Our research projects

Assessing the Governance of Tuna Fisheries for Community Wellbeing

• Professor Kate Barclay

The key question addressed in this research project is how the governance of fisheries affects the wellbeing of coastal communities, which we have addressed through conducting case studies of 4 tuna fisheries in Indonesia and Solomon Islands. The aim of the research is to contribute to the development of a methodology for structured and evidence-based decision-making for fisheries policies and projects intending to benefit coastal communities. 

he key question addressed in this research project is how the governance of fisheries affects the wellbeing of coastal communities, which we have addressed through conducting case studies of 4 tuna fisheries in Indonesia and Solomon Islands. The aim of the research is to contribute to the development of a methodology for structured and evidence-based decision-making for fisheries policies and projects intending to benefit coastal communities. 

In developing methods to support these policies, we include consideration of the potential benefits and risks associated with policy changes and projects, who derives those benefits or is exposed to the risks, and to what extent intended benefits are in fact realised over time. These are not usually assessed or monitored in fisheries, in relation to social and economic outcomes in communities.

The reports and policy briefs below include key findings and case studies on wellbeing and governance in tuna fisheries. Based on these we have developed a framework for assessing the potential impacts of changes in fisheries policy on the wellbeing of communities who rely on fisheries for livelihoods and food.

A summary report, two policy briefs, and the full report are available for download below.  The summary report and policy briefs are available in Bahasa Indonesia, as well as English.

Summary Report/Laporan Ringkasan

• Summary Report - Assessing tuna fisheries governance for community wellbeing: case studies from Indonesia and Solomon Islands (English, 3.4 MB)
• Laporan Ringkasan - Menilai tata kelola perikanan tuna untuk kesejahteraan masyarakat: studi kasus dari Indonesia dan Kepulauan Solomon (Bahasa, 771 KB)

Policy briefs/Ringkasan Kebijakan

• Policy Brief - Assessing tuna fisheries for community wellbeing (English, 428 KB)
• Ringkasan Kebijakan - Menilai perikanan tuna untuk kesejahteraan masyarakat (Bahasa, 420 KB)
• Policy Brief - Community wellbeing and FAD-based tuna fisheries in Eastern Indonesia (English, 510 KB)
• Ringkasan Kebijakan - Kesejahteraan masyarakat dan perikanan tuna berbasis rumpon di Indonesia Timur (Bahasa, 511 KB)

Full Report

• Full Report - Assessing tuna fisheries governance for community wellbeing: case studies from Indonesia and Solomon Islands (English, 7.3 MB)

More information

• Kate Barclay
• kate.barclay@uts.edu.au
• 02 9514 1579

The Darlinghurst Public History Initiative

• Investigators: A/Prof Anna Clark; A/Prof Tamson Pietsch; Dr Alana Piper
• Funder: The Paul Ramsay Foundation

Rationale / aim

The Paul Ramsay Foundation and the Australian Centre for Public History (ACPH) at UTS have formed a partnership to deliver a series of projects on the public history of Darlinghurst, with funding from the Foundation, to engage the diverse voices of Darlinghurst and create platforms and forums to amplify their stories.

ACPH will lead a series of conversations with the aim of building connections, understanding the values and assets of the community, and discerning the community’s aspirations for an enhanced future. Collaboration is at the heart of this project, in which the Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion at UTS, as well as Jumbunna and researchers from Murawin Indigenous corporation and Macquarie University, will produce a series of community engagements. Several public history outputs, including a collection of Darlinghurst oral histories, a historical walking tour and two digital exhibitions on the history of Darlinghurst, are also being produced with the assistance of the State Library of New South Wales and the City of Sydney Archives. UTS Impact Studios is also working with the Foundation to create a series of podcasts that examine how public discourse on disadvantage is framed and the implications for policy and service provision in a range of sectors.

Findings / outcomes / benefits

Most of the project components of the Darlinghurst Public History Initiative are due for release over 2022-23, when further reflections and outcomes will be elaborated and shared. However, the initial positive reception of completed work point to the Initiative’s successful engagement and reception: Season 1 of the podcast, On Life’s Lottery, was released and ranked #1 in Apple Podcasts’ Government category in November 2021 and featured in Spotify’s ‘Podcast Picks of the Week’ playlist November 16-22.

In the meantime, this PRF-funded project confirms ACPH’s capacity to develop and manage public-facing history in collaboration with major external partners. It also points to a possible future model of research partnership for universities more broadly.

Governing the City in China: The Territorial Imperative

• Prof C Cartier, Prof D S Goodman, Prof Liu Junde, Dr Hu De
• The Australian Research Council

This extended collaboration with the Centre for Research on the Administrative Divisions in China focuses on understanding how urbanisation, rapid growth, and regional development have been taking place through strategic changes to China’s subnational territory. The research, seeking to understand the role of the state in urban and regional development, asks how the Chinese central government’s decisions to change multiple conditions of the administrative divisions, including boundaries, areas, functions, ranks, and governing relations, impact the process of urban-industrial transformation.

In recent decades, the main change to the administrative divisions has been the declaration of new cities in the space of former rural territories. Where small cities once existed in the meso-scale territories, the Chinese state has designated entire prefectures and counties as cities. Through this paradoxical process, naming vast rural-urban territories as cities, in advance of urbanisation, the state has been strategically governing the future through targeted regional development.

In addition to demonstrating how China puts new cities on the map, results show that ‘territorial urbanisation’ includes targeted mergers between adjacent administrative divisions in which the state repeals the government of the less developed area and merges its territory with that of the more-developed jurisdiction. Such changes continue cities’ high local GDP growth, not because of economic growth per se but because the city area significantly increases in size. Some mergers are consequently timed to attain new growth targets. From a cartographic perspective, the process explains why historic names disappear from the map and multiple resources are required to understand even recent geographical change. From the perspective of social sciences research, the process stops and restarts local statistical categories and thus precludes normal times series data analysis.

The project’s recent research phase focuses on understanding how changes to the county-level administrative divisions are leading to the evolution of new state-led city systems that favour connections between small cities and towns. Contrary to assumptions about rural-urban migration and leaving small towns behind, the policy idea of city-town-isation seeks to develop sustainable urbanisation of rural areas with supports for the rural economy.

The reality of changing subnational territory to achieve state-defined political and economic goals challenges normative urban and economic research concepts. Nevertheless, this research demonstrates that the Chinese state distinctively conceives administrative divisions as mutable pieces of the political economy, demonstrating the authority to establish future cities through new territorial arrangements in the process of economic development.

This project will investigate and develop next generation creative practices and technologies for creating highly immersive, spatial audio for 3D computer game engines. 3D game engines such as Unreal and Unity have become a tool of choice for interactive and immersive games and are increasingly used in other areas such as simulation and training, film and animation production, architecture, engineering, data analytics and live performances–among others. 

Of increasing interest is the use of games-engine-based applications for virtual and augmented reality (‘mixed reality’) experiences. 

Game engines are deployed on consoles, screen based PCs, on mobile devices, and are expected to be implemented in the cloud and delivered over 5G networks to provide untethered mixed reality experiences (3GPP 2020). The visual fidelity and performance of current generation game engines is remarkable, but historically they have focussed on 3D graphics rather than 3D audio (Rogers et al, 2017).

While game engines are improving their built-in audio capabilities, they are comparatively neglected and are less well supported (Kenwright et al, 2020).  This is especially the case for spatial audio.  Modern, ‘object based’, spatial audio techniques allow highly accurate 3D positioning of sounds.  This means that sound generated by game objects can be made to precisely match their position in the simulated world.  If a bird, for example, flies from above and behind the user to land in front of them, the sounds generated by the bird will be perceived to precisely match its movements.

Research goals

There are two overarching research goals:

1. Develop sound design and game design approaches and methods that create immersive experiences for users.
2. Demonstrate and test the approaches and methods through the creation and evaluation of a series of games featuring immersive audio.

Partnership goals

Deepen the partnership between Dolby and UTS as follows:

1. Dolby Atmos curriculum will be made available to UTS coursework students in relevant courses such as the Music and Sound Design and Games Development degrees.
2. Key Dolby staff will present guest lectures and participate in relevant student workshops to engage students in the creation of immersive audio and highlight career opportunities in this area.
3. UTS will investigate the development of short courses on Dolby Atmos
4. Dolby will provide UTS students with the opportunity to highlight their audio compositions globally

Research outcomes

• A set of tools, techniques and methods for the creation of headphone-first, immersive gaming experiences developed and tested through the practice of games creation.
• Design criteria for headphone-first immersive audio creation tools based on in-depth analysis of users’ experiences.
• Games/immersive experiences which demonstrate the capabilities of the tools and the benefits of the techniques.
• Rigorous methods for the evaluation of audience members’ sense of immersion.

Deliverables and engagement

The project deliverables will include:

• Industry event presentations/demos
• Publicly available videos and demonstrator games showcasing immersive audio
• Installations and demos at appropriate venues, including the UTS cinema, equipped with a 7.1.4 sound system.
• Game-audio creation techniques and tools and associated documentation
• Research publications in key conferences & journals
• Report detailing refined research questions and methods presented after 6 months
• Six-monthly progress reports/presentations to Dolby

Investigators

• Prof Nick Hopwood (UTS)
• Dr Chris Elliot (St George Hospital)
• A/Prof Ann Dadich (WSU)
• Kady Moraby (South Australia Health)
• In collaboration with our Parent Advisory Group, artist Kate Disher-Quill, Inter-cultural Consultant Anjana Regmi, UTS Design Innovation Research Centre, Sydney Children’s Hospital, St George Hospital.

Funders

• Maridulu Budyari Gumal/Sydney Partnership for Health, Education, Research & Enterprise
• South Eastern Sydney Local Health District
• UTS Social Impact Grant
• WSU Business School

Rationale / aim

Feeding tubes are life-saving devices that enable safe delivery of nutrition for people who cannot eat or drink orally. Paediatric feeding disorders requiring use of a feeding tube for more than two weeks (PFD-Ts) are surprisingly common, and are linked to multiple causes such as low birth weight, surgery in early life, autism spectrum disorder, childhood cancer, cystic fibrosis, and a range of genetic disorders. When a child uses a feeding tube, everyone around them is impacted. Parents and carers feed children with their hearts, not with plastic tubes. How we feed our children and include them in the joys of mealtimes matters immensely. So, too, does participating in everyday life – joining playgroups, going out to parks and cafes, and having contact with others. However, evidence repeatedly shows that these everyday joys are often under threat when a child feeds using a tube. Practical challenges and social stigma make simple things very difficult, and many families find themselves isolated, anxious, feeling judged and disconnected from their communities.

SUCCEED aims to change this by finding how families can go from just about coping, to thriving. Our purpose is to change feeding tubes from being life-saving devices to being life-enabling ones, remembering that the tube doesn’t just fill stomachs, it can be a way – just like breastfeeding, bottle feeding, or eating from a plate – to fill our hearts.

Findings, outcomes and benefits

We found that families have invented many ingenious ways to overcome challenges associated with tube-feeding, and have curated these in a unique website – childfeeding.org – that shares parents’ experiences, expertise, and their stories of tube-feeding. We also found that parents found it hard to connect with others who had similar experiences. So, we ran a world-first Tube-Feeding picnic, featured on Channel 7 News. We have been working with clinicians to define a model of care that better meets the needs of families with children who tube-feed, including that their child feels loved and lives life to the full, not just that they are full of food. Recently, we responded to evidence of stigma around tube-feeding, running a national digital campaign, designed in collaboration with parents, that shows tube-feeding in a more positive light, educating the wider public on this crucial but overlooked issue. We reached nearly 280,000 parents in Australia, who watched our videos (produced by UTS students) over 31,000 times, sharing parents’ stories, and showing their love for children who tube-feed. Children, siblings and parents all benefit when whole communities can respond in ways that replace stigma and exclusion with warmth and a spirit that tube-feeding is everyone’s business.

The Talking Room

• Investigator: Deborah Szapiro
• Funder: Honda Research Institute – Japan (HRI-JP)

Rationale / Aim

The Talking Room builds on a longitudinal collaboration between UTS and HRI-JP which applies design, animation and storytelling principles to social robotics.  The project is an interactive, creative content program facilitated through the prototype social robot, Haru, and aimed at high school students around the world.

As social robots are being designed to be active social actors within human society, there is a need to understand how to design them in a way that fosters diversity and inclusion.

The Talking Room aims to support inclusive practices and an acceptance of diversity in high school aged students through an exchange of ideas, discussion and shared experience with the social robot Haru, and their peers in other countries. The project is designed to UNICEF SDG’s as outlined in their Policy Guidance on AI for Children (2020) and Universal Design Principles in order to create an enabling environment that addresses issues of fairness, non-discrimination, transparency, explainability and accountability for children.

The Talking Room acknowledges that an acceptance of diversity is created out of ‘sharedness’ not ‘sameness’ and that it is interaction and actual experiences with members of other social or racial groups that encourage positive effects and minimise bias and undesirable impacts. The project is designed to encourage students to form a ‘sharing’ community comprised of students from diverse backgrounds to support a greater understanding and acceptance of the variety of human experience and identities.

Findings / outcomes / benefits

A pilot study of the Talking Room will take place between high school students located in Australia, UK, Portugal, Spain, Greece, Thailand, Uganda, USA, Germany, Japan, Ukraine and India from late April – August 2022. The findings from The Talking Room project and user testing will contribute to the development of social robotics/AI technologies that consider the technology’s impact on children and create an enabling environment for child-centred AI that supports children’s prosocial development and well-being.

Ref: Office of Global Insight and Policy,  2020.Policy guidance on AI for children draft 1.0 | September 2020 , United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF)