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Family finds a way: Experiences of multigenerational transnational new Chinese immigrant families in New Zealand
Get PDFThe Immigration Act 1987 fundamentally transformed New Zealand’s immigration policy from one that was race-based to one based on economic needs of New Zealand society. It opened the borders to immigrants from much wider regions. As a result of this “open-door” immigration policy, a substantial new Chinese immigrant community from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was established in New Zealand. Building a closely-tied multigenerational family is an important feature of family life for this immigrant group. Often, multiple generations live together or within close proximity with one another in highly interdependent relationships. However, a growing number have also started to maintain their family lives transnationally, with different family members across generations living apart but maintaining close ties, with frequent interactions across national borders. Given this transnational family arrangement is very different from Chinese traditional practices of family maintenance, the impact of this change on the wellbeing and functioning of these families and their individual family members is an issue of increasing academic interest.
This thesis responds to these concerns and explores the relationship between people’s experiences of transnational migration and their multigenerational family dynamics. Through engaging with individual life stories and perspectives of 45 participants across generations from new PRC immigrant families living in New Zealand, this thesis seeks to understand how those families with closely-tied multiple generations cope with dislocation and relocation during the process of transnational migration. It also investigates how transnational migration experiences contribute to new emergent domestic dynamics, including the development of new strategies and practices to maintain family traditions, interests and coherence across national borders, as well as shifting intergenerational relationships.
The empirical data demonstrates that despite the increasing proportion of new PRC families living transnationally, their experiences of managing family lives vary. I argue that this diversification of transnational family experiences is largely attributed to the interaction of various impact factors associated with both the internal dynamics of immigrant families themselves and external contexts where those families are closely related. My research also attests that family members’ transnational migration experiences accelerate changes to the way they perform family life, particularly amplifying intergenerational differences and altering intergenerational dependency. Even though those changes introduce vital challenges towards multigenerational family maintenance and coherence, my research reveals that families are resilient and able to actively forge multistranded resources as well as engage various transnational activities in response to those challenges. While this thesis poses intriguing perspectives and culturally-specific scenarios to study immigrant families in New Zealand society, more importantly, it also contributes to the broad theorisation of transnational family formation and maintenance in the increasingly globalised world
Effect of shroud in plasma spraying on chemical composition and thickness of titanium coatings
Get PDFTitanium and its alloys are wildly used in industries. Shrouded plasma spray can be considered as a useful technology to produce low oxide containing titanium coatings. In this paper, the effect of shroud in plasma spraying on chemical composition and thickness of titanium coatings were investigated. Shrouded plasma-sprayed titanium coatings were deposited onto mild steel
substrates. Air plasma-sprayed titanium coatings were also deposited for comparison under the same spraying parameters. Those titanium coatings were then studied in terms of microstructure, oxygen and nitrogen contents and coating’s thickness. The titanium coatings were assessed by scanning electron microscopy and quantitative chemical analysis. The results showed that the shroud
played a key role in protecting the particles from oxidation in flight. The shrouded titanium coatings
exhibited lower oxygen content and an enhanced microstructure. The reduction in air entrainment
with the shroud resulted in better heating of the particles and increases in deposition efficiency and
coating thickness
Developing Soft Skills to produce Work-Ready International Graduate Diploma Students in Engineering: a Comparative Study
Get PDFIntroduction: Engineering education has increased its emphasis on the development of soft skills to produce work-ready Engineers to meet the requirements of professional accrediting institutions. One key soft skill is confident public speaking. A major impediment to this is confidence with English language, particularly for EAL (English as and Additional Language) students.
New Zealand, like many countries, has an “export education” sector: many international students come to study in New Zealand as an EAL speaker. One offering for International students is the Graduate Diploma, a one year qualification for graduate international students which aims to produce work-ready engineers.
This paper investigates how performance of Graduate Diploma International (GDI) students differed across two cohorts, the 2019 and 2020 intake, in the area of oral presentation skills, when the classes were structured differently: GDI mixed with Bachelor of Engineering Technology (BET) students, and GDI students placed into a separate group from BET students.
Literature: “Soft skills”, such as interpersonal communication, teamwork and professionalism are critical for success in an environment of global competition (Farr and Brazil, 2009) and for developing leadership (Robles, 2012; Development Dimensions International, 2016, as cited in Dishman, 2016). Undergraduate research projects develop soft-skills, especially communication (Carter, Ro, Alcott, and Lattuca, 2016), which can be assessed formally via oral presentations. Oral presentations can be particularly anxiety-inducing for EAL students, due to the additional impediment of speaking in a language with which they are less confident (Woodrow, 2006; Mak, 2011).
Methods: We compare the performance of GDI students across two years’ cohorts: 2019 and 2020 in two oral presentations for the Final Year Project (FYP) course: the early presentation occuring in April/May, and the final presentation, in November. Due to class size and staff availability, the students in the 2020 FYP course were split into two groups, one containing all international students (GDI students) and one which contained mainly domestic students (the BET). This resulted in some “field data” on the impact of such a split. We compare the performance of the 2020 cohort of GDI students (n = 43) in their FYP presentations to the performance of the 2019 cohort of GDI students (n = 23).
Results: GDI students in the 2020 cohort on average performed better in their oral presentations at both points in the course than GDI students in the 2019 cohort.
Conclusion: Oral Communication is a key soft-skill required of work-ready engineers. The Graduate Diploma is a one year qualification that aims to produce work-ready engineers. When Graduate Diploma International students were placed into a group by themselves, they performed better in oral presentations than when placed into a class mixed with Bachelor of Engineering Technology students
Residential IEQ improvement using UVGI lights and carbon fibre filters: Mould and relative humidity assessments
Get PDFMany New Zealand residential homes suffer from poor indoor environmental quality (IEQ). Cold, damp, and mould-ridden homes can cause serious respiratory health problems. Poor IEQ can arise due to poor insulation and ventilation, and is compounded when residents cannot afford heating. Features of the residential building code mean many New Zealand houses built under old standards lack wall insulation, have single glazing on windows and are poorly ventilated. A major indicator of poor IEQ is mould growth, which can cause, or exacerbate, respiratory illness. This project assesses the results of modifying an existing dehumidifier to include ultraviolet germicidal (UVGI) lights and two different types of filters (CityPleat and 30/30). The original device altered IEQ by removing moisture. The modified device was designed to further improve IEQ by performing filtration and purification of the air, with the addition of the CityPleat, 30/30 filters with the UVGI lights. This project investigates the impact on various IEQ elements, such as room temperature, particulate matters (PM2.5), and relative humidity using an air imaging sensor (compatible with current WHO guidelines), with a focus on mould growth. We found the different filtration scenarios presented reduced the relative humidity effectively in the room compared to the baseline dehumidifier action only. The results show that adding the 30/30 filter with the UVGI lights increased the room temperature by 2.2oC, reduced the relative humidity by 10%, and reduced the PM2.5 values from 2.5 µg/m³ to 0.4 µg/m³ in the room after three hours of operation. Mould growth, as measured in agar plate coverage, was also reduced by the addition of the filtration and UVGI lights
The tasting table: Food as theme and instigator of creative and practical projects
Get PDFFood is a signifier of culture, generation, and social status. Each recipe is a narrative and each dish arising from a recipe an exploration of the word made flesh (or textured vegetable protein or aquafaba!).
Building on the centrality and redundancy of food in our lives, three panelists who are teachers and researchers discuss how we have chosen to use food themes, developing our own and our student's communication and creative practice.
Having shared our mahi with each other, we share techniques, synergies, reflections, and a tasting table of stimuli.
Elna Fourie is a Senior Academic Staff Member at the School of Media Arts, and a facilitator and coach at Design Factory New Zealand (DFNZ). Discussing recent student projects from DFNZ, she brings to the panel reflections on the potential of food-based projects to allow for multi-disciplinary engagement, for student-community collaboration, and for applying human-centred design approaches to solving societal challenges.
Gail Pittaway is a Principal Academic Staff Member in the School of Media Arts and a teacher of Writing, Storytelling and Creative Media. Currently a PhD candidate at the Central Queensland University in Creative Writing, she is writing a Creative Nonfictional food memoir. She will discuss the use of food as stimulus for students’ writing and how investigation into food writing and food practices have generated a portfolio of articles and chapters for her own research.
Cate Prestidge is a Principal Academic Staff Member in the School of Media Arts, teaching media, communication and professional practice. Her masters study included examining the value of applied learning and the ‘soft skills’ required for graduates to thrive in the creative industries. Cate will discuss the ways food has featured in recent student learning, including; breaking down barriers for diversity interviews and the challenges of managing a test kitchen
Low-cost residential air quality device using ultraviolet germicidal irradiation (UVGI) light
No full textMany New Zealand residential dwellings suffer from dampness and fungi during the winter, which can cause respiratory health problems. This can be due to poor insulation and ventilation, and the situation worsens when residents cannot afford to heat the dwelling. The main aim of this paper is to modify an existing dehumidifier so that it can remove moisture, heat the living space and reduce fungi growth and bacteria. To achieve that, we installed ultraviolet germicidal lights (UVGI) in an existing dehumidifier with a total cost of NZD 213.76. The UVGI lights are known to be efficient in destroying the DNA of fungi and bacteria. The results show that the device reduced the fungi growth and did increase the room temperature because the dehumidifier captured two litres of water over 24 hours of testing. Therefore, our proposed low-cost device does improve the indoor air quality (IAQ) in the living space.
The design files for the modified dehumidifier will be included here.
https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/bshhwy3czd/
Performing nature unnaturally: musique concrète and the performance of knowledge one seabird at a time
No full textMigratory seabirds are an unseen conduit between marine and terrestrial systems, carrying the nutrients they consume at sea into the forests where they breed. Acting as environmental sentinels, their health and reproductive success provide early warning signals of deteriorating marine eco-systems as the climate changes, and fish stocks decrease.
Aotearoa New Zealand is the seabird capital of the world, with ~25% of all species breeding here and ~10% exclusively so. They play a critical role in maintaining healthy ecosystems, with their long-term well-being is closely interconnected with our own prospects for a sustainable future.
Now predominantly restricted to off-shore islands due to predation and habitat destruction, seabirds and their familiar sounds have become less available in an age when the unprecedented global movement and planetary spread of the human population has culminated in unsustainable fishing, predators and habitat destruction. Inspiring mythology, song, poetry and stories, birds have been significant in shaping our understanding of how our natural environment has come to be known and understood.
This paper speculates upon how we learn to communicate and cooperate with these precious taonga, and what might be learned from such an exchange through creative practice. Reflecting upon what birds might tell us, musician Matthew Bannister and I, a visual artist, have taken our cue from seabirds sharing our local environment on the west coast of Aotearoa - from the petrel (peera) through to the gannet (tākapu). Working on the premise that bird vocalisation is a performed negotiation that includes defence of territory and mate attraction, a bird’s call is a form of communication that effectively says “Come here” or “Go away”, which arguably is true of music – marking a social space and time to invite or repel.
Rather than limiting bird calls to functionalist categories of explanation, we ask whether seabirds can communicate and exchange information about environmental changes using a malleable vocabulary, comprised of unique acoustic units arranged and re-arranged sequentially for greater communicative depth. Granting a high level of agency and creativity to birds as opposed to believing a bird only avails itself of stereotyped ‘speech’ to survive an accident-rich environment, places greater importance on responses that are improvised directly upon environmental stimuli as irritant rather than as a signal.
Matthew explores bird calls via musique concrète, sampling recordings of seabirds to abstract the musical values of bird song conventions – a human response to the ‘other’ in jointly formed compositions, reflecting a living evolving relationship between composer and bird.
In further developing our research into a multimedia artwork, I shall extend a technique used for electroacoustic composition (granular synthesis) to video portraits of composer/performer and bird. In applying granular synthesis techniques to video, tiny units of image and sampled sound are reassembled within the frames. Through the mixing of existing synthesised sequences, performer/composer and bird become active participants in the making and remaking of a shared environment, articulating the limits of space/territory to find new ways to be heard within it
“Forced” family separation and intergenerational dynamics: Multi-generational new Chinese immigrant families in New Zealand
Get PDFIn New Zealand (NZ), due to the immigration policy change against family reunifications, many ‘forced’ transnational immigrant families emerged between NZ and other immigration sending countries. Closely tied family members across generations now have limited choice but to live across different national, cultural, and linguistic localities. By taking the new Chinese immigrant families from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as the case in point, and based on 45 in-depth interviews with their multi-generational family members, this paper examines how immigrant families adapt to the NZ immigration regime which does not easily accommodate their cultural preference to live as multi-generational families. It also demonstrates the importance of family reunification for immigrant families in NZ, and the changing inter-generational power relations caused by the evolving process of migration and settlement of these families
Tau Ruru: Te Ruru light festival: Rostrevor pop-up 2021
No full textArtist Statement: "2020 was a turbulent year for many. This watchful guardian stands for hope as it calls into the darkness signalling good times ahead. Recycled milk bottles collected during the COVID-19 lockdown were used to construct the ruru and moths." The project was an exploration of how light installations could be developed during a national lock-down. The project explored the use of milk bottles as a sculptural material as, at the time, curbside recycling was not in operation. The work also explored te ao Māori themes of safety and warnings associated with the different calls of ruru (morepork owl). The name of the work alludes to a whakataukī (Māori proverb) that speaks of preserving in hard times. "E rua tau ruru; e rua tau wehe; e rua tau mutu; e rua tau kai." These words seem relevant during the uncertainty of this global pandemic
Heartwood: Te Ruru light festival: Rostrevor pop-up 2021
No full textA light and sound installation bringing an ancient tree to life. The work used light and sound to create the illusion of a heartbeat emanating from the heart of the tree. The work helps viewers consider the life of a tree and recognise it as a living being that, like us, is born, lives, and dies. The red pulsing lights which illuminated the core of the tree created artery like forms from the base of the tree up into the canopy