as an activity whose main purpose is that of seeking the actual extent and place of (human) life and freedom within nature. The author originally emphasises the relevance of these conclusions on contemporary debates in Postcolonial Critical Theory and Environmental Ethics. Schelling, Freedom, and the Immanent Made Transcendent. From Philosophy of Nature to Environmental Ethics will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in 19th-century Continental philosophy, German idealism, and Postcolonial Critical Theory and Environmental Ethics
Autonomous inspection and construction of civil infrastructure using robots
No full textWith rapid population growth worldwide, there is a high demand for new construction and inspection of civil structures, which is challenged by skilled worker shortage, and by inefficient and expensive manual construction and inspection practices. Therefore, it is imperative to develop faster, more economical, and sustainable construction and inspection methods. In recent years, robotic technologies have gained attraction in automating the construction and inspection process. Modular construction using robots has shown great potential in replacing the traditional design, fabrication, and construction to the next industry standard, where higher quality control, precision design, economical transportation, faster on-site construction, less material waste, less site disturbance, and higher utilization of construction material can be achieved. Robot-aided inspection using various types of sensing and control units has shown promising results in replacing traditional manual inspection, which can reduce the cost, and improve efficiency and consistency. In this chapter, the current development of robot-aided construction and inspection methods is first reviewed. Then, a detailed methodology for robotic construction and inspection is described to provide a theoretical basis. Finally, to further demonstrate the applicability of robots in automated construction and inspection, three case studies, including automatic construction using mobile cranes, and autonomous inspection using micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), are presented. The results indicate that the use of robots with other appropriate control and sensing units can successfully achieve different desired tasks such as autonomous navigation, mapping, construction, and inspection of civil structures
Important-data-based DoS attack mechanism and resilient H∞ filter design for networked T-S fuzzy systems
No full textThis article is concerned with the security problems for networked Takagi–Sugeno (T–S) fuzzy systems with asynchronous premise constraints. The primary objective of this article is twofold. First, a novel important-data-based (IDB) denial-of-service (DoS) attack mechanism is proposed from the perspective of the adversary for the first time to reinforce the destructive effect of the DoS attacks. Different from most existing DoS attack models, the proposed attack mechanism can utilize the information of packets, evaluate the importance degree of packets, and only attack the most “important” ones. As such, a larger system performance degradation can be expected. Second, corresponding to the proposed IDB DoS mechanism, a resilient H∞ fuzzy filter is designed from the defender’s point of view to alleviate the negative effect of the attack. Furthermore, since the defender does not know the attack parameter, an algorithm is designed to estimate it. In a word, a unified attack-defense framework is developed in this article for networked T–S fuzzy systems with asynchronous premise constraints. With the help of the Lyapunov functional method, sufficient conditions are successfully established to compute the desired filtering gains and ensure the performance of the filtering error system. Finally, two examples are exploited to demonstrate the destructiveness of the proposed IDB DoS attack and the usefulness of the developed resilient H∞ filter
Intelligent controller optimizing structural performance and control devices
No full textThis chapter is dedicated to exploring the bearing of a control system governing the input current to the control device on the position and number of devices incorporated into a structure. The device placements and controller parameters are derived using a combinatorial optimization technique as the number and location of control devices are also important for effective structural performance against dynamic forces. Because it is impractical to install dampers on every section, optimizing this parameter is an important task. This study aims to develop an embedded controller that looks to integrate the control device alignment strategy with adaptive semi-active controller. Single control objectives are selected for integrated control strategies and correspondingly compared with traditional genetic-based algorithms using a H2/LQG algorithm with clipped optimal controller, to ascertain the effectiveness of the controllers. Next, experimental verification of integrated control strategy for multiple magnetorheological (MR) damper-controlled structures is conducted on a shake table. The optimal position of MR dampers and corresponding control gains obtained during mathematical simulation is assigned to the structure and the controller. The structure is subjected to scaled ground excitations and tested for different configurations of 1, 2, and 3 MR dampers with optimal control gains assigned based on proposed control strategies. Furthermore, the application of the proposed integrated controller on a benchmark structure has been discussed
Secure stabilization of switched T-S fuzzy systems with mixed delay via mode-dependent event-triggered control
No full textThis article considers a sort of continuous-time switched T–S fuzzy systems, in which each subsystem switches based on the mode-dependent average dwell time and transition probability and the mixed delay includes time-varying and infinite-time distributed delay. An event-triggered controller (ETC) with mode-dependent random deception attacks is put forward such that the considered system realizes exponential stabilization almost surely (ES a.s.). The ETC is not only mode-dependent but also excludes Zeno behavior automatically with tunable parameters to adjust the event-triggering (ET) numbers according to practical needs. By using the ergodic theory and designing Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional, two criteria are set up to ensure the ES a.s. It is interesting to discover that the ETC is not necessary to control each mode to be stable and the dwell time of an unstable mode can be very large, which greatly reduces the conservatism and saves the control cost. Moreover, the weights of ET mechanism and control gains are obtained for all the switching modes by solving linear matrix inequalities. A simulation example is given to illustrate the merits of theoretical analysis
Breaking the racial silence : putting racial literacy to work in Australia
No full textRace structures the lives of Indigenous peoples and other negatively racialized people in Australia. The language of race permeates institutions, workplaces, and is embedded in everyday life. Racial literacy as pedagogical praxis resists the racial contract that secures whiteness as a structure of possessive power. We explore the state of racial literacy in Australian education, and the obstructions and opportunities for educators to do anti-racism work. To this end, we draw on the preliminary findings from an ongoing research project, Breaking the Racial Silence, and use them to inform a theoretical framework for conceptualizing educators’ racial literacy practices. We bring to the fore effective strategies, practices, and programmes used to interrogate race and racism. Despite the efforts of educators, racial literacy in formal and informal education is oftentimes suppressed and concealed by languages and practices that sustain the practices and pedagogies of whiteness