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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Kodak’s Little White Lie

‘All visions and stories and narratives come from bias.’ - Marcus Winter What are we as a culture if not a collection of widely understood images and narratives? After Marcus Winter’s lecture on his artistic practise of telling stories with sand, I wanted to...

Is Old Enough Getting Old? Do Age Limits Promote Equality or Discrimination?

Jenifer Frost discussed how youth activism to lower the voting age emphasised education and maturity as well as disparities in their responsibilities, hence the phrase "Old enough to fight old enough to vote". This got me wondering about which age barriers could be...

Vulnerability and Strength in Research

Reflecting upon the power and inequity in research panel seems to stir up ideas about the negotiation of power in the research setting. It appears as though this is a complex issue with many answers, however, no completely right or wrong ones.    One idea I was...

“Gays are not real”

Dr Patrick Thomsen's research was my favourite out of all senior researchers. Solely because it was inspired by unexpected life experience, and it reinforces the idea that every, single, little, thing in our lives can become a topic of research. And these researches...

An Anthro Nerd Talks War

I love Anthro106 (issues and history in popular music), so I thought it’d be awesome to bring my new knowledge into art schol. I wanted to explore the music created during wartime and how it was influenced in the aftermath. I decided to focus on World War II and how...

To What Extent is Science “Cultural”?

  Research is inherently scientific, whether us Arts students would like to admit it or not. However, common-sense understandings of research are inherently based on a Western construction of “science”, thus, can scientific reasoning produce appropriate results...

A Modern French Revolution

In our lecture on the French revolution, one of the questions was why should we care about the history of revolutionary violence? This really resonated with me, as a white woman from South Africa and as a watcher of the protests in America. There has been no...

“Hey Siri – Define Beauty”

Has the definition of beauty changed due to new technologies and resources? During early modern Europe, “Recipe books” were used as a step by step guide to reach beauty ideals. Dr Erin Griffey sourced over 400 recipes that focused on complexion alone. The extensive...

Removing My Blinders

Patrick Thomsen’s story, and ultimately his research, was personal to him. His exposure to multiple cultural perceptions as a gay man led to his investigation of a Korean gay man’s navigation of race, culture, religion, and sexual invisibility. Although not Korean...

Less is more, in research especially

As a researcher, it is often easy to lose your goal during research as you become exposed to more knowledge. The staggering amount of sources that are available for study can at times seem overwhelming, and against this vastness, it is unsurprising that researchers...

Translation is Positional

Translation is a simple process, right? Take a word in one language, change it into the other language, repeat for the whole text. A tried and true method, except... obviously not, please don't translate things like that. Not even a closely related language, like...

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The World of Fantasy

The World of Fantasy

*content warning* mentions of sexual assault   After Brooke and Hela mentioned Percy Jackson and The Hunger Games during their (amazing!) presentations, it got me rethinking some of the books that I loved growing up, and the increasingly problematic aspects of...

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Like a Peacock

It's been a long year. The world has changed in so many ways in only a few months, yet things are still oddly the same. Time has blurred. Things that have happened only a week ago feel like old hat. Movements have progressed rapidly, and at the same time achieved...

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Tissues, please.

What does it mean to “weep in the archives”? For me, it means connecting emotionally with the history that is - or isn’t - documented. It means expressing empathy with a community or a person separated from you by a vast expanse of time. It means recognising that...

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Rogue One: A Non-Skywalker Story

Rogue One: A Non-Skywalker Story

The first time I watched Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, it was as a casual moviegoer along for the ride. I sat there just soaking in the action and cast chemistry and left little space for thinking about theme or cinematography. Four years and one video essay later,...

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Personal Histories

Personal experiences are a vital part of history. My memory project – interviewing my Grandmother about her memories of war – raised some interesting questions for me about different perspectives and memories of events. I have done a few research projects and...

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An infrastructure of feeling

An infrastructure of feeling

War and conflict are too impactful to be forgotten, even if they aren’t talked about and burrow down into the subconscious. In my memory project, I looked at this idea in relation to my family’s experience of World War Two and explored the consequences of silencing...

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