Care, collaboration and critique: The intersection of creativity and wellbeing in older women

In this paper, we investigate the intersection of creativity and wellbeing for older women based on the experience of a group who participated in a photography project in Melbourne, Australia. We draw on interviews with 18 women who participated in the 500 Strong photography project in 2019. This project aimed to raise the visibility and dispel stereotypical portrayals of older women through an exhibition of nude photographs of more than 400 women aged over 50 from Melbourne and regional Victoria. We suggest that, for the participants in this study, creativity and wellbeing are interlinked through the domains of care, collaboration and critique. For some women, the photography experience was an act of care, to liberate themselves from negative images of ageing and celebrate their bodies. For others, participation was a creative venture through which they could collectively acknowledge the contributions of older women. Some women participated in the photography project to raise awareness of, and critique policies detrimental to, older women’s wellbeing. The findings of this qualitative research with older women support the arguments that: 1) wellbeing is understood by the participants within a matrix of personal and structural security; 2) creativity is a critical and under-theorised dimension through which women make these understandings visible. This study contributes to literature on contemporary ageing that contests singular notions of decline and loss and to theorizing the use of creativity in wellbeing frameworks

Connections, constraints and continuities: wellbeing, relationality and young Pasifika women in Melbourne Australia

© 2019 Dr. Lila MoosadAmong many theoretical and methodological approaches to studying wellbeing the relational approach I adopt in this thesis has the potential to enrich understanding of the concept. The assumption of this thesis is that observing the flow of relationships and practices in lived spaces foregrounds the forces that enable and disrupt wellbeing. The thesis captures these flows through an ethnographic exploration of the experiences of young Pasifika women in Melbourne’s west. Through my roles as a volunteer, a participant and a researcher with a Pasifika youth group, I attend to their unique transnational context which shapes the young women’s relationships and practices and is essential to their wellbeing experiences. The meaning the young women make of wellbeing is interpreted through their family and community relational processes, through their participatory activities in cultural projects and through their perception and reporting of the impact of broader structures of power such as educational and regulatory regimes. I argue that the agency of the state specifically through restrictions imposed on migrants from Aotearoa/New Zealand after February 2001 - including eligibility for education and welfare services - is a constituent factor in diminishing young Pasifika’s wellbeing potential. In researching relational wellbeing I draw on scholarship informed by Pasifika, medical anthropological and critical theoretical frameworks. These frameworks provide a valuable basis for the analysis of processual and political dimensions of wellbeing. In studying the spaces the young women inhabit the thesis engages with conceptual issues central to this literature. I have identified and separately examined wellbeing practices in three spaces which I call restorative (Chapter Four), participatory (Chapter Five) and structural (Chapter Six). My argument is counterposed to a common notion of wellbeing as an abstract, measurable and ahistorical entity. For these young women, wellbeing experiences are grounded in, and shaped by ongoing historical, socio-economic and political processes. In Chapters Two and Three I provide an account of these processes in the historical/ethnographic context. This is essential to developing my concept of wellbeing as social and historical experiences embedded in the relational spaces. There is both potential and constraint in these spaces; and the young women’s wellbeing experiences emerge from complex processes of negotiation and balancing of these. My thesis argues that wellbeing is essentially an unfinished project as the young women weave stories of possibilities into their imaginings. In using multidisciplinary perspectives on wellbeing, this thesis makes an original contribution to health literature on Pasifika youth in Australia. The thesis presents an alternative epistemological foundation to health and wellbeing approaches that do not adequately address the relational dynamics of wellbeing in minority populations. It focuses on strengths and capabilities of the young women; it also argues that a study of wellbeing is incomplete unless it foregrounds the impact of structural forces on wellbeing pathways. This thesis will be of interest to Pasifika and minority youth who contest deficit-based portrayals of their communities. It will also be of interest to scholars and policy makers working at the intersections of immigration, justice and settlement agencies and health delivery

OBJECT DETECTION AND VISUAL TRACKING SYSTEM

The aim of the project is to design visual object detection and target tracking system. Such a system has been extensively used in military applications, but these days they find use in the civilian domain too, such as fault detection, geological surveys, remote sensing and domestic policing. Object detection and target tracking systems find use in robots and unmanned vehicles. In order to navigate and perform various operations on its own, these vehicles need to have intelligence. Therefore, developing an algorithm that would enable the robotic device to act on its own and make necessary changes to its trajectory would be a major breakthrough. Many algorithms have been developed to achieve this objective but they usually run in a pre-defined environment. In this project it is assumed that the environment is unknown and the drone has only visual data obtained by its frontend camera. The algorithm for object detection is based on the concept of determining image contours and utilizing the principle of image moments. Contours help detect the object and moment of the object is used to determine its size and therefore, its distance from camera. The algorithm for tracking has been developed using the Shi Tomasi algorithm for corner point detection and the pyramidal Lucas- Kanade optical flow algorithm to determine the motion vectors of the corner points. This is followed by the calculation of the local scale variance of these points and then estimating the time to collision. With these results the robotic device would be in a position to change its direction or trajectory. Therefore this algorithm performs real-time image processing of visual data provided by the drone and gives some kind of visual intelligence to the drone.M.S. in Electrical Engineering, December 201