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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This article seemed to touch on some things from our Monday Session!

“Working Together Is What Humans Are Built to Do”: Social Trust Is Key to Stemming the Coronavirus Crisis Bill McKibben, The New Yorker, 2 April 2020.

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...

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...

Redress: What Now?

Stephen Winter’s presentation on redress programs for those who suffered abuse while in state care piqued my interest because the history of the intersection of government and the underserved has been marred with suffering. In the past, those who were unlucky enough...

Age?

Jennifer Frost bought age into the spotlight. Specifically, the arbitrary nature of age in our society and how age is a social construct. In terms of politics, I have always thought about how strange it is that as young people, we are reprimanded for a lack of...

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...

Dismantling the symbols of institutionalized oppression

For the past few weeks, the visibility of the Black Lives Matter movement has increased exponentially, especially as part of the quickly circulating posts on Instagram and Facebook. Chains of names, the familiar squares captioned #BlackOutTuesday (so as not to lose...

Is Conflict Necessary for Facilitating Social Change?

An unnerving idea proposed in Sinisa Malesevic’s The Sociology of War and Violence I keep returning to is that war is necessary in order to facilitate rapid progress. Although I largely brushed it aside as the product of bellicose sociology and the process of...

Hi, I’ve just got a “few” questions

Historian Jennifer Frost is publishing a book titled, “Let Us Vote,” dedicated towards the significant events that led up to the 26th amendment in 1971, which granted youth voting rights in America. Admittedly, I’m unfamiliar with American politics. Although I am more...

You and I, We Could Start Something

Wherein I help you cause violence.

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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