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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Databases: Unlocking the Potential of Computers in The Arts

Victoria Munn and Erin Griffey’s presentation on the use of databases to aid research merged two of my interests: Computer Science and the Arts. One of the areas I’m most interested in is computer vision and machine learning. Unlike other areas of computer science,...

Inequity In Research

One of the messages that resonates mostly strongly with me was Carisa Showden's reminder that the assumptions one brings to the research process need to be treated delicately. It is far to easy to let ill-founded assumptions taint your research process in a way that...

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...

Kodak’s Little White Lie

‘All visions and stories and narratives come from bias.’ - Marcus Winter What are we as a culture if not a collection of widely understood images and narratives? After Marcus Winter’s lecture on his artistic practise of telling stories with sand, I wanted to...

Separating Strength and Sexuality: How We Interpret Women in Power

Historically, images of female power and sexual agency were incompatible. From goddesses to servicewomen, regulation of sexuality counteracted …

Researchers that serve

In reflecting on this seminar, I was drawn to the ideas of Dr Tiatia-Seath as researchers being leaders who serve. This idea was illustrated by a Samoan proverb she shared with us ‘to be a leader one must serve.’ Although the idea of leadership through service is not...

What’s the Tea?

Since being stuck at home, I’ve been drinking an excessive amount of tea. Somewhere around my hundredth cup of the day, I started thinking about how strange it was that such a warm, friendly drink could be the center of so many global conflicts. Tea-related violence...

If you sound like David Attenborough you’re doing it wrong.

  The power of biases is hard to minimize in Theology because everyone has a bias somewhere on the religious spectrum. Often the religious affiliation of the researcher comes into question. Why would you let someone who doesn't share your belief, tell you how...

Why do we need to research about the past ?

Victoria Munn and Erin Griffey’s research is centralised around ideas of beauty in the Renaissance age and how the ideals, methods of beauty inform or parallel with our own understandings of beauty in 21st century in the western world. This idea of how the past could...

The World of Fantasy

*content warning* mentions of sexual assault   After Brooke and Hela mentioned Percy Jackson and The Hunger Games during their (amazing!) presentations, it got me rethinking some of the books that I loved growing up, and the increasingly problematic aspects of...

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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