Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice 3 - Sunday 11 August 2024 6.00pm (AEST)
Justice, Design and Communication (including Doctoral)
- Presiding Officer: Adjunct Professor Susan Rix AM
- Ceremonial Host: Mr Huw Davies
- Presenting Officer: Professor Lisa Scharoun
Find a name
Doctor of Creative Industries
DILLON, James Joseph
Thesis Title
Creative Third Space: Applying Creative Digital Marketing Practice Within Higher Education Settings
Supervisors
- Professor Jillian Gail Hamilton (Principal Supervisor)
- Dr Caroline Maria Rueckert (Associate Supervisor)
Citation
An investigation into the strategies of creative digital marketing practitioners who work in higher education, including how they adapt to continually changing conditions; apply creative techniques to push marketing conventions; and produce content that is both evocative and practical. Combining analytical and applied creative research, the thesis contributes to the fields of third space professionalism and professional creative practice through a new, applied, and tested process model and practice principles for what is termed ‘creative third space’. This outcome can be applied by creative professionals to navigate higher education contexts, negotiate priorities, build relationships, and produce innovative marketing and communications.
Doctor of Philosophy
ADAMS, Kelsey Laura
Thesis Title
Understanding the Rape Acknowledgment Process: A Follow-Up Study
Supervisors
- Professor Michael Gaston Flood (Principal Supervisor)
- Dr Laura Elizabeth Vitis (Associate Supervisor)
Citation
This study investigated rape acknowledgement, the process by which sexual violence survivors choose the label they use to refer to unwanted or non-consensual sexual experiences. This study is the first to explore rape acknowledgement as a process, seeking to understand how acknowledgement works over time. This study finds that survivors’ feelings of certainty in their chosen label may fluctuate over time. This certainty crucially informs how other post-assault experiences impact survivors’ acknowledgement and healing.
BARTOLO, Louisa
Thesis Title
Algorithmic Recommendation as Repair Work: Towards a More Just Distribution of Attention on Cultural and Entertainment Digital Platforms
Supervisors
- Dr Ariadna Matamoros Fernandez (Principal Supervisor)
- Dr Kylie Marie Pappalardo (Associate Supervisor)
- Professor Nicolas Suzor (Mentoring Supervisor)
Citation
Scholars, civil society groups and regulators have highlighted various risks associated with the digital ‘nudging’ of human attention by platform companies’ recommender systems. In this thesis, I focus on the risks of these systems encoding and re-entrenching social inequality: under-representing, or harmfully misrepresenting, (members of) historically marginalised social identity groups. I empirically examine patterns in the recommendation of history books on Amazon and the representation of transgender streamers in homepage recommendation on Twitch. I then develop a framework for reimagining algorithmic recommendation as a tool to elevate the voices of those historically excluded from participation in public spaces and conversations.
HUSSEY, Emma Alexandra
Thesis Title
"Passion Became My Purpose": Performances of Self by "Paedophile Hunters" Online
Supervisors
- Professor Kelly May Richards (Principal Supervisor)
- Professor John Geoffrey Scott (Associate Supervisor)
- Dr Laura Elizabeth Vitis (Associate Supervisor)
Citation
This thesis investigates the expressive and performative nature of "paedophile hunting," a phenomenon where citizen groups expose alleged child sex offenders online. Employing Goffman's dramaturgical perspective, the study examines how "paedophile hunters" perform their online selfhood through dialogical masculinity, micro-celebrity culture, and narratives of self-transformation. Utilizing cyberethnography of twelve public-facing Facebook groups and fifteen interviews, the research reveals three key arguments: 1) "paedophile hunters" perform selfhood through masculinities; 2) they construct selfhood via micro-celebrity; and 3) they perform self-transformations. This inductive study uncovers the complex understandings of self and identity among "paedophile hunters."
JUNPIBAN, Naputsamohn
Thesis Title
Augment Your Strengths: Cross-Cultural Co-Design of Augmented Reality to Facilitate Self-Care Resources for Young People in Australia and Thailand
Supervisors
- Danny Hills (External Supervisor)
- Dr Chaiyatorn Limapornvanich (External Supervisor)
- Professor Mark David Ryan (Associate Supervisor)
- Professor Lisa Scharoun (Principal Supervisor)
Citation
This thesis employs a cross-cultural and collaborative design strategy to innovate new AR-based design solutions for promoting mental health literacy and self-care among young people. Through co-design with young people from Australia and Thailand, and established creative methods in the context of a strength-based approach. The study emphasises the significance of cross-cultural co-design in shaping meaningful design processes and innovate outcomes. This thesis contributes significantly to both design theory and practice, offering insights for design and health practitioners, and educators in the creation of design solutions for complex problems such as mental health.
LANGTON, Katrin
Thesis Title
Constructing Contemporary Parenthood in Digital Spaces: Infant Feeding and Baby Tracking Applications and the Mediation of Australian Parenthood
Supervisors
- Dr Elija Marc Cassidy (Principal Supervisor)
- Professor Michael Luigi Dezuanni (Associate Supervisor)
- Professor Danielle Gallegos (Associate Supervisor)
Citation
This thesis explores how contemporary parenthood in Australia is constructed through mobile applications designed to support parents in feeding and caring for their infants. It combines app walkthroughs of two infant feeding apps with interviews that outline parents’ experiences of app use in the context of their everyday lives. Notably, this research specifically includes the perspectives of parents from a range of genders and family structures. This work achieves cross-disciplinary applicability through the inclusion of health sciences and social sciences perspectives on infant feeding apps. It provides nuanced insights into the mutual shaping of (mobile health) technology and (parenting) culture.
LOH, Susan W
Thesis Title
The Entanglement of People, Plants, and Technology in Office Environments
Supervisors
- Professor Marcus Foth (Principal Supervisor)
- Dr Yasuhiro Santo (Associate Supervisor)
Citation
This thesis interrogates the current human-centric responses to using plants in buildings by investigating how people can engage with plants from a more-than-human perspective that does not consider plants as just decorative or utilitarian objects. A research-through-design methodology was used with a design intervention that enabled building occupants to care for technologically augmented pot plants in their office environment, thus enabling a more entangled relationship with the pot plant as co-inhabitant of the same space we share.
MELLBERG, Jacques Thomas
Thesis Title
Psychological Distance and Fear of Crime: Understanding Subjective Worries about Crime from a New Perspective
Supervisors
- Professor Matthew James Ball (Mentoring Supervisor)
- Dr Michael Luke Chataway (Principal Supervisor)
Citation
This thesis explored how people become worried about crime in the absence of direct victimisation experience using data collected from two communities in Queensland, Australia. Analyses focused on individuals’ perceptions of psychological distance from crime (i.e., how close they felt crime was in their immediate surrounding). As evidenced by the results, community members tend to report heightened feelings of worry about future victimisation when they perceive crime as a proximal threat (an event that could happen to them soon in their current location). The findings lay the foundation for new strategies to manage fear of crime in the community.
NAGAPPA, Ashwin
Thesis Title
Everyday Autonomous Transactional Media: A Platform Biography of the Decentralized Video Streaming Platform DTube
Supervisors
- Professor Daniel Angus (Associate Supervisor)
- Distinguished Professor Jean Elizabeth Burgess (Principal Supervisor)
Citation
This thesis tells the story of DTube, a blockchain-based social media (BSM) platform positioned as an alternative to YouTube. BSM platforms are situated at the intersection of the emergent Web3 discourse and the dominant platform paradigm. These novel initiatives attempt to develop community-led alternatives to mainstream commercial platforms by leveraging emergent Web3 technologies. Using the platform biography approach, the thesis traces DTube’s evolution between 2017-2022, locating these changes within the history of the web and digital media platforms. It contributes to a broader understanding of changing discourses, technologies, and practices of the web at a crucial historical juncture.
SCHOONENS, Amy Leana Cross
Thesis Title
Exploring Digital Media Ecologies of Young Adult Fiction: Teen Readers and Online Participatory Culture
Supervisors
- Professor Michael Luigi Dezuanni (Principal Supervisor)
- Associate Professor Lesley Kathryn Hawkes (Associate Supervisor)
- Leonie Rutherford (External Supervisor)
Citation
This thesis examined digital media ecologies of young adult fiction in contemporary book culture. It explores how young people engage with reading and books via digital platforms through case studies of Australian fiction, and through drawing on survey responses and focus group discussions with Australian teen readers. The project explores how teen reading intersects with popular social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and YouTube and other digital forms such as blogs and review sites. The research demonstrates the importance of understanding and fostering digital media engagement to encourage recreational reading among teens.
TROYNAR, Luke Misho Misho
Thesis Title
Decoding the Political Ideology of Dank Meme Subcultures Using Pragmasemiotic Methods
Supervisors
- Professor Daniel Angus (Associate Supervisor)
- Distinguished Professor Jean Elizabeth Burgess (Principal Supervisor)
- Dr Ariadna Matamoros Fernandez (Associate Supervisor)
Citation
This study analyses how politically diverse online subcultures are using internet memes to make meaning, build discourse, and engage with ideology. To address the difficulty of assessing the differential social impacts of image macro memes that appear politically ambivalent in meaning, I combine the textual expertise of the literary method of pragmasemiotics with the social reflexivity of Feminist Standpoint Theory and critical humour studies. Using this method, I critically analysed a sample of memes shared among two apparently contrasting dank meme communities on Reddit.
YADAV, Prithi
Thesis Title
Evidence-Based Design Justice: A Design-Led and Data- Driven Approach for Systemic Justice in Human Services
Supervisors
- Dr Heather McKinnon (Associate Supervisor)
- Dr Manuela Taboada (Principal Supervisor)
Citation
This research introduces a trauma-informed approach called 'Evidence-based Design Justice' (EDJ) to address systemic injustice in human services. Systems and structures meant to assist vulnerable populations from human services issues such as homelessness, unemployment and child welfare often inadvertently reinforce and perpetuate structural oppression. EDJ leverages the synergy of design and data for systems change in human services towards social justice, through an interplay between data, design, systems, and justice. It aims to respond to systemic injustices by gaining a holistic understanding of those experiencing these issues and initiating concerted agency, through traversing the gap between systems-level and street-level perspectives.