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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The Stories of Victims of Violence: Retellings of the ‘Iliad’

The last time I read Homer’s ‘Iliad’ was in my Year 11 Classics class, but it’s the text that first came to mind when Joe Zizek brought up the topic of how we should discuss past violence. The ‘Iliad’ may be of hotly-debated historical value, but it’s a story with a...

On peering at the world through a microscope

As a student of Global Studies and Sociology, my learning often centres on people and social structures. This involves a fair amount of generalising and theorising about people whom I have no lived experiences with. For example, when we were asked to make a...

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....

What Can We Do About Today’s (and Tomorrow’s) World?

Sometimes I fall down the existential rabbit-hole. As a child, the world seemed relatively unproblematic. Politicians fought and made threats, but counteracting forces balanced them out. Scientists made new advances almost regularly. I always thought the world was...

Setting the Bull Free

For any of you who have heard me speak for more than five seconds, you would know by now that I am the self-proclaimed "biggest, fattest Taurus" you’ll ever meet in your entire life. I’m stubborn, opinionated and I can’t bear to be told that I'm in the wrong. What can...

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...

The Hypocrisy of Social Justice in the French Revolution

To what extent does popular rule achieve social justice? Modernist scholars romanticize the French Revolution, where the common people rose and overthrew a corrupt establishment. A social pinnacle, where the foundations of feudalism and old order were torn up to...

*women* and my positionality on feminism

Being a women (as I’m sure we can all agree) is hard enough as it is. Now, with growing globalisation and ‘modernity’, we get to grapple with the conflicts of living our lives and other women living theirs. Of course, there is no one way to live life but trying to...

Sexual Identity in a World That Already Seems to Know You

Dr Patrick S. Thomsen’s research about the evolution of the sexual identity of Korean men in America was incredibly revelationary. Thomsen’s work was spring boarded by identifying the intrinsic flaws in the Cass Homosexual Identity Model, commonly relied upon in the...

The Mediterranean and the Internet: How Similar Are They?

In his lecture, Jeremy Armstrong made an interesting connection between the Mediterranean sea and the internet. As someone spending a lot of time on the internet recently I thought it would be interesting to break down this comparison and ultimately see why this...

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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