Arts Scholars
Koi te hinengaro, koi te arero, koi te mahi!
Sharp of mind, tongue, and work!
Keep up with the latest discussions and thoughts from our Arts Scholars whānau
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Addressing the Redress
Dr Stephen Winter's research into the process of redressing the abuse suffered by those in the care system in New Zealand was fascinating to look at. For a long time now, governmental care systems like orphanages have been something that I've been interested in,...
Reflecting of Great Works: The Difference in Lived Research and Living Research.
One of the most important takeaways I have gained from Art Scholars this year has been from Patrick Thomsen’s lecture on his research on Gay men in Korea. “Understand that your lived experiences and things that appear as objective facts carry genealogies of...
Research is personal.
I've always been taught to keep as many confounding variables out of the data as possible - including myself, my views, thoughts, and opinions. But Dr Hirini Kaa and Patrick Thomsen told a different story. Their personal experiences guided them to their research...
Lived Positionality
Dr Patrick Thomsen's lecture on examining the struggles of gay men in Korea through the lens of a pacific lens was quite the ride. The past year has instilled in me a curiosity about how varied viewpoints can be used to analyse different topics. I personally have...
Collecting Notions
For a presentation last year, I researched Joseph Campbell's "Hero's Journey". You might also have heard of it as the "monomyth". If not, here's a simplified summary: the Hero's Journey is a sequence of plot points, which are said to loosely match every story we...
Obscure War
We are very fortunate to be able to talk about war in theoretics. We are able to keep war at an antiseptic distance from ourselves, avoiding discussion of the “nasties” of conflict and, for the most part, live completely detached from the effects of war and conflict....
History A, History B
Recently, while I was listening to a series of lectures on Herodotus, the lecturer distinguished between what she called History definition A and History definition B*. She also briefly mentioned the confusion caused when people do not realise which definition they...
Perception
As Halloween recently passed, my mind shifts to the commodification of culture. Nowadays you can purchase anything from toy guns to real guns, and murdering video games to watching WW2 in colour. (Greatest Events of WW2 in Color - Netflix). I feel less as if war is in...
Where do I go from here?
The first day of Arts scholars, I remember being perplexed when Sara brought in a Barbie in US army garb to discuss the gendered dimensions of war. I called myself a feminist back then (and I still am). But it wasn’t really grounded in any sense of “academia,”...
Connections and research across different faculties
As someone who’s grown up (like many of you, I’m sure) with literature as my ‘found family,’ a way for me to connect with others while staying safely holed up in my room, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that this love of literature could be transformed into something...
Empathy for Debate and Positionality
When we engage in debate, it is important to acknowledge that our emotional responses come from our experiences and our origins. This reveals the need for empathy in understanding our differences not as an objective truth which only one has discovered but as co-existent interpretations that deserve understanding and compromise if we are ever to diverge from the hostility that seems to be the focus of much modern political discourse.