13553 research outputs found
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Complementary Committees: Conflict and Co-operation in Legislative Scrutiny in Aotearoa New Zealand
No full textIn Aotearoa New Zealand, parliamentary subject select committees are seen as the ‘engine rooms’ of parliament. Here, detailed scrutiny of executive legislative proposals is conducted by cross-party groups of Members of Parliament with institutionalised mechanisms for public engagement. Following the introduction of the Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) electoral system, significant scholarship examined the internal workings of parliament, including committees. Generally, these works positively evaluated reform as shifting the balance of power from the executive towards the legislature in contrast to the executive dominance under the First Past the Post electoral system. Over the past twenty years, further change has occurred in parliament, including the first single-party majority government under MMP and significant increases in the numbers of public submissions to select committees. Despite this, scholarship on select committees has largely stalled.In this thesis, I revise our understanding of select committees in Aotearoa New Zealand. I undertake a mixed-methods within-case evaluation of: 1) committees’ capacity to constrain the executive from making policy unilaterally; 2) committees’ exercise of their capacity to constrain; and 3) the deliberative, representative, and epistemic factors influencing committee operation. To do this, I analyse the nine Reviews of Standing Orders between 1995 and 2020, all 1503 reports made by committees on bills between 1996 and 2023, and conduct 35 interviews with actors involved in the legislative scrutiny process. Ultimately, I argue committees perform a ‘complementary’ mode of scrutiny, blending elements of Mulgan’s (1994) liberal constitutionalist and democratic party models of the proper role of a legislature. Committees seek to improve the form of bills, with high rates of unanimously supported recommended amendments where committees have engaged in cross-party negotiation. However, strong party discipline and increasing rates of government majorities on committees over successive terms of parliament mean these amendments typically sit within parameters acceptable to the executive; committees rarely recommend Government bills not pass at all. Committees neither wholly facilitate the desires of the executive nor strongly challenge the executive in its legislative proposals. This has significant implications for how we understand democracy in Aotearoa New Zealand: select committees can act as strong checks on the executive but are rarely willing to perform this role.</p
Making Space for Risk: Sex, Gender, and Trans Women’s Use of Oestrogen in Aotearoa
No full textCertain hormones, commonly referred to as ‘sex hormones’ are given key roles in the creation and regulation of contemporary biological, medical and social understandings of sex and gender. Taking risk as both a material reality and conceptual framework, this thesis examines how one of these hormones, oestrogen, operates as a socio-cultural and biological object, expanding on the relationship between hormones, sex, gender, physical space and social life. I draw on nine semi-structured interviews and four secondary go-alongs with trans women from across Aotearoa who use oestrogen, examining how these women navigate and rework the risks they encounter accessing and using pharmaceutical oestrogen and highlighting how these risks are shaped by the physical spaces they occur within. Drawing together literature from Science and Technology Studies, Medical Anthropology, and Queer Studies I interrogate how medical systems render oestrogen (as a synthetic hormone) as ‘risky’ and how this idea of risk is mobilised as a regulatory force to ‘manage’ trans bodies in different spaces. I show how the management of risk intersects with the ways physical space operates as a regulatory, structural force for sex/gender presentation in the trans community. In queering risk, I posit that when risk is imposed on trans bodies, embracing risk can become a necessity. It is in agentively choosing to take on certain medical risks that trans women can live the lives they desire.</p
Playlists in Music Therapy: Using Participant-Selected Playlists to Inform Student Music Therapy Practice.
No full textThe purpose of this research was to examine the use of participant-selected playlists (PSPs) within an active student music therapy practice. The study focused on the music therapy playlists of two participants - one adolescent and one young adult, both attending individual music therapy sessions at a regional centre. The guiding research question was: ‘Playlists in music therapy: How did a student music therapist use participant-selected playlists to inform therapeutic practice?’ A pragmatic action research process was followed, providing a context-sensitive approach that facilitated reflexive practice by the researcher/therapist. The research involved three cycles from which reflexive thematic analysis was used to interpret the data. The first cycle suggested PSPs challenged and extended therapist perceptions of their use in practice, while a musical exploration of the most frequently used songs indicated PSPs allowed participants to express themselves through the music and direct the intention of their music therapy. The second cycle added support to these initial findings, showing PSPs offered a way for participants to communicate their feelings or goals, as well as being a powerful means to encourage agency and confidence. The third and final cycle explored the process of active listening by the therapist. This work was framed around music therapist Colin Lee’s description of active listening as being an important receptive role that was not passive, but one in which the ‘listener’ contributed to the creativity of the musical experience by actively resonating with it (Lee, 2016). This cycle highlighted the potential of embodied responsiveness and silence, while also raising awareness of sociocultural assumptions. While further research is needed, the importance of the reciprocal interactions PSPs can ignite and facilitate between the therapist and the participant was emphasised in conclusion.</p
Making Dis / Aggregation
No full textThis thesis proposes research using two scales that run through the work: the project scale and the portfolio scale. The broader motive behind this research is to observe my creative portfolio through a body of work, making design tendencies explicit knowledge. The research looks at current anthropogenic water issues, using Hawkes Bay as a vehicle to test answers and understand implications. This thesis is prompted by a collective urgency to restore sensitivity to the way we understand, interact with, and inhabit landscapes.Through this lens: How can my creative design processes impact the ways in which architecture can help us understand dynamic landscape conditions within the Anthropocene? In questioning this, how can the tacit knowledge embedded within my creative processes be made explicit, revealing fascinations and tendencies? I navigate this by looking at water issues in Hawkes Bay, from coastal erosion to flooding events, using Cyclone Gabrielle as material. This research does not attempt to solve problems; instead, it speculates on those issues by engaging with them. The research consists of three experiments that increase in scale and architectural complexity and expand and contract between ideas relating to the territory, landscape, and architecture. In articulating the portfolio, I zero in on the intersection between my portfolio and intersecting arguments, positioning my work through others within the disciplinary constellation. This creative research uses methods of making through lenses of hybrid drawing, hybrid models, and hybrid cartography in search of transference between lenses and working environments, analogue and digital. Through investigating landscape issues and my creative tendencies, this thesis seeks to contribute knowledge by offering landscape understandings and to concretise my methods as explicit knowledge.</p
An Emotion-based Facial Editing Method for Animators
No full textFacial animation plays a crucial role in conveying emotion in digital characters, supporting narrative engagement across film, animation, games, and virtual media. However, current animation pipelines offer limited control over emotional level once facial motion has been generated, especially when such motion is tightly coupled with specific constraints such as dialogue-related lip synchronisation. This project proposes a novel approach to facial animation editing by manipulating expression at the emotion level, enabling a more structured and semantically informed approach to analysing and modifying facial animations.At the core of our approach are two key technical contributions. The first is a vision-language model (VLM)-based facial emotion annotation framework, which provides rich, context-sensitive emotional labelling of facial expressions. Traditional approaches to emotion classification often rely on limited categories (e.g., Ekman’s six basic emotions), which can be overly simplistic for the nuanced and dynamic range of affective states found in expressive performances. By leveraging the power of VLMs, the framework interprets facial expressions not only based on the facial image itself but through cues from the image that reflect narrative and situational context. This leads to a more contextual annotation that better aligns with intents and perceptions.The second contribution is a method for emotion-content disentanglement in facial motion data. In many production situations, facial animation must adhere to strict constraints — for instance, lip synchronisation with recorded dialogue, or fidelity to pre-captured performance. Such constraints frequently inhibit further adjustments to emotional style, as the result can introduce artefacts or disrupt temporal alignment. By decoupling emotional features from content features, our method allows emotional editing without disrupting original facial animation content. This disentanglement is achieved via a learning-based codec framework that maps facial motion into a latent space with independent emotion and content dimensions.The resulting workflow enables animators to explore a wide array of emotional variations. More broadly, it bridges the traditionally separate domains of affective computing and animation control. By embedding emotional understanding into the animation editing process, it has implications not only for artistic production but also for areas such as virtual agents and interactive emotional AI.</p
An Architecture of the Metamodern
No full textToday’s cultural landscape in the digital age is profoundly different from the Postmodern period. Digital technologies have redefined human engagement, identity, and routine, shifting cultural production and participation into the hands of the many rather than the elite few. This transformation calls for a new framework to understand contemporary conditions, which is increasingly explored through the discourse of Metamodernism. Defined by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker as an oscillation between the optimism of Modernism and the detachment of Postmodernism (2010), Metamodernism encapsulates a renewed cultural sensibility, between irony and sincerity, characterised by an informed naivety and pragmatic idealism.While Metamodernism has been widely explored in art and literature, its implications for architecture remain largely underexamined. This research addresses this gap by asking: what is architecture in response to multiplicities in the Metamodern condition? This thesis interrogates this question through a creative practice research methodology, with the questioning refined through creative experiments that successively increase in scale, and architectural complexity. These develop strategies to entangle digital culture, Metamodernism and architecture, to pursue An Architecture of the Metamodern. Three interrelated, iterative projects explore rhizomic territories in the Metamodern: Recommended for You, an interactive installation, Arena of Disjunction, a conceptual performance arena, and Into the Heart: A Civic Gateway, in central Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. In these projects, architectural conventions are engaged with, and subverted, to spatialise digital culture and the Metamodern sensibility, creating spatial experiences that embody the dynamic interplay of cultural plurality, participatory engagement, and adaptive oscillations that define contemporary society.A context review traces the Metamodern condition from its historical context, of art and cultural movements, through to its contemporary evolution and articulation in digital culture. Case studies give a visual context to ideas surrounding the Metamodern and their analysis draws out key notions that are expanded upon in three projects. The Recommended for You installation project explores the Metamodern as a spatialised digital condition. The Arena of Disjunction interphase project extends ideas from the installation into the civic realm, creating a multimedia performance space in Christchurch, New Zealand. Finally, the Into the Heart: A Civic Gateway metaphase project takes this further, in the design of a speculative, large-scale architectural intervention on the same site. The Christchurch site provides historical, cultural, environmental and social material to the research. Across the three phases, multiple modes of representation are employed, including physical and digital modelling, hybrid visualisations, and a range of digital tools. The three phases prompt reflections on architecture’s response to the Metamodern condition, presenting new approaches to user engagement, cultural identities, and the dynamic interplay between digital and physical realms in architecture. This unique work explores a synthesis of digital culture and civic space, offering an adaptive and responsive architectural framework attuned to the complexities of contemporary society.</p
Drawing other Þings
No full textThis thesis is traced by a desire to explore whether architecture can persist as an unfolding negotiation between drawer’s intent and external forces. Drawing is conventionally understood as a passive vehicle for transcription. In this understanding, the translation between idea and building is pure, with drawing serving as its neutral translator—having no generative agency. This thesis gently unsettles that assumption. It asks what happens when you actively disrupt drawing practices through engaging with the external forces that pressurise drawing—when memory, site, and material resistance all press on drawing’s mark making.This research unfolds through drawing my family’s farm, through practice-as-research, weaving together drawing, walking, making, and autoethnographic storytelling. Across Three Tracks, the work stages progressively more complex negotiations between myself and the farm—starting with a body-scale drawing of the farm, using a machine built from farm materials that register the site, to an exploration of entanglements between farm, myself, external forces and architecture, and finally, an investigation into architecture drawn from disruptions, material translations, architectural elements and personal stories, within my family farm.Central to this research is the understanding that drawing is thinking—not a preparatory act but a live and open-ended process where gesture, memory, resistance, and material awkwardness all shape outcomes. Through engaging in disruptive drawing practices, I relinquish control; the act of drawing becomes a form of mutual discovery, where drawer and external forces mutually pressurise each other. Through this process, the research uncovers how relinquishing control opens possibilities—allowing drawing to be destabilised and contingent, with unexpected outcomes. This results in architecture that resists fixity, totalisation, and finality; it becomes ever-persisting, through unfolding negotiations between drawer’s intent and external forces.This research contributes to knowledge in the expanded field of architectural drawing—where drawing is understood as open, indeterminate and figured by multiple forces. It explores how personal stories and architecture can entangle through the expanded architectural practice of drawing. Through drawing that remains open to the unexpected, architecture becomes a site of encounter rather than resolution; this research is a conversation between myself, the family farm, and elusive forces shaping me, drawing and architecture.</p
Emotion Motives, Psychological Distress, and Non-Suicidal Self-Injury: Temporal Patterns and Latent Profiles of Risk
No full textEmotion motives may offer unique insight into the temporal relationships among psychological distress and non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI; Hasking et al., 2017; Gross, 2015). Drawing on emotion regulation (ER) theories (Gross, 2015) and prior findings linking ER and NSSI (Taylor et al., 2018), I explored relationships among emotion motives, psychological distress, and NSSI severity and functions using large cross-sectional and longitudinal samples of first-year psychology students in New Zealand. Cross-sectional associations among psychological distress, emotion motives, and NSSI severity and functions were significant; however, longitudinal analyses identified fewer predictive relationships. Trying to experience positive emotions predicted slight decreases in NSSI, while trying to avoid negative emotions predicted increases in NSSI over time and marginally moderated baseline distress effects. Additionally, using latent profile analysis, I identified four distinct profiles that differed meaningfully in emotion motives and NSSI severity. Three profiles replicated prior findings (Bloore et al., 2020), aligning with expected levels of psychological wellbeing and NSSI. Unexpectedly, a pro-hedonic NSSI group emerged, marked by high psychological distress despite pro-hedonic emotion motives. Findings highlight the complexity of the ER-NSSI relationship and provide support for considering emotion motives in ER models (Gross, 2015). Clinical applications include tailoring interventions to emotion motive profiles, particularly targeting avoidance motives.</p
Tobacco Industry Interference Report 2021: New Zealand Aotearoa
No full textThis report highlights the many tactics tobacco companies and their affiliates employ to kill, weaken, or delay essential policies to reduce tobacco use in NZ.
https://globaltobaccoindex.org/country/NZ
https://exposetobacco.org/global-index
Levitating rotor released at 6100 rpm imaged with a stroboscopic technique
No full textSuperconducting levitation bearing spin-down experiment showing a magnetic rotor being released from a drive motor at 6100 rpm above a high-temperature superconductor. Footage on the left is captured by a webcam. Footage on the right is captured using a stroboscopic imaging system which makes the rotor appear frozen about the axis of rotation. This eliminates motion blur allowing changes in rotor position and orientation to be determined by machine vision tracking of the inverted T-shaped markers.</p
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