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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How a Nickelodeon Show Contextualised War and Conflicts for Youths

I experienced war, similarly to many of my generational peers through Avatar: The Last Airbender - a Nickelodeon show made for children alongside Spongebob Squarepants and Dora the Explorer. Avatar: The Last Airbender is an animated series set in an Asiatic world. In...

Co-Create! Don’t Hate!

Anthropology is fascinating. I love the way it makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar. However, whilst studying it I have often thought about the ethical nature of producing research on a culture that is not your own. As the written word holds great power...

The Standard of Truth

To understand conflicts is to reach into a tumult of voices and take out something sensical. History has tended to focus on the loudest – those who could afford, or were interesting enough, to have their voices written and preserved. Until recently, the voice of the...

War in Film: A Look at Cinema’s Evolving Relationship with Conflict

If I asked you to picture a war movie, what is the first thing you envision? It could be the gritty realism of Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front. You may picture a class of naive young men thrust into a desolate wasteland strewn with wire and bodies....

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...

State’s Rights and Statues — Bad Perceptions of History

Dr. Zizek's lecture on the history of revolutionary violence made me question some of the ways in which historical conflict is percieved. The killing of George Floyd, and subsequent Black Lives Matter protests have presented some interesting perceptions of history. I...

Mark Zuckerberg wants me to be sexy, and other lies I tell myself.

Erin Griffy and Victoria Munn: People wanting to be hot is the one constant across history. The end.   But actually though, everyone is ugly, even though we're not, we still think we are from time to time. It’s some messed up, warped up, f***** up part of the...

Ancient History for the Girls, Gays and Theys.

Greco-Roman history has always been remembered as a little gay – an accurate but slightly problematic fact that ignores the prevalent paedophilia rife in Ancient Greece and Rome. In the words of John Mulaney, “we don’t have time to unpack all that”. We do, however,...

We may be locked down but we can still pudding like it’s 1944!

Thought this was a neat connection to ideas about scarcity and the way war (and our current situation) might impact food. AND there’s a recipe! Might also inspire some memory project ideas?...

Tell a story for fun

Patrick Thomsen’s seminar on genealogies of knowledge and the construction of research questions made me reflect on why I even want to do research. He described the complexities of the social world, such as how the several intersecting aspects of his ex-partner’s...

Gender and War

When we talk about war, so often it is in terms of the male soldier or male head-of-state. When women are mentioned, it is often in the lumped phrase ‘women and children’. As we’ve progressed through this term, it has left me wondering: where are the women?  Simply,...

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Hated in our Nations

Hated in our Nations

Spoilers  for episode 6 of season 3 of Black Mirror below.  Civilian casualties are as common as they are condemned. Numbers remind us that governments, be it democratic or authoritarian, kill large numbers of civilians as a military strategy. In his lecture, Thomas...

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Labels and Positionality

Labels and Positionality

Of all the sessions we had this year, one of the most impactful for me was Dr. Madhavi Manchi's session on research positionality. She answered a lot of the questions that I didn't know had been at the back of my mind since I started my Arts degree, the core of these...

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