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Memefest Radical Intimacies Podcast Series
No full textResearch statement Radical Intimacies Podcast
Research Background
The Memefest Radical Design podcast extends research from the peer-reviewed volume Radical Intimacies (Intellect Books, 2024) through dialogic engagement with the book’s contributors. Across ten episodes, it applies structured, reflective conversations to explore intimacy, technology, capitalism, and social practice, generating knowledge beyond the original text. Operating as a “pirate island”–style space, the podcast creates an autonomous zone where contributors engage in safe, collaborative dialogue, enabling relational knowledge production beyond institutional constraints. Dialogue is both method and medium, producing insights grounded in contributors’ expertise and critical practice.
Research Significance
The podcast exemplifies peer-engaged research: the original contributors underwent formal peer review, and the podcast dialogues critically extend this scholarship. Drawing on Buber (1970), Lévinas (1969), Bakhtin (1981), Habermas (1984), and Bourriaud (2002, 2005), it treats dialogue as an epistemological and socially generative method, producing insights inaccessible through monologic exposition by combining ethical, relational, polyphonic, rational, and participatory dimensions of discourse. Each episode is curated, co-produced with Intellect Books, and structured to interrogate theoretical frameworks in real-world contexts. Indicators of peer review include collaboration with discipline experts, commissioning by a reputable publisher, and critical alignment with a peer-reviewed text.
Research Contribution
Across ten episodes, the podcast constitutes a substantial, coherent inquiry into Radical Intimacies, exploring emergent patterns and critical issues including decolonial relationality, radical participatory design, ecological and relational methods, and Capitalism’s addictions. The series exemplifies dialogue as a rigorous research method, translating theory, philosophy, and practice into actionable knowledge. As part of an ongoing research practice, future episodes will expand and deepen these inquiries, situating the work within a peer-reviewed intellectual lineage and advancing accessible, conceptually robust discourse that bridges scholarship, public engagement, and creative practice.</p
Information Sharing Before, During and After the 2024 Bellfield Fire
No full textThis report presents the findings of a research project titled ‘Information Sharing Before, During and After the 2024 Bellfield Fire’, led by RMIT University, in collaboration with the Country Fire Authority in Victoria (Dr. Chloe Begg), and funded by the Australian Research Council. The report focuses on understanding how information was shared by both residents and stakeholders before, during and after the Bellfield Fire that impacted Pomonal, Victoria on 13 February 2024. The research highlights what aspects of information sharing were most effective, and areas where information sharing could be improved, as well as providing an overview of the different information sources and channels.</p
Ethical questions as relational pedagogy: teaching Forms for encounter and exchange in art, photography and social practice
No full textThis chapter critically reflects on the ethical questions that emerge in Forms for Encounter & Exchange, an undergraduate university studio course in Naarm (Melbourne, Australia) focusing on collaboration across art, photography, and social practices. Our course aims to stimulate critical dialogue for self-reflexive creative practices and relational approaches to arts pedagogy. We propose that when ethical questions are developed in combination with positionality work , students can open to multiple ways of knowing. Our work together seeks to develop alternative theorisations and understandings of art and social practice education that centre relational ethics and collaborative modes of making and reflection.</p
What Cannot Be Forgotten, Must Be Celebrated
No full textResearch Background In Southeast Asian contemporary art, trauma is addressed in several ways. The Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama views her artistic practice as a means to cope with her hallucinations and mental illnesses. The London-based Chinese artist Shiyu (Icy) Qiao uses line animation and basic visual effects to address the pathological extremes of contemporary and traditional Chinese culture. The Filipina artist Dee Jai takes an active social role in reaching out to damaged youth. All these artists employ one form or another of a confessional strategy. A potential problem with this is that a confession can easily become a performance, thereby risking lessening its impact. Research Contribution My exhibition 'What Cannot Be Forgotten, Must Be Celebrated' consisted of 14 paintings, 2 digital prints, 1 set of 7 lightboxes and 1 projected video. It was open for October to November of 2025. Through this variety of media, I address personal loss through a lens of science fiction and fantasy. In my digital art the technologies I employ are the same as those found in Hollywood style visual effects. Importantly, my position to the subject matter is essentially playful, seeking to engage the audience with fantastical and appealing imagery. Research Significance The venue for this exhibition was Bangkok University Art Gallery (BUG) and was financially supported by them. The exhibition was curated by the notable Thai curator Pojai Akratanaku. It was favorably reviewed by TimeOut Bangkok and named by Koktail magazine as one of the top five attraction in Bangkok in October (2025). The opening was attended by over 100 visitors.</p
Loosening the reins of teacher control: Empowering student writers through web-based tools
No full textThis chapter explores the pedagogical implications of opening up teaching and assessment practices to include guided student use of online tools as sources of knowledge. Using the author’s reflections as an action researcher in an Australian tertiary setting, it presents and evaluates a project on technology-enhanced writing in an AL context, using a specific feedback protocol that avoids direct correction in favour of encouragement of student agency, including individualised consultation of online tools such as dictionaries, concordances, grammar checkers and machine translation (MT). The paper is structured following an action research cycle of observation, reflection, planning and action. The first section describes the context in which the project is carried out and the problem requiring critical attention (observation). The second discusses the principles important to the design of the feedback protocol (reflection). This protocol is then presented (planning), followed by a description of its implementation (action). Data from a cohort of students using the protocol are presented as a second observation section, leading to further reflections. The paper concludes with recommendations for educators and students planning their own teaching and learning. Book Abstract How can languages and cultures in Australian higher education be disrupted, decentred and diversified? Contributors to this volume advance theoretical, critical (self-)reflections and position papers, pedagogical explorations of classroom practice as well as data-driven empirical investigations to challenge, resist and stretch how languages and cultures are both taught and imagined in research. From metaphorical conceptualisations of knowledge production, discussions of virtual reality, and innovation and creativity viewed through the lens of Indigenous epistemologies, to language learning curricula designed to challenge heteronormativity and cisgenderism, and a reconceptualisation of the role of language educators as designers, each chapter emphasises the vital role of innovation as the driving force of positive disruption. What emerges here is the resilience and adaptability demanded of languages and cultures researchers and educators as they navigate an ever-shifting educational landscape. Taken as a whole, this volume serves as a testament to these scholars’ collective capacity to adapt, evolve, embrace and actively drive change, fostering a more diverse, equitable and inclusive future for their field.</p
Communicating to CALD communities about energy: Best practice engagement to connect with digitally excluded groups
No full textThis research examines the critical challenges facing culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities in Australia as they navigate the country’s transition to clean energy. With CALD communities comprising nearly a quarter of Australia’s population, there is growing concern that the shift toward digital communication and complex energy market information is leaving these communities, particularly newly arrived migrants and older people, behind in the energy transition. To understand this challenge, a literature review and interviews with participants from Victorian multicultural and ethnic community groups were conducted to:
1. Engage with CALD community organisations to understand foundational knowledge gaps that are
impacting how CALD communities engage with residential energy supply in Australia.
2. Understand the information access needs of newly arrived migrants and older CALD communities
3. Identify examples of how to engage these communities in communications with emphasis on non-
digital formats around complex issues in energy markets.</p
Signal to Noise
No full textBackground If the Information Age was defined by the control of data, Signal to Noise explores what happens when those systems overflow. The exhibition examines how artists work with, challenge, and complicate the relationship between signal and interference, across technologies from radio and television to the internet, artificial intelligence, and algorithmic culture. Where computation seeks to eliminate noise, artists reclaim it as a generative, critical, and poetic force. Signal to Noise revisits a lineage of “interference aesthetics,” from Nam June Paik and George Brecht to Lillian Schwartz and JODI, tracing how noise has served as both disruption and revelation within communication systems. Contribution Curated by Joel Stern, with Emily Siddons and Eryk Salvaggio, and presented at the National Communications Museum, Signal to Noise brings together international artworks, new commissions, and technology collections by artists including Nam June Paik, George Brecht, Lillian Schwartz, JODI, elekhlekha อีเหละเขละขละ, Craftwork, Rowan Savage, Mimi Ọnụọha, Machine Listening, and Eryk Salvaggio. The exhibition draws from the paradox at the heart of generative AI: creativity simulated through the systematic reduction of randomness. The featured works instead locate creativity in what cannot be denoised; glitches, distortions, and breakdowns that resist algorithmic order. Significance Through its exploration of noise as resistance, material, and knowledge, Signal to Noise reframes interference as a site of political and aesthetic possibility. It extends the curatorial research trajectory established by This Hideous Replica, advancing inquiry into the poetics of malfunction and the politics of mediation in post-digital culture.</p
AI in Victorian Courts and Tribunals: Submission to the Victorian Law Reform Commission
No full textThis response concerns consumer disputes brought by a consumer to a court or a tribunal. It explores
some of the benefits of a public consumer online dispute resolution system (‘ODR’). We argue that ODR
holds vast potential for increasing access to justice in the domain of consumer protection and there are
strong normative arguments for exploring its potential in the resolution of consumer disputes in courts
and tribunals.</p
Counting care workers: when the 'muddle' is the message
No full textThere is power in numbers. Consequently counting is central to modern bureaucracies and when, how and about whom counting is done matters greatly for who gets what, under what conditions and when. Answering these ‘counting’ questions has taken on urgency as we proceed at pace to enable decision- making by Artificial Intelligence (AI), with ‘big’ data, large language models and algorithms problem-solving for us (see Chapters 4 and 14 to consider big data on ageing). Increasingly, data will power who and what are visible, while data silences will oppress who and what are not.</p
Local Place-Based Social Connection in Urban Fringe Areas: Learning from Resident Experiences
No full textThe urban fringe local government areas of Australian capital cities have some of the fastest- growing populations in the world. Incorporating new housing developments with established urban and rural settlements, these locations are home to a diverse mix of international immigrants, long- term Australians and Indigenous Peoples.
Despite long- standing policy approaches seeking to consolidate development in Australia’s inner cities, building on previously ‘greenfield’ urban fringe sites remains the primary location for new affordable housing. The rapid growth of these fringe suburbs is not adequately supported by social infrastructure (that is, places where people can meet, such as community hubs, leisure centres, libraries and cafés) or services focused on social wellbeing (Henderson, 2019). There are also delays in providing public transport (Kroen et al, 2023), and local employment opportunities are often limited. This results in long commutes – typically by car – to reach distant workplaces (Nicholls et al, 2018). These challenges of suburban living limit the time available for local social interactions.</p