Tuwhera Research Repository

The Tuwhera Research Repository provides sustainable open access and archiving to a broad range of AUT produced research - theses, research outputs and datasets.

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Access status: Open Access ,
Can You Wear a Feeling? A Dialogue of Body, Material, and Emotion
(Auckland University of Technology, 2026) Eastwood, Abby; Moore, Rachelle; Whitty, Jennifer
This research explores what it might mean to wear a feeling through a dialogue between material, body and emotion. The practice examines how fashion can act as a medium for accessing emotional states. Building on phenomenological, tacit, and expressive therapeutic perspectives, the research challenges fashion’s predominantly visual and critical positioning of the body and instead investigates its potential as a tool for re-centring bodily awareness. Using a bricolage methodology incorporating practice-led, autoethnography and phenomenology, the research situates lived experience and bodily knowledge within the design process. Methods, including criteria-led making, reflective journaling, mapping, and prototyping, emerged from this framework. The practice-led research develops a defined spectrum of discomfort that operates as both a generative and evaluative criterion. Prototypes are evaluated by their ability to interrupt bodily autopilot, the habitual and unconscious ways the body occupies space in everyday life. As bodily awareness often emerges through moments of friction or tension, the research applies a structured spectrum of discomfort to deliberately disrupt these automatic patterns. This enables making within identified categories to emerge across postural, balance-based, tactile, and sensorial experiences of discomfort. Findings suggest that structured discomfort can expose habitual patterns of movement and perception, revealing emotions that are often resisted. Through wearable prototypes that engage with discomfort, the research demonstrates how fashion can mediate between sensation, awareness, and emotional states. This research contributes to embodied fashion practice, offering insights for designers, educators, and those living with complex or changing bodies. By reframing discomfort as a generative creative method, the research proposes that wearable interactions can support the embodied practice of wearing a feeling, cultivating resilience and expanding tolerance for navigating uncertainty in everyday life.
Access status: Open Access ,
From Tradition to Transformation: A Literature Review of Educational Change and the Marginalization of Community-based Learning in Nepal
(Auckland University of Technology, 2026) Gautam, Alisha; Lourie, Megan
The literature review critically reflects on the impact of the formalization of schooling on community-based learning and the reconfiguration of cultural identity, language, indigenous knowledge, and community involvement in schooling in Nepal. Prior to the formal school system, learning in Nepal was mostly associated with the family, the local community, religious life and rituals, occupation, farming, festivals, traditional narration, apprenticeship, and social interaction. This learning enabled knowledge, skills, values, languages, cultural practices, and relationships to be passed on from one generation to the next, to local environments. As a result of the political changes since the 1950s, formal education grew in size and was increasingly associated with literacy, national development, citizenship, recognized qualifications, employment, and social mobility. This process opened up significant educational and economic opportunities, but also reinforced the dominance of standardized curricula, textbooks, exams, the dominant language, trained teachers, and state-approved knowledge. As a result, oral, practical, place- and community-based knowledge has been sidelined as informal, supplementary, and/or culturally relevant but not academically valid. The study is conducted as a systematic literature review (SLR) using secondary academic sources. Five themes were identified in the literature, and they are interconnected. First, formal education has played a key role in the evolution of literacy, mobility, and national development, and has favored written, standardized, examinable, and certifiable knowledge. Second, intergenerational learning, cultivation, the organization of festivals and rituals, ecological knowledge, craft, oral history, problem solving, etc., are also part of the indigenous knowledge system but are not widely acknowledged in formal curricula or assessment systems. Third, the widespread use of Nepali and English has created a language hierarchy that can make it difficult to learn mother tongues and can cause issues in learners' cultural identity, confidence, memory, and sense of belonging. Fourth, community involvement has evolved from teaching and knowledge sharing to administration and governance, and to fundraising and support, with communities perceived as being involved in education. Lastly, the creation of a local curriculum, culturally responsive pedagogy, multilingual teaching, indigenous values of leadership, and improved school–community partnerships provide practical opportunities for integration. Meanwhile, implementation is constrained by limited resources, insufficient teacher training, low institutional capacity, participant attitudes, and inconsistent policy implementation. This study reveals opportunities and marginalization in the process of education change in Nepal. Formal education should therefore be sustained and expanded, and made culturally, linguistically and locally responsive. Community knowledge, mother tongues, elders, families and local knowledge holders can be valid sources of knowledge, improving equity, relevance, participation, cultural continuity, and learner's sense of belonging.
Access status: Open Access ,
Modern Trading in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Examining Market Manipulation and the Case for Regulation
(Auckland University of Technology, 2026) Bhageerutty, Vasheesh; Beever, Allan; Abdussalam, Moshood
The rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) powered trading systems has transformed modern stock exchange markets, including the New Zealand Exchange (NZX). AI-driven trading strategies offer significant benefits in liquidity, speed, and market efficiency. However, they also introduce new risks to market integrity, particularly AI-enabled market manipulation, emergent collusion, and distorted price discovery arising from system design, optimisation objectives, and opaque decision-making. Legal frameworks developed to address human-centred misconduct are increasingly strained by the scale, speed, and opacity of AI driven trading. This thesis examines whether New Zealand law can effectively regulate AI driven market manipulation on the NZX and, if not, how the legal framework must evolve. It analyses the adequacy of existing public law mechanisms, including the market manipulation provisions of the Financial Markets Conduct Act 2013, and assesses the extent to which concepts such as foreseeability, knowledge, and causation can be applied to AI-enabled trading systems. The thesis also explores the role of private law remedies in promoting accountability and victim compensation. It assesses the applicability of negligence and statutory product liability under the Consumer Guarantees Act and Fair-Trading Act, identifying doctrinal constraints, particularly in cases involving pure economic loss, distributed agency, and the absence of a direct consumer relationship. In response, it proposes two targeted reforms: a statutory product liability regime under the FMC Act imposing strict liability for defective AI financial products, and a new tort of AI Governance Liability grounded in a statutory duty of diligent governance. Ultimately, the thesis proposes an integrated legal and governance framework that combines preventive regulation with effective enforcement and compensation mechanisms. Key recommendations include pre-market approval for high-risk AI trading systems, enhanced transparency and explainability obligations, compliance by design requirements, continuous monitoring with tested kill switches, and clear board level accountability. It concludes that while New Zealand’s existing legal architecture provides a foundation for regulating AI-driven trading, targeted reforms are required to safeguard market integrity and maintain investor confidence in an increasingly automated financial ecosystem.
Access status: Open Access ,
Resilience in Crisis and Emergency Management: The Role of Performance Audit
(Elsevier BV, 2026-11-01) Kommunuri, John; Narayan, Anil; Ramachandra, Suresh
Public sector organisations (PSOs) operate in an environment of unprecedented complexity and volatility, facing challenges such as natural disasters, financial and economic fluctuations, and social issues. These complexities strain their capacity to deliver services effectively. Performance audits assess PSOs’ ability to anticipate, plan for, sustain, and recover from crises, strengthening resilience by systematically identifying vulnerabilities and enhancing adaptability. The paper examines PSOs’ actions in Australia and New Zealand during crises and analyses performance audit evaluations and recommendations. Although PSOs responded to the crises, the paper identifies several deficiencies in governance and accountability, procurement and financial management, data integrity and information management, network building, and operational efficiency. Strengthening these areas is essential to enhance organisational resilience, preparedness, and recovery capacity in future crises.
Access status: Open Access ,
From Information to Independence: Understanding How Online Travel Reviews Shape Traveller Empowerment
(Informa UK Limited, 2026-10-06) Mills, Annette M.; Mendes-Filho, Luiz; Tan, Felix
Travellers frequently rely on online travel reviews (OTRs) to plan their trips independently, but how these reviews contribute to traveller empowerment is unclear. To address, this study draws on Psychological Empowerment Theory and Dual-Process Theory to examine how two aspects of OTRs, that is informational and normative attributes, shape travellers’ sense of empowerment during travel planning. Our findings show that informational cues (e.g. argument quality, information consistency) and people’s opinions (e.g. recommendation ratings, recommendation consistency) enhance traveller empowerment, which in turn contributes to satisfaction with OTR use. Further analysis shows that empowerment partially mediates the effects of information consistency and argument quality, while the effects of recommendation consistency and recommendation rating on satisfaction operate through empowerment. The findings highlight empowerment as an important outcome of engaging with OTRs and provide new insight into how online review environments influence travellers’ confidence and autonomy in travel decision-making.