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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More war and food links…

Cooking for Victory? This interview is a fascinating look at the role of Winston Churchill's chef! https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/2018754010/churchill-s-forgotten-cook-serving-up-victory-in-the-kitchen  

The Eye of the Beholder.

Our second research seminar that was delivered by Erin Griffey and Victoria Munn explored beauty ideals from the Renaissance and how this might be reflected in art produced at the time. Their work involved translating historical beauty recipes from this period and...

Mission Trips and Cross-Cultural Research

"If heroism is driving your mission trip, stay home." 1 Power and inequity are uneasy themes that dictate life for people across all sub-sections of Aotearoa. Our in-class panel discussion regarding how these two topics are treated in cross-cultural academic research...

“This is me, Eliza Thornberry, part of your average family.”

Weirdly enough my favourite show as a kid was ‘The Wild Thornberrys’ and I would be lying if I said it didn’t change my life. It aired from 1998 to 2004 on Nickelodeon and the movie came out in 2002.  If you haven’t had the wonderful experience of watching ‘The Wild...

Meditations on Positionality; A Game of Faces.

I am not usually one for sentimental blog posts; emotions can be tedious and robust motivators for the academic drives but messy to express amidst robust research and detailed critical thinking. Kate Hannah’s and Dr. Madhavi Manchi’s lectures impacted the idea that...

Stretching beyond our comfort zones

Comfort zones are pretty great. They are like a safe and secure blanket, they protect us. However, while comfort zones can be pretty great, they can also be restricting.  The discussion panel regarding power and inequity in research got me thinking about how this is...

Peace on the Stage

The last lecture on positive peace and the different columns reminded me of something I have been seeing more and more recently. Over the past few weeks there have been numerous support networks popping up around different communities I visit. One of which that has...

Grit and bear it

To achieve a long-term goal, one must have the passion and perseverance to reach it. This is the basic concept of grit and it is something that I find keeps popping up in these discussions with researchers, and here in my bubble of isolation, the reminders are...

Where’s the blood?

As I’ve been reading more about war, I keep on returning to that question posed in our very first lecture: where’s the blood? Going through the long lists of facts and statistics, it becomes easy to slip into this comfortable niche of studying conflict in a detached,...

The “intelligible rationale” behind the George Floyd protests

There is a long history of dismissive linguistic and narrative framings of sociopolitical protests, both deliberate and inadvertent.    Today, certain representations of the George Floyd protests delegitimize them and distract from their driving philosophy. This...

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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