With origins in the South Bronx area of New York in the early 1970s, hip-hop culture is now produced and consumed globally. While hip-hop activities can be varied, hip-hop is generally considered to have four forms or “elements”: DJing, MCing, b-boying/b-girling, and graffiti. Although all four elements of hip-hop have become a part of many youth work initiatives across the globe, public debate and controversy continue to surround hip-hop activities. Very little research and literature has explored the complexities involved in the assembling of hip-hop activities in youth work sites of practice using these hip-hop elements. This study attends to the gap in hip-hop and human service literature by tracing how hip-hop activities were assembled in several sites of youth work activity in Christchurch, New Zealand. Actor-network theory (ANT) is the methodological framework used to map the assemblage of hip-hop-youth work activities in this study. ANT follows how action is distributed across both human and non-human actors. By recognising the potential agency of “things”, this research traces the roles played by human actors, such as young people and youth workers, together with those of non-human actors such as funding documents, social media, clothing, and youth venue equipment. This ethnographic study provides rich descriptions or “snapshots” of some of the key socio-material practices that shaped the enactment of hip-hop-youth work activities. These are derived from fieldwork undertaken between October 2009 and December 2011, where participant observation took place across a range of sites of hip-hop-youth work activity. In addition to this fieldwork, formal interviews were undertaken with 22 participants, the majority being youth workers, young people, and youth trust administrators. The ANT framework reveals the complexity of the task of assembling hip-hop in youth work worlds. The thesis traces the work undertaken by both human and non-human actors in generating youth engagement in hip-hop-youth work activities. Young people’s hip-hop interests are shown to be varied, multiple, and continually evolving. It is also shown how generating youth interest in hip-hop-youth work activities involved overcoming young people’s indifference or lack of awareness of the hip-hop resources a youth trust had on offer. Furthermore, the study highlights where hip-hop activities were edited or “tinkered” with to avoid hip-hop “bads”. The thesis also unpacks how needed resources were enlisted, and how funders’ interests were translated into supporting hip-hop groups and activities. By tracing the range of actors mobilised to enact hip-hop-youth work activities, this research reveals how some youth trusts could avoid having to rely on obtaining government funds for their hip-hop activities. The thesis also includes an examination of one youth trust’s efforts to reconfigure its hip-hop activities after the earthquakes that struck Christchurch city in 2010 and 2011. Working both in and on the world, the text that is this thesis is also understood as an intervention. This study constitutes a deliberate attempt to strengthen understandings of hip-hop as a complex, multiple, and fluid entity. It therefore challenges traditional media and literature representations that simplify and thus either stigmatise or celebrate hip-hop. As such, this study opens up possibilities to consider the opportunities, as well as the complexities of assembling hip-hop in youth work sites of practice.
The Avon River and the Avon-Heathcote Estuary/Ihutai are features of the urban environment of Christchurch City and are popular for recreational and tourist activities. These include punting, rowing, organized yachting, water skiing, shoreline walking, bird watching, recreational fishing and aesthetic appreciation. The Canterbury earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 significantly affected the estuarine and river environments, affecting both the valued urban recreation resources and infrastructure. The aim of the research is to evaluate recreational opportunities using a questionnaire, assess levels of public participation in recreation between winter 2014 and summer 2014-2015 and evaluate the quality of recreational resources. The objective is to determine the main factors influencing recreational uses before and after the February 2011 earthquake and to identify future options for promoting recreational activities. Resource evaluation includes water quality, wildlife values, habitats, riparian strip and the availability of facilities and infrastructure. High levels of recreational participation usually occurred at locations that provided many facilities along with their suitability for family activities, scenic beauty, relaxation, amenities and their proximity to residences. Some locations included more land-based activities, while some included more water-based activities. There were greater opportunities for recreation in summer compared to winter. Activities that were negatively affected by the earthquake such as rowing, kayaking and sailing have resumed. But activities at some places may be limited due to the lack of proper tracks, jetty, public toilets and other facilities and infrastructure. Also, some locations had high levels of bacterial pollution, excessive growth of aquatic plants and a low number of amenity values. These problems need to be solved to facilitate recreational uses. In recovering from the earthquake, the enhancement of recreation in the river and the Estuary will lead to a better quality of life and the improved well-being and psychological health of Christchurch residents. It was concluded that the Avon River and the Avon-Heathcote Estuary/Ihutai continue to provide various opportunities of recreation for users.
Elevated levels of trace elements in the environment are of great concern because of their persistence, and their high potential to harm living organisms. The exposure of aquatic biota to trace elements can lead to bioaccumulation, and toxicity can result. Furthermore, the transfer of these elements through food chains can result in exposure to human consumers. Sea-fill or coastal fill sites are among the major anthropogenic sources of trace elements to the surrounding marine environment. For example, in the Maldives, Thilafushi Island is a sea-fill site consisting of assorted municipal solid waste, with multiple potential sources of trace elements. However, there is limited data on environmental trace element levels in the Maldives, and although seafood is harvested from close to this site, there is no existing data regarding trace element levels in Maldivian diets. Following the Christchurch earthquakes of 2011,
This article argues that active coordination of research engagement after disasters has the potential to maximize research opportunities, improve research quality, increase end-user engagement, and manage escalating research activity to mitigate ethical risks posed to impacted populations. The focus is on the coordination of research activity after the 22nd February 2011 Mw6.2 Christchurch earthquake by the then newly-formed national research consortium, the Natural Hazards Research Platform, which included a social science research moratorium during the declared state of national emergency. Decisions defining this organisation’s functional and structural parameters are analyzed to identify lessons concerning the need for systematic approaches to the management of post disaster research, in collaboration with the response effort. Other lessons include the importance of involving an existing, broadly-based research consortium, ensuring that this consortium's coordination role is fully integrated into emergency management structures, and ensuring that all aspects of decision-making processes are transparent and easily accessed.
This study explores the impact post-earthquake images from Christchurch, New Zealand inserted into a task requiring sustained attention or vigilance have on performance, selfreports of task-focus, and cerebra activity using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). The images represent the current state of Christchurch; a city struggling to recover from devastating earthquakes that peaked in February, 2011, killing 185 people, injuring hundreds more and causing widespread and massive damage to infrastructure, land and building in the region. Crowdsourcing was used to gather a series of positive and negative photos from greater Christchurch to be employed in the subsequent experiment. Seventy-one Christchurch resident participants (51 women, 20 men) then took part in a vigilance task with the sourced images embedded to assess possible cognitive disruptions. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: embedded positive pictures, embedded negative pictures, or embedded scrambled image controls. Task performance was assessed with signal detection theory metrics of sensitivity A’ and β’’. Individuals viewing the positive images, relating to progress, rebuild, or aesthetic aspects within the city, were overall more conservative or less willing to respond than those in the other conditions. In addition, positive condition individuals reported lower task focus, when compared to those in the control condition. However, indicators of cerebral activity (fNIRS) did not differ significantly between the experimental groups. These results combined, suggest that mind wandering events may be being generated when exposed to positive post-earthquake images. This finding fits with recent research which indicates that mind-wandering or day dreaming tends to be positive and future oriented. While positive recovery images may initiate internal thoughts, this could actually prove problematic in contexts in which external attention is required. While the actual environment, of course, needs to recover, support agencies may want to be careful with employing positive recovery imagery in contexts where people actually should be paying attention to something else, like operating a vehicle or machinery.
The last few years have seen the emergence of a range of Digital Humanities projects concerned with archiving material related to traumatic events and disasters. The 9/11 Digital Archive, The Hurricane Memory Bank and the CEISMIC Canterbury Earthquakes Digital Archive are a few such projects committed to collecting, curating and making available disaster-related images, stories and media for the purposes of commemoration, teaching and research. In this paper Paul Millar 1. examines the value of such projects in preserving post-disaster memories, 2. explores some differences between passive and active digital memory projects, and 3. asks whether even the most determinedly open and inclusive digital memory project can preserve its values when issues of race, class, gender, politics and economics impact upon its activities.
When disasters and crises, both man-made and natural, occur, resilient higher education institutions adapt in order to continue teaching and research. This may necessitate the closure of the whole institution, a building and/or other essential infrastructure. In disasters of large scale the impact can be felt for many years. There is an increasing recognition of the need for disaster planning to restructure educational institutions so that they become more resilient to challenges including natural disasters (Seville, Hawker, & Lyttle, 2012).The University of Canterbury (UC) was affected by seismic events that resulted in the closure of the University in September 2010 for 10 days and two weeks at the start of the 2011 academic year This case study research describes ways in which e-learning was deployed and developed by the University to continue and even to improve learning and teaching in the aftermath of a series of earthquakes in 2010 and 2011. A qualitative intrinsic embedded/nested single case study design was chosen for the study. The population was the management, support staff and educators at the University of Canterbury. Participants were recruited with purposive sampling using a snowball strategy where the early key participants were encouraged to recommend further participants. Four sources of data were identified: (1) documents such as policy, reports and guidelines; (2) emails from leaders of the colleges and academics; (3) communications from senior management team posted on the university website during and after the seismic activity of 2010 and 2011; and (4) semi-structured interviews of academics, support staff and members of senior management team. A series of inductive descriptive content analyses identified a number of themes in the data. The Technology Acceptance Model 2 (Venkatesh & Davis, 2000) and the Indicator of Resilience Model (Resilient Organisations, 2012) were used for additional analyses of each of the three cases. Within the University case, the cases of two contrasting Colleges were embedded to produce a total of three case studies describing e-learning from 2000 - 2014. One contrast was the extent of e-learning deployment at the colleges: The College of Education was a leader in the field, while the College of Business and Law had relatively little e-learning at the time of the first earthquake in September 2010. The following six themes emerged from the analyses: Communication about crises, IT infrastructure, Availability of e-learning technologies, Support in the use of e-learning technologies, Timing of crises in academic year and Strategic planning for e-learning. One of the findings confirmed earlier research that communication to members of an organisation and the general public about crises and the recovery from crises is important. The use of communication channels, which students were familiar with and already using, aided the dissemination of the information that UC would be using e-learning as one of the options to complete the academic year. It was also found that e-learning tools were invaluable during the crises and facilitated teaching and learning whilst freeing limited campus space for essential activities and that IT infrastructure was essential to e-learning. The range of e-learning tools and their deployment evolved over the years influenced by repeated crises and facilitated by the availability of centrally located support from the e-Learning support team for a limited set of tools, as well as more localised support and collaboration with colleagues. Furthermore, the reasons and/or rate of e-learning adoption in an educational institution during crises varied with the time of the academic year and the needs of the institution at the time. The duration of the crises also affected the adoption of e-learning. Finally, UC’s lack of an explicit e-learning strategy influenced the two colleges to develop college-specific e-learning plans and those College plans complemented the incorporation of e-learning for the first time in the University’s teaching and learning strategy in 2013. Twelve out of the 13 indicators of the Indicators of Resilience Model were found in the data collected for the study and could be explained using the model; it revealed that UC has become more resilient with e-learning in the aftermath of the seismic activities in 2010 and 2011. The interpretation of the results using TAM2 demonstrated that the adoption of technologies during crises aided in overcoming barriers to learning at the time of the crisis. The recommendations from this study are that in times of crises, educational institutions take advantage of Cloud computing to communicate with members of the institution and stakeholders. Also, that the architecture of a university’s IT infrastructure be made more resilient by increasing redundancy, backup and security, centralisation and Cloud computing. In addition, when under stress it is recommended that new tools are only introduced when they are essential.
Recurrent liquefaction in Christchurch during the 2010-2011 Canterbury earthquake sequence created a wealth of shallow subsurface intrusions with geometries and orientations governed by (1) strong ground motion severity and duration, and (2) intrinsic site characteristics including liquefaction susceptibility, lateral spreading severity, geomorphic setting, host sediment heterogeneity, and anthropogenic soil modifications. We present a suite of case studies that demonstrate how each of these characteristics influenced the geologic expressions of contemporary liquefaction in the shallow subsurface. We compare contemporary features with paleo-features to show how geologic investigations of recurrent liquefaction can provide novel insights into the shaking characteristics of modern and paleo-earthquakes, the influence of geomorphology on liquefaction vulnerability, and the possible controls of anthropogenic activity on the geologic record. We conclude that (a) sites of paleo-liquefaction in the last 1000-2000 years corresponded with most severe liquefaction during the Canterbury earthquake sequence, (b) less vulnerable sites that only liquefied in the strongest and most proximal contemporary earthquakes are unlikely to have liquefied in the last 1000-2000 years or more, (c) proximal strong earthquakes with large vertical accelerations favoured sill formation at some locations, (d) contemporary liquefaction was more severe than paleoliquefaction at all study sites, and (e) stratigraphic records of successive dike formation were more complete at sites with severe lateral spreading, (f) anthropogenic fill suppressed surface liquefaction features and altered subsurface liquefaction architecture.
This study explored the effects of the Canterbury earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 on different areas of quality of life (QOL) for children and adolescents with disabilities. Using a survey developed from the Quality of Life Instrument for People with Developmental Disabilities – Short Version (QOL-PDD-SV) (Brown, Raphael & Renwick, 1997) and The World Health Organisation Quality of Life - (WHOQOL)-BREF, parents or caregivers were asked to identify what level of importance and satisfaction their child or adolescent placed on areas of QOL including physical health, psychological health - stress levels and coping ability, attachment to their neighbourhood, friends, family, leisure activities, community access and schooling. They were also asked to determine what level of impact the earthquakes had had on each area of their child or adolescent’s life and overall quality of life in the aftermath of the earthquakes. A total of 31 parents of 22 males and 9 females between the ages of 2.5 years to 19 years of age (mean age: 12.6 years) responded. The results were collated and analysis was run to measure for the effect of age, gender and geographical location. The results found that the earthquakes affected nearly every area of QOL for the children and adolescents. The biggest impact on the children’s psychological health and their ability to cope It was observed that younger children (<13) were more likely to record improved or lessened effects from the earthquakes in psychological health areas. However, the areas of social belonging and friendships were the least affected by the earthquakes. Female children were more likely to indicate higher scores for social belonging after the earthquakes. Many parents observed that their children developed improved coping skills over the earthquake period. The findings in this study offer a better understanding of how earthquakes can affect the quality of life children and adolescents with disabilities.
Oblique-convergent plate collision between the Pacific and Australian plates across the South Island has resulted in shallow, upper crustal earthquake activity and ground surface deformation. In particular the Porters Pass - Amberley Fault Zone displays a complex hybrid zone of anastomosing dextral strike-slip and thrust/reverse faulting which includes the thrust/reverse Lees Valley Fault Zone and associated basin deformation. There is a knowledge gap with respect to the paleoseismicity of many of the faults in this region including the Lees Valley Fault Zone. This study aimed to investigate the earthquake history of the fault at a selected location and the structural and geomorphic development of the Lees Valley Fault Zone and eastern rangefront. This was investigated through extensive structural and geomorphic mapping, GPS field surveying, vertical aerial photo interpretation, analysis of Digital Elevation Models, paleoseismic trenching and optically stimulated luminescence dating. This thesis used a published model for tectonic geomorphology development of mountain rangefronts to understand the development of Lees Valley. Rangefront geomorphology is investigated through analysis of features such as rangefront sinuosity and faceted spurs and indicates the recently active and episodic nature of the uplifted rangefront. Analysis of fault discontinuity, fault splays, distribution of displacement, fault deformation zone and limited exposure of bedrock provided insight into the complex structure of the fault zone. These observations revealed preserved, earlier rangefronts, abandoned and uplifted within the eastern ranges, indicating a basinward shift in focus of faulting and an imbricate thrust wedge development propagating into the footwall of the fault zone and along the eastern ranges of Lees Valley. Fault scarp deformation analysis indicated multiple events have produced the deformation present preserved by the active fault trace in the northern valley. Vertical deformation along this scarp varied with a maximum of 11.5 m and an average of 5 m. Field mapping revealed fan surfaces of various ages have been offset and deformed, likely during the Holocene, based on expected relative surface ages. Geomorphic and structural mapping highlighted the effect of cross-cutting and inherited structures on the Lees Valley Fault, resulting in a step-over development in the centre of the eastern range-bounding trace. Paleoseismic trenching provided evidence of at least two earthquakes, which were constrained to post 21.6 ± 2.3 ka by optically stimulated luminescence dating. Single event displacements (1.48 ± 0.08 m), surface rupture earthquake magnitudes (Mw 6.7 ± 0.1, with potential to produce ≥ 7.0), and a minimum recurrence interval (3.6 ± 0.3 ka) indicated the Lees Valley Fault is an active structure capable of producing significant earthquake events. Results from this study indicate that the Lees Valley Fault Zone accommodates an important component of the Porters Pass - Amberley Fault Zone deformation and confirms the fault as a source of potentially damaging, peak ground accelerations in the Canterbury region. Remnants of previous rangefronts indicate a thrust wedge development of the Lees Valley Fault Zone and associated ranges that can potentially be used as a model of development for other thrust-fault bounded basins.
