The first move: A home for asylum seekers on the far side of paradise

<p>Since the turn of the twenty-first century Australia and New Zealand have become an increasingly popular destination for asylum seekers and refugees in search of a better life. Many of these people do not reach this new life so easily, with thousands trapped both literally and metaphorically somewhere between their homeland and their future home, but belonging to neither. Nauru, an isolated island in the Central Pacific, is host to a prison-like Australian offshore processing centre that currently detains people in inhumane conditions. Amnesty International cites the Regional Processing Centre situation as: “...a toxic mix of uncertainty, unlawful detention and inhumane conditions...the facility totally inappropriate and ill-equipped, with 387 men cramped into 5 rows of leaking tents, suffering from physical and mental ailments.” This thesis is centred on the following research question: How can architecture be perceived as a temporary ‘home’ to asylum seekers from disparate backgrounds all brought together in one place for an unknown period of time? The aim of this design-led research is to critically consider how architecture can play a significant role in remediating the authoritarian, prison-like conditions of processing centres while assisting the transition for asylum seekers to their future home. This thesis proposes a sense of worth and belonging can be established through developing an architecture that is connected intrinsically to the landscape and cultural context in which it sits. The objectives of this thesis are to investigate how the architectural design of a large asylum seeker processing facility can: 1) provide a sense of place to a wide range of asylum seekers from differing ethnicities, cultures, and social backgrounds; 2) improve their sense of individuality, self-worth, belonging, and community; 3)prepare them for entering a new Western culture where they can more readily assimilate; 4) mitigate the appearance of power and authority in a large processing facility; 5) provide a sense of human-scale, order and orientation within a large processing facility; 6) and engage with, and contribute to, the local host indigenous community. This thesis also argues that through architecture, an asylum seeker’s temporary home can be symbolically interpreted as a gateway or threshold to their future home, providing a sense of place, belonging and hope.</p>

The first move: A home for asylum seekers on the far side of paradise

<p>Since the turn of the twenty-first century Australia and New Zealand have become an increasingly popular destination for asylum seekers and refugees in search of a better life. Many of these people do not reach this new life so easily, with thousands trapped both literally and metaphorically somewhere between their homeland and their future home, but belonging to neither. Nauru, an isolated island in the Central Pacific, is host to a prison-like Australian offshore processing centre that currently detains people in inhumane conditions. Amnesty International cites the Regional Processing Centre situation as: “...a toxic mix of uncertainty, unlawful detention and inhumane conditions...the facility totally inappropriate and ill-equipped, with 387 men cramped into 5 rows of leaking tents, suffering from physical and mental ailments.” This thesis is centred on the following research question: How can architecture be perceived as a temporary ‘home’ to asylum seekers from disparate backgrounds all brought together in one place for an unknown period of time? The aim of this design-led research is to critically consider how architecture can play a significant role in remediating the authoritarian, prison-like conditions of processing centres while assisting the transition for asylum seekers to their future home. This thesis proposes a sense of worth and belonging can be established through developing an architecture that is connected intrinsically to the landscape and cultural context in which it sits. The objectives of this thesis are to investigate how the architectural design of a large asylum seeker processing facility can: 1) provide a sense of place to a wide range of asylum seekers from differing ethnicities, cultures, and social backgrounds; 2) improve their sense of individuality, self-worth, belonging, and community; 3)prepare them for entering a new Western culture where they can more readily assimilate; 4) mitigate the appearance of power and authority in a large processing facility; 5) provide a sense of human-scale, order and orientation within a large processing facility; 6) and engage with, and contribute to, the local host indigenous community. This thesis also argues that through architecture, an asylum seeker’s temporary home can be symbolically interpreted as a gateway or threshold to their future home, providing a sense of place, belonging and hope.</p>

Divergence

Since the function and form of Comenian pansophia derived from the previous post-Ramist tradition, its sources and basic working methods naturally betrayed the same family resemblance. Far from proceeding on strictly empirical principles, Comenius adopted from Alsted the idea that pansophia must derive from the ‘three books of God’: sense, reason, and revelation (section 8.i). Like Alsted, Comenius also collected and processed this huge variety of material within a system of commonplaces; while Hartlib and Dury, for their part, proposed using Alsted’s Encyclopaedia as the structure of a collaborative information processing centre known as the Office of Address for Communications. However bookish these methods may seem, they were not as far removed from Bacon’s actual practice as is commonly supposed (section 8.ii). The fatal disjuncture underlying the universal reform programme was not between empiricism and commonplacing but between philosophical and pedagogical goals. The fundamental objective was to expound a reformed system of universal knowledge in the systematic manner in which it could be propagated universally. But the reformation of knowledge in the patient, incremental manner advocated by Bacon required resistance to premature systematization. The Baconian pansophists were therefore forced to choose between pursuing the best means of transmitting received knowledge and the best means of transforming it. Since there was no point in communicating knowledge which remained fundamentally flawed, the universal reform agenda collapsed amongst Hartlib’s successors into the more coherent and manageable task of reforming natural philosophy alone (section 8.iii).

Re-emergence and diversification of a specialised antennal lobe morphology in ithomiine butterflies

How an organism’s sensory system functions is central to how it navigates its environment and meets the behavioural challenges associated with survival and reproduction. Comparing sensory systems across species can reveal how facets of behaviour and ecology promote adaptive shifts in the relative importance of certain environmental cues. The insect olfactory system is prominent model for investigating how ecological factors impact sensory reception and processing. Notably work in Lepidoptera led to the discovery of vastly expanded structures, termed a macroglomerular complex (MGC), within the primary olfactory processing centre. These structures typically process pheromonal cues and provide a classic example of how variation in size can influence the functional processing of sensory cues. Though prevalent across moths, the MGC was lost during the early evolution of butterflies, consistent with evidence that courtship initiation in butterflies is primarily reliant upon visual cues, rather than long distance olfactory signals like pheromones. However, a MGC has recently been reported to be present in a species of ithomiine, Godryis zavaleta, suggesting this once lost neural adaptation has re-emerged in this clade. Here, we show that MGC’s, or MGC-like morphologies, are indeed widely distributed across the ithomiine tribe, and vary in both structure and the prevalence of sexual dimorphism. Based on patterns of variation across species with different chemical ecologies, we suggest that this structure is involved in the processing of both plant and pheromonal cues, of interlinked chemical constitution, and has evolved in conjunction with the increased importance and diversification of plant derived chemicals cues in ithomiines.

Requirements of Solid Waste Management System in Savina Vegetable Market at Smart City Udaipur in Rajasthan

Awareness of Solid Waste Management is main requirement in India. Environmental deprivation, hygiene and health problems are raising due to increasing quantity of solid waste and improper execution of this service. It is need of hour to conduct detail surveys of different areas and identify the solutions to manage the solid waste. The main object of this study was to educate people about Solid Waste Management, benefits of separation at source and to estimate the quantity of separated wastes for design of processing centre for Savina Vegetable Market. Processing centers in campus of market can reduce transportation cost and also problems associated with landfills. After conducting 5 days workshop it was estimated that an average per day 3464 kg fruit-vegetable waste, 504 kg paper waste, 111 kg plastic wastes are generated in this market. Vegetable and fruit waste is generated in very high amount which can be converted into compost. It can be converted in to revenue for this market because farmers are the customers for compost and they visiting everyday in this market for selling the vegetables and fruits. As per calculation based on this study Rs 15, 60,000 revenue and 5, 59,200 profits per year can be generated after expenditure for maintenance of processing centre.

Republic of Nauru

Nauru is at a point of transition, given the continued decline in both phosphate mining and activity associated with the Regional Processing Centre (RPC) for refugees and asylum seekers. Nauru remains vulnerable to climate change and has a narrow economic base and limited capacity. Development challenges are increased by unavailability of land and high incidence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs). This is the second Article IV Consultation since Nauru became the 189th Fund member in April 2016.

The last Goldfish

A few years before filmmaker Su Goldfish’s father, Manfred Goldfish, died she interviewed him on camera. He was reluctant to talk about the uncomfortable truths of his past, his previous marriage, his two other children and the persecution and murder of his family in Germany. “You can watch all that in a documentary”, he used to say to her. The Last Goldfish (Su Goldfish, 2017) became that documentary. This article contains three responses to the film. The first section, “Losing Harry”, written by Su Goldfish, focuses on the impact Manfred’s experiences had on his son Harry, connecting that experience to the despair of children currently held in the Australian Regional Processing Centre on Nauru. The second part, “Internment”, is written by historian Dr Joanna Newman whose research on refugees in the British West Indies grounds Manfred’s reluctant memories of rescue and internment in Trinidad in historical fact. The third section of this composite reflection, “Citizen of the World”, is a response from curator and scholar Julie Ewington who reflects on the film’s unravelling of hidden traumas and the unspoken histories in families.

Displacement, exile and incarceration commuted into cinematic vision

Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time (Behrouz Boochani and Arash Kamali Sarvestani, 2017) is a documentary that exposes the systematic torture of refugees banished by the Australian Government to Manus Prison (in Papua New Guinea and officially called the Manus Regional Processing Centre). Shot clandestinely from a mobile phone camera by Boochani and smuggled out for codirection with Kamali Sarvestani, the film documents an important phase in the history of migration to Australia. This article analyses the film by foregrounding the experience of displacement, exile and incarceration as a unique cinematic standpoint. Boochani’s cinematic vision and socio-political critique will be interpreted in terms of embodied knowing and his existential predicament. The symbiotic relationship between the experience of seeking asylum, exile, imprisonment and the filmmaking process raises critical questions regarding the film as anti-genre, common tropes used to define refugeehood, and the criteria necessary to interpret and evaluate cultural production created from this unique position. The article draws on theories pertaining to accented cinema and incorporates ideas from social epistemology. Furthermore, it considers the author’s dialogue and collaboration with Boochani and Kamali Sarvestani and examines the significance of various contributors to the filmmaking process and cinematic vision.

Shaming Australia

This article analyses Australian audiovisual treatments of contemporary refugee experiences of the Australian government’s “Pacific Solution”, which was introduced after the Tampa affair in 2001. I call into question the conventional premise of much documentary filmmaking, that the moving photographic image can reveal the reality of that experience (indexicality). That approach is exemplified, I argue, by Eva Orner’s award-winning film, Chasing Asylum (2014), which aspired to reveal the truth about conditions in the Regional Processing Centre on Nauru and thereby to shock Australian audiences into demanding a change in government policy. The problem with the film is that its reliance on the norms of documentary has the unintended consequence of silencing the detainees and reducing them to the status of vulnerable and victimised objects. The article concludes by comparing Chasing Asylum with an installation by Dennis Del Favero, Tampa 2001 (2015), which exemplifies a nonrepresentational, affect-based aesthetic that says less in order to achieve more in evoking complex refugee stories of dispossession or disappearance.