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Unpacking Racial Relevance in Emergency Calls
No full textPsychological research has extensively explored the consequences of racial categorisation, contributing to the emergence of race-related issues. However, research has largely overlooked the examination of how individuals orient and mobilise race categories, which is an aspect crucial to the development of racial issues. Given that race-related issues are fundamentally rooted in people’s utilisation of racial categories as a foundation for social action, it is of relevance to investigate the pertinence of these categories in people’s talk. This involves not only investigating the explicit mentions of racial categories but also delving into the inferences and common-sense knowledge packaged with them in interaction. In this thesis, I used the theoretical framework of discursive psychology to apply both conversation (CA) and membership categorisation analysis (MCA) to examine where and how race becomes relevant in institutional talk, specifically in emergency calls reporting family harm and violence. Although literature conducting CA and MCA on race is existent, literature has been focal on race talk in ordinary interaction as opposed to institutional settings. Therefore, this thesis analyses racial relevance in the institutional talk of emergency calls. Examining emergency calls is advantageous as it captures both representatives of the institution (call-takers) and members of the public (callers) orientation and mobilisation of race categories in interaction. This thesis analyses the intricate dynamics of racial expression and the utilisation of racial common-sense in the context of either seeking or providing emergency services.In my thesis, race was found to be initiated in various phases in the emergency call, particularly within the interrogative series of person descriptions. When describing the subject of the complaint, inquiries for racial categories were utilised as predicates of appearance, mobilising common-sense understandings of the visual attributes tied to race categories. The call-taker employed a diverse array of linguistic strategies to broach discussions on racial categories. These linguistic strategies highlighted the necessity for a careful and deliberate approach when inquiring about race, orientating to race as a sensitive and delicate topic of discussion. Furthermore, a notable deviant case is presented wherein the description of the person differed from other calls that included race as a pertinent descriptor within the series of person descriptions, to demonstrate how certain race categories can be treated as relevant and identifiable compared to others. My thesis findings bear academic significance, as they contribute to the limited body of literature addressing racial relevance in emergency services and offer empirical implications and practical applications for improving the responsiveness of these crucial services.</p
The Realisation of Technology Transfer through the Access and Benefit-Sharing Regime: Which Way Forward?
No full textAbstract There exists a global technology gap which manifests in the creation and concentration of most technologies in a handful of societies/countries. This technology gap transcends several aspects of human society, including biodiversity conservation and utilisation. Most of the societies with abundant biodiversity and knowledge of its usefulness generally lack the technologies for utilising biodiversity resources to manufacture goods and services at scale. Indigenous communities are major stakeholders in biodiversity conservation, nurturing up to 80 per cent of biodiversity in many nations. However, because they lack the technologies for biodiversity utilisation, they are generally only providers while others are users possessing capacity to manufacture goods and services at scale from biodiversity. This thesis examines how these indigenous communities can transition from mere providers of genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge to becoming users as well, considering the access and benefit-sharing system’s promise of technological capacity-building for providers.Relying on doctrinal analysis, socio-legal methodology, and regime theory, this thesis highlights the fractious relationship between intellectual property and access and benefit-sharing, and the negative effects of intellectual property rights on technological capacity-building. The thesis establishes other policy and social challenges to the technology transfer aspirations of access and benefit-sharing. To resolve this impasse, this thesis employs concepts of property, Third World Approaches to International Law, and the right to development in advancing six normative principles for resolving the normative conflicts between intellectual property and access and benefit-sharing. It thereafter employs the six principles in critiquing the TRIPS Agreement, demonstrating, among other things, that TRIPS offers limited flexibility for member countries to prioritise access and benefit-sharing goals while implementing intellectual property laws.The thesis proposes that, to actualise access and benefit-sharing technology goals, national policies must prioritise funding for indigenous communities’ capacity-building and biodiversity conservation and utilisation; demonstrate a desire for technological advancement; prioritise the education of indigenous peoples; and promote ease of doing business by eliminating investment obstacles and incentivising technology owners to invest in indigenous communities. In addition, the thesis proposes that intellectual property policy should embrace a right not to be excluded rather than its current exclusive rights paradigm; integrate a holistic definition of development; and resolve the traditional knowledge protection conundrum by penalising biopiracy.</p
Earthquakes, seismic hazard, and lithospheric structures beneath an ophiolite nappe, southern New Caledonia, southwest Pacific
No full textThis thesis presents the first comprehensive seismological study of southern Grande Terre, New Caledonia, southwest Pacific. Grande Terre emerges from Norfolk Ridge, which is part of northeastern Zealandia. The study region contains ophiolite nappes that were emplaced during Eocene initiation of the Tonga-Kermadec subduction system. The structure of Grande Terre, imaged by this study, provides insights into ophiolite emplacement and subduction initiation processes. Grande Terre has been isolated from tectonics since the Oligocene but currently sits in the outer rise of the Vanuatu subduction zone, providing an unusual opportunity to study the footwall of an active subduction zone. The seismic waveform data used in this study were acquired in October 2018–November 2019 during a scientific project called “Investigating the Thickness of the Peridotite Nappe of New Caledonia” (ITOPNC). This is a collaborative project between Victoria University of Wellington (VUW) in New Zealand, Service Géologique de Nouvelle-Calédonie (SGNC), University of New Caledonia, and Institut pour la Recherche et le Développement (IRD) Centre de Nouméa in New Caledonia. Twelve temporary stations were deployed to record ground motions for fourteen months. Seismic data from nine permanent stations in New Caledonia were also used in this thesis.Studies presented in this thesis address earthquake distribution, stress state, earthquake shaking hazard, earthquake triggering, and crust-mantle structures in southern New Caledonia. Most earthquakes in southern Grande Terre are shallow (100 km and the largest earthquake recorded in this study was Mw 7.5 in the subduction zone on 5 December 2018. The biggest local earthquake in southern Grande Terre had ML 3.8, and occurred 15 minutes after the Mw 7.5 event. Southern Grande Terre is under a tensile stress regime with a trench-normal minimum horizontal stress, which is controlled by the adjacent Vanuatu subduction zone and topographic stresses. Earthquake shaking hazard at high peak ground accelerations (>0.1 g) in southern Grande Terre is affected more by local earthquakes than those in the Vanuatu subduction zone, because flexure results in higher rates of local seismicity than in the stable Australian plate, and peak ground accelerations from subduction zone earthquakes are anomalously lower than standard ground motion predictions. The discrepancies in observed and predicted ground shaking from subduction zone earthquakes are ~10 times different, possibly related to the deep geological structure between the subduction zone and Grande Terre. Local earthquake hazard is time-varying. The local seismicity rate strongly correlates with occurrence of Mw > 7 earthquakes in the Vanuatu subduction zone. Earthquake shaking hazard in southern Grande Terre increases by a factor of 4 immediately after a Mw > 7 earthquake nearby (200–350 km away), as a result of triggered local seismicity, and returns to background levels by Omori decay in 20–30 days.Rayleigh wave group velocities determined using ambient noise analysis reveal that the ophiolite thickness in southern Grande Terre is ~1 km over much of its width but may reach nearly 2 km thick beneath the east coast. The ophiolite lies on a WNW-ESE oriented high velocity body (Vp 5.5–6.0 km/s, Vs 3.0–3.5 km/s) located in the upper crust beneath the centre of southern Grande Terre, with lower-velocity materials beneath the east and west coasts that are interpreted as sedimentary basins.Receiver function analysis shows variable crustal thickness beneath southern Grande Terre: thin (25–30 km) continental crust on the west has a subhorizontal Moho; and this transitions via a west-dipping structure to oceanic crust towards the east (~10 km thick). Moho depth is confirmed by a 1D velocity model derived from local earthquake travel times that has Vp 7.4 km/s at 27–31 km depth and 7.8–8.1 km/s at 31–40 km depth. Beneath the Moho, a west-dipping structure is imaged to 65 km depth and interpreted as a fossil subduction system beneath a partially-serpentinized mantle wedge. Our results confirm the hypothesis that the slab was west-dipping beneath New Caledonia during subduction initiation and ophiolite emplacement.</p
Wellington kākā culture: life, death and relationality in a multispecies city
No full textIn the city of Pōneke Wellington, local ecosanctuary Zealandia has flooded the capital with a now thriving population of native birds, many of whom were locally extinct just 20 years ago. The charismatic kākā parrot with its shrieking call and playful demeanour is becoming an increasingly dominant actor in this new urban multispecies assemblage, winning the hearts of many human residents, and injecting itself into public discourse. Inspired by multispecies studies and more-than-human scholarship, this thesis seeks to explore the more-than-human actors and agencies that are co-constructing the city of Wellington. Thinking with the kākā, I investigate the ways in which a highly visible and charismatic native parrot is (re)configuring the urban environment, asking how are the kākā changing Aotearoa’s capital city? In focusing on and telling stories with the kākā, this thesis has contributed to the growing scholarship committed to revealing the nonhuman agencies at play in the world. It explores: (1) the formation of a local, post-release kākā culture in close relationship with the urban environment and the city’s conservation organisations (2) kākā- human feeding relations as sites of relational ethics (3) the co-production of materiality and narrative identity within kākā-tree encounters.By putting multispecies studies in conversation with discourse analysis and political ecology, this thesis contributes to the growing scholarship on how we can approach nonhumans as agentic beings in our political ecologies of place. Moving beyond simply stating the importance of nonhuman agency and telling celebratory stories of nonhuman-human entanglement, this work demonstrates how people share and co-create urban spaces with nonhuman neighbours.</p
ASSESSING SYMPTOM CHANGE OF NEURODEVELOPMENTAL AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY FACTORS USING LATENT GROWTH CURVE ANALYSIS IN THE ABCD STUDY
No full textDiagnostic models such as the hierarchical taxonomy of psychopathology (HiTOP) are gaining notice amongst the psychopathology research community due to issues with traditional classification methods (Kotov et al., 2021). Yet, the placement of neurodevelopmental symptoms in HiTOP remains unclear, partly due to a lack of longitudinal research on their stability, and of their distinction from externalising symptoms. Using data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, we conducted latent growth curve analysis to assess the comparable change of neurodevelopmental symptoms and other latent factors across pre-adolescence, using factor structure determined by Michelini and colleagues (2019). We predicted that neurodevelopmental symptoms would show the lowest improvement of model fit when constrained to represent change across time. We expected that this would also be reflected in greater associations with birth weight, due to functional developmental differences, in line with previous findings in this sample (Dooley et al., 2022). Findings indicated that while the specification of a slope (constrained change of symptom severity) for the neurodevelopmental factor fit the data less well than a slope for the internalising and externalising factors, these differences were only moderate. After controlling for covariates, we found no relationship to be significant between birth weight and any psychopathology domain, with pre-term birth appearing to be a strong and unique predictor of neurodevelopmental symptoms, and household income being the strongest predictor of internalising and externalising symptoms. These findings implicate both the distinctiveness of neurodevelopmental symptoms and the effect of the p factor, which represents co-occurrence of symptoms in general. Future research should continue to investigate the placement of neurodevelopmental symptoms within psychopathology factor models.</p
A Landscape in Motion
No full textWellington’s coastal landscape is a layered and changing condition. Informed by landscape architect and theorist James Corner’s insights from “Landscape Imagination”, this research contends that “just as a landscape cannot spatially be reduced to a single point of view, it cannot be frozen as a single moment in time. The geography of a place becomes known to us through an accumulation of fragments, detours, and incidents that sediment meaning” (Corner & Hirsch, 2014). Within this framework, speculative architectural design emerges as a pivotal medium, exploring the aesthetic voice of landscape, and proposing architecture that is co-authored between humans and landscape. This thesis explores the proposition that architecture connects and converses with its environment. Through a speculative design methodology, the research develops a range of architectural techniques as translational tools for landscape ephemerality to become aesthetically agential. This research aims to deepen comprehension of these complex phenomena in order to expand spatial and architectural understanding through explorations of landscape and architecture. The research unfolds through an iterative design process comprised of a series of design experiments, each increasing in scale and architectural complexity. Beginning with an installation at the scale of the body, followed by a series of coastal interventions along the rocky southern coast, culminating in a reimagined ‘urban landscape’ comprised of four interconnected rooftop interventions.These design explorations are supported by a literary framework drawing from the concepts of poíēsis and sympoíēsis, emphasising the act of collaborative creation, supported by artists and thinkers like Nikolaus Gansterer and Donna Haraway. The explorations utilise a diverse range of design media, continually shifting between analogue and digital techniques, to draw out the landscape’s aesthetic agency. This outcome presents a novel approach to conceptualising the relationship between architecture and landscape, highlighting their connection, entanglement, and mutual influence. The research fosters a rigorous exploration of liminal architectural expressions that engage in dialogue with the landscape, capturing and translating the shifting qualities of the coast. In giving landscape an aesthetic voice, this work challenges prevailing notions of how architecture and landscape are understood and related in Aotearoa.Throughout this exploration, critical reflection on drawings and design iterations deepen the discourse surrounding the research focus. The thesis investigates the dynamic interplay between architecture and the natural context it inhabits. It speculates on the potential of architecture to act as an agent in an ontological shift, fostering a deeper understanding of the tacit connectedness that exists between built and natural environments. This compels a relational approach to architectural practice, driven by transformative and radical design methods.</p
How Diet Impacts the Relationship between Intimate Partner Aggression and Child Conduct Problems
No full textAbstract The positive relationship between intimate partner aggression (IPA) and child conduct problems (CP) is an established research finding in the literature, suggesting that exposure to IPA can negatively impact on children’s behaviour. The relationship between diet and children’s behaviour is also an established research finding, suggesting that a ‘healthy’ diet can buffer against, while an ‘unhealthy’ diet can exacerbate, child behavioural problems.These established relationships lead us to create hypotheses that test whether maternal and child dietary patterns can moderate the relationship between minor IPA and child CP, which is yet to be explored. It is hypothesised that both the maternal and child 'healthy' dietary patterns will act as a protective factor for CP in children who are exposed to IPA. The current study is based on the dataset from the Growing Up in New Zealand (GUiNZ) study, which is New Zealand’s biggest and continuing longitudinal study with over 6,000 children. Diet was measured antenatally for the mother and at child age 2 and 4.5. Minor IPA was measured antenatally and when the child was 9 months through mother and partner reports. CP was measured via the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) at age 2, 4.5 and 8.Structural equation models showed significant effects of IPA on CP for all time points. Both 'healthy' and 'junk' diet had varying impacts on child CP, with mainly positive effects of ‘healthy’ diet and negative effects of ‘junk diet on child CP. However, moderation effects of diet for the relationship between IPA and CP did not withstand multiple comparisons, indicating no moderating effect of diet. Implications of the research suggest that broader dietary patterns may not need further investigation in this context as IPA is a predictor of CP that is not changed by diet. Despite no significant buffering effects, the direct effects of the maternal and child diet allow the recommendation of incorporating diet as a key component in the prevention and intervention of children with behavioural problems.</p
Sharing the Ecotone
No full textCoastal infrastructure like seawalls have created a condition along our urban coastlines where the inland migration of intertidal species will be restricted. Due to changes in climate and the subsequent effects of sea level rise, these ecosystems will face gradual but imminent habitat reduction. As designers, we need effective and efficient means of engaging with intertidal ecology to ensure that critical species that are most at risk from coastal squeeze will be retained. Wellington’s coastline is one of many examples where urban areas with heavily modified coastlines will be facing the effects of coastal squeeze. Omarukaikuru (Point Jerningham) supports a range of rocky intertidal habitat that due to significant coastal modification in the form of seawalls will be under threat due to the effects of coastal squeeze. The reason that sites like this and many more around Wellington’s coast continue to be designed in such a way is largely due to the time it takes to engage meaningfully with coastal ecology, and the absence of applicable methods that bridge the gap between ecology and landscape architecture. This research explores methods of engaging and mapping site ecology while also synthesizing ways in which this knowledge can inform design. Methods explored include, aerial lidar mapping, mapping of species distribution and behavior as well as the testing of design prototypes through installations. These methods are trialed in the design of the coastal edge at Omarukaikuru. This trial communicates how methods of engaging with site ecology are translated into ecologically sensitive design outcomes.</p
The Happiness of Material Things
No full textThe high demand for mental health services in NZ necessitates societal shifts to improve mental wellbeing. Targeting the mental wellbeing of children establishes behaviours, setting up generations for high quality living. This research explored the role of materiality in enhancing child wellbeing within a learning environment.Theories suggest children understand space by experiencing with their whole bodies and using all senses. Elements affecting the physical body are heavily researched for wellbeing, while visual qualities are less examined.Initial work established principles of wellbeing from a child’s perspective and depicts how this can be reflected through architecture. Material theory was researched, followed by examination of material use in ‘successful’ international and New Zealand learning environments. An experimentation phase, collected data from students testing architectural theory, to understand actual resonance of theory with children. In the design experiments, materiality tests were completed on an existing school and the effects assessed. The final design demonstrates implementations of tactics indicated throughout the research.Wellbeing principles established from a child’s perspective of wellbeing are used throughout the research as measurable tools. Material theory assessed indicates pattern, texture and colour as integral for design, informing decision choices for the remainder of the research. Within New Zealand, higher consideration of materiality is needed to enhance spaces for wellbeing. Empirical data collection proved this integral, indicating through qualitative and quantitative analysis that children react consistently with architectural theory. Design exercises indicate use of theory through combining different aspects of materiality to create positive spaces. The final design acts as a visual representation of a variety of techniques designers can use to enhance child wellbeing through material choice, combination and placement.The findings of this research promote more consideration of material selection and combination to produce learning environments that enhance the overall wellbeing of students in schools.</p
Evaluating Science Communication Beyond Clicks & Attendance
No full textPoster presentation at Science Talk 2024, hosted by the Association of Science Communicators Conference in Portland, Oregon, April 11-12, 2024.Evaluating Science Communication Beyond Clicks & Attendance © 2024 by Jessica Rohde is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International</p
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