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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What Counts As Knowledge?

What Counts as Knowledge? Lectures in the Arts Scholars course on power and inequity in research begged the question: What counts as knowledge? In these lectures, various scholars presented their work and touched upon power and inequity in their research methods, and...

You and I, We Could Start Something

Wherein I help you cause violence.

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...

East-Me Defined by West-Me

My 15-year-old cousin recently told me I’m such a ‘westernised Indian’ in such a flippant manner and I asked myself what is she trying to insinuate? I decided, for the most part, to really understand what ‘east defined by west’ meant for an Anglo-Indian like myself....

The Caution Sign on a Path to Better Research

Good research should never be one-sided, the researcher shouldn’t just be scrawling notes on the little ‘other’ people they observe below them. This discussion made me realise good social research is about bridging the gap between the researcher and the researched. To...

The Evolution of Fairy Tales

  For centuries, the whimsy of fairy tales has been ingrained into childhoods. They are stories which have been told over and over with intentions to provide entertainment and hope. I still remember dressing up like a princess with friends for birthdays or waving...

Quentin Tarantino: The Art v Artist Conundrum

When I was 16, my dad introduced me to Tarantino’s Kill Bill. It felt revolutionary.    From then on, I was hooked on Tarantino films, both as father-daughter bonding and because they fueled my love of film.   But, like all good things, my love for...

Reflections on Internal Conflict during COVID-19

As coronavirus ravages through the world, I feel odd basking in inner peace. Solitude, and time with my family have left me with hours to enjoy the simpler pleasures that life normally gets in the way of. Picking out tomorrow’s lunch recipe with my family the night...

The nonphysical beauty

The coagulation of past Italian to modern day Italian lingistically was as necessary to upholding historical texts as it was to upholding beauty formulas to the beauty society. Imagine not being able to read or understand historic Italian because you only know...

Thinking about commemoration…75th Anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

And this popped up today. Critical thinking about images and to whom we give access is always interesting. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/world/asia/hiroshima-nagasaki-japan-photos.html

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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