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Hacking with Hope at the Hollow of the University
No full textSince the pandemic further upended certainties about what a university should do to build culture, our once bustling campuses have increasingly come to resemble empty husks - hollowed out not just by lockdowns and the attendant absence from campus, but by decades of neoliberal corporatisation. What was once a commons for critical exchange has been retooled into a mechanism of brand management and stakeholder appeasement. Spaces for collective encounter – lecture theatres, designer study pods – now stand as ruins of past aspiration, made obsolete by digital delivery, casualisation, and efficiency mandates. The campus, once a hotbed of communal learning and dissent, has been ideologically excavated. Following theorists critical of what the university has become including Wendy Brown and Henry Giroux we suggest that a burgeoning class of middle managers and compliance officers has accelerated this shift, often indifferent to cultivating culture and creativity within or beyond the institution. And yet, into these spaces, where art schools still exist in the academy, students wander. Despite the hollowing, this paper seeks possibility in the emptiness, reporting on two imaginative, risky, and radically reflexive projects staged at RMIT University in 2023 and 2024 respectively: The Posthuman Lecture Theatre Hack and the Graduate Exhibition Protest.</p
Understanding Student Perceptions of Sustainability in Global Fashion Education
No full textIn response to the urgent climate crisis and evolving demands of the global fashion industry, educational institutions must integrate sustainability into their curricula. By aligning fashion programs with student perspectives and the United Nations Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs), future professionals can acquire the necessary knowledge and skills. Addressing social and environmental concerns in fashion education remains paramount. This study explores global student perceptions of sustainability within fashion curricula, exploring how educational practices influence attitudes towards sustainable fashion in consumer and producer countries. Building on collaborative research between RMIT University Vietnam and the University of Portsmouth in 2023, the project has been extended to involve student cohorts from Istituto Marangoni London, RMIT University Melbourne, and the University of Lisbon. Through survey data analysis, the research identifies factors shaping student views on sustainability and assesses pedagogical effectiveness. By understanding these influences, educators can enhance student engagement and promote sustainable practices within the industry. This approach underscores the importance of active learning pedagogies in fostering sustainable commitments. The research contributes to ongoing conversations about education's role in shaping the fashion industry's future. By conducting a comparative analysis across diverse student cohorts and programs globally, it offers insights into effective sustainable education practices in various cultural and educational settings. Integrating sustainability into higher education benefits students, academics, and industry professionals alike. Students gain specialized skills for evolving industries, boosting employability and sustainability contributions. Academics benefit from flexible curricula supporting innovative practices and industry connections. Industry professionals can leverage academic collaborations to stay updated on sustainability trends and recruit new talent. Advocating for a student-centred approach to sustainable fashion education, this study emphasizes the importance of creative research and practical applications for shaping a forward-thinking industry-aligned educational framework.</p
Report from the 4th Strategic Workshop on Information Retrieval in Lorne (SWIRL 2025)
No full textThe purpose of the Strategic Workshop on Information Retrieval in Lorne (SWIRL) is to explore the long-range issues of the information retrieval (IR) field, to recognise challenges that are on – or even over – the horizon, to build consensus on key challenges, and to disseminate the resulting information to the research community. The intent is that this description of open problems will help to inspire researchers and graduate students to address the questions and will provide funding agencies with data to focus and coordinate support for IR research. </p
Beyond Autonomy: Ontological Alignment and Leadership in Spiritually Grounded Organizations
No full textThis conceptual paper advances a metaphysical framework for understanding agency, coherence, and leadership in mission-driven organizations. Drawing on Said Nursî’s Islamic concept of Zerre (the smallest particle), we reconceptualize organizational actors not as autonomous agents but as morally embedded participants aligned with a transcendent ethical order. This Zerre-based logic contrasts with secular-functional paradigms by grounding legitimacy and leadership in humility, symbolic resonance, and ontological coherence. We develop an analytical model that maps this metaphysical lens onto organizational constructs such as agency, leadership, and moral purpose. The framework contributes to emerging post-secular and spiritually informed theories of organizing by integrating Islamic metaphysics with contemporary challenges of decentralized leadership, ethical alignment, and value-based management. Illustrative examples from Islamic Relief, World Vision, and Extinction Rebellion highlight the model’s relevance for spiritually inspired organizational action across faith traditions.</p
Visual literacies in transition: multimodal co-production with generative AI
No full textThe emergence of synthetic images generated through artificial intelligence represents a paradigm shift in visual content production and interpretation. Much like early photography—once uncritically viewed as a “mirror” of reality—generative AI produces potentially high-fidelity depictions of places, people, and scenes. At the same time, AI enables instantaneous creation of entirely fabricated scenarios, challenging interpretations of reality through the reports given by images and rendering the accuracy of visual messages infinitely elastic. Moreover, the multimodal nature of synthetic image production blurs conventional boundaries between textual and visual literacies, highlighting the need for a more holistic understanding of visual literacy as part of a broader set of multimodal literacies. Addressing these changes requires not only competencies to distinguish AI-generated images from photographic imagery but also rethinking visual literacy practices to consider the socio-technical dynamics of generative AI, where images are produced through layered mediations of data patterns, interface architectures, and user inputs. This paper’s goal, then, is to identify the repertoire of literacies that emerge from multimodal co-production with visual generative AI. It is an agenda-setting article that uses journalism as a worked context and situates this exploration within one particular moment of human-AI interaction—the site of verbal-to-visual production.</p
Centre for Urban Research: Thought Leadership Series
No full textThought Leadership Series for Centre for Urban Research is our commitment to public scholarship and the importance of sharing research insights. The Series brings together diverse voices from across the Centre to explore the questions that matter most for the future of our cities — from housing, climate and land, to transport, planning and urban justice. Each piece highlights the value of interdisciplinary, place-based research and our commitment to collective knowledge creation.</p
Switching in Sliding Mode Control: A Spatio-Temporal Perspective
No full textSliding mode control (SMC) is a widely adopted control technology known for its robustness and simplicity. The essence of SMC is to use discontinuous control to drive a system into a pre-defined motion, called the sliding mode, which is designed with desirable dynamical properties. In the sliding mode, the controlled system is insensitive to the matched uncertainties and disturbances. Most SMC theory and methods have been developed based on the dynamical systems in the continuous-time domain, where switching functions play a critical role. Ideal switching is supposed to be instantaneous, activating as soon as the switching condition is met. However, in practice, switching mechanisms are affected by imperfections such as time delays, unmodeled dynamics, defects, digitization effects, and actuation limitations, which can degrade the salient properties of SMC. Understanding these effects and developing mitigation strategies are essential for industrial applications. Furthermore, the advent of networked control environments presents new challenges like limited communication bandwidth, latency and cyberattack, which have seen the emergence of the event-triggered SMC recently. Despite these significant advances, there is a lack of comprehensive studies which examine the commonalities and distinctions of utilizing switching in SMC across the continuous-time and discrete-time domains and beyond. This paper investigates the role of switching in SMC from a spatio-temporal perspective, considering both state-space and time aspects. The aim is to facilitate better understanding of its effects and misbehaviors, and to unlock its full potential for future applications. The interplay between SMC methods in the continuous-time and discrete-time domains is analyzed, and their shared principles and unique challenges are identified. Furthermore, important technical issues relating to switching across these time domains are explored, and several myths and pitfalls in their theory and applications are depicted. The relationships of SMC with other switching-based control systems such as switched control systems, fuzzy control systems, and event-triggered control systems are discussed. The impact of networked control environments on SMC in the continuous-time and discrete-time domains is also examined. Finally, key challenges and opportunities are outlined for future work in SMC and beyond.</p
Making, Unmaking, and Remaking Home in Social and Affordable Mixed-Tenure Community Housing
No full textThe shortfall in social and affordable housing in Australia has been widely reported. In Victoria, the role of community housing in providing social and affordable housing has been gradually increasing over the last few decades, and this is projected to grow in the coming years. One approach community housing organisations (CHOs) use to deliver housing to people on low incomes is through mixed-tenure sites that provide social housing and affordable housing. Research to date has primarily focused on the key objective of mixed-tenure housing, which is to improve the social and economic position of social housing tenants. At best, outcomes have been mixed, while experiences outside of this objective are largely unknown. As such, there is ambiguity surrounding what mixed-tenure community housing offers the people residing there, particularly for social and affordable sites. This research employed a qualitative approach to study and compare two social and affordable mixed-tenure housing sites delivered by Unison Housing, a CHO in Melbourne, Victoria. The study consisted of document analysis of Unison’s policies and three focus groups with 12 staff members, ethnographic observation on two mixed-tenure sites, and photo-elicited and semi-structured interviews with 11 tenants to gain insights into the factors and processes that contribute to tenants’ homemaking practices. The thesis builds a framework of ontological security in community housing, drawing on Dupuis and Thorns’ (1998) conditions of home, Kearns et al.’s (2000) notion of ‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom to’, and Giddens’ (1991) ideas of adaptive reactions to explain how historical and current social and economic contexts shaped participants’ experiences of home. Social and material conditions attached to tenure provided ‘freedom from’ past experiences of insecurity and risks to safety, enabling participants to passively experience the benefits of home, and the ‘freedom to’ actively engage in making home. However, the housing sites were also places of social and material disruption that unmade home. In these instances, participants engaged in adaptive practices to remake a compromised version of home. Despite being a mixed-tenure study, tenure type was not a driver for how tenant participants experienced home. Indeed, tenant participants of both tenure types shared similar social and economic marginalisation, experienced the making, unmaking, and remaking of home in similar ways, and derived comparable wellbeing from these experiences. The research draws attention to how past and current social and material conditions, and housing governance, intersect to mould experiences of home. Further, this research reinforces the significance of affordable, secure housing, and emphasises the need for consistent, accessible, and active on-site governance.</p
The emotional labour of peer work: encountering stigma in mental healthcare spaces
No full textThis article focuses on the workplace experiences of peer workers with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (BPD) in mental healthcare settings in Australia. Our article is located at the intersection of political, social, cultural, and legislative forces that have fostered the development of peer work as a paid profession. We draw on the concept of stigma to analyse findings from qualitative interviews with peer workers conducted in [state], Australia. By examining peer work in the broader context of lifeworlds of BPD, we address the interplay of work and professional identity, and the experience of a profoundly stigmatised diagnosis at this intersection. Our findings demonstrate the physical and emotional effects of stigma and how it produces boundaries and inequalities between peer workers and other health practitioners. These boundaries are reinforced by invisible markers that delineate what is expected, 'normal' and deemed professional in the workplace. Moreover, these same medico-socio-political relations help shape peer workers' identities and experiences. The development of peer workforces in mental healthcare service delivery is a prominent area of reform in Australia and internationally. Our research highlights the urgency of efforts to transform current socio-cultural-political relations that inhibit peer workers in their roles and impact workplace experiences.</p
Fuzzy Logic-Based Adaptive Filtering for Transfer Alignment
No full textThe transfer alignment of strapdown inertial navigation systems (SINSs) is of great significance for improving the strike accuracy of airborne tactical vehicles. This study designed a new fuzzy logic-based adaptive filtering method by using the fuzzy logic theory to address the influence of system model error on the state estimation of the Kalman filter for SINS transfer alignment. It established the state error model and measurement error model, which were embedded with the state prediction residual and measurement residual, respectively, for SINS transfer alignment. The fuzzy rules were designed and introduced into the Kalman filtering framework to estimate the covariances of the system measurement and predicted state by minimizing their residuals to improve filtering accuracy for SINS transfer alignment. Simulation and experimentation together with associated comparative analyses were conducted, demonstrating that the proposed method can effectively handle the influence of system model error on SINS transfer alignment, and its accuracy is at least 18.83% higher than benchmark methods for transfer alignment.</p