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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Classics, classics, everywhere

Classical mythology has been consistently inspiring art and entertainment over the years for a nearly inconceivable amount of time. As a die hard classics student (and all around nerd), I am always excited to find new adaptations to these familiar stories and see just...

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....

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...

How could we know if a fish is happy?

"One day, Zhuangzi was crossing a bridge with Huizi over a river. Zhuangzi said, “ The fish are swimming happily.” Immediately Huizi countered this with: “ You are not a fish, how can you tell when a fish is a happy?” “You are not me, How do you know that I can’t tell...

六四事件 – Three Decades On

The late twentieth century was a time of tremendous change. With the weakening of the Soviet Union before the capitalist machine of the United States, the legitimacy of authoritarian regimes was beginning to crumble. To survive the fallout of the Cold War, China...

When does the war actually end?

  It is easy to think of war as a past tense. While we aren’t exposed first hand to current situations like war in Afghanistan, we can recognize this horror across media and news updates. Then we can turn the tv off and look away. We don’t need to look any...

Letting the Lions loose

THERE was once a man and a lion travelling together through a forest, debating who was more powerful. Whilst disputing, they passed a statue depicting a man strangling a lion. “Ha!” Said the man. “See there! Look how strong we are, prevailing even over the king of...

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...

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...

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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