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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Is Old Enough Getting Old? Do Age Limits Promote Equality or Discrimination?

Jenifer Frost discussed how youth activism to lower the voting age emphasised education and maturity as well as disparities in their responsibilities, hence the phrase "Old enough to fight old enough to vote". This got me wondering about which age barriers could be...

“Gays are not real”

Dr Patrick Thomsen's research was my favourite out of all senior researchers. Solely because it was inspired by unexpected life experience, and it reinforces the idea that every, single, little, thing in our lives can become a topic of research. And these researches...

The War Within: Creating New Soviet Men Out of the Women of the Leningrad Blockade

Fascinated by food as a basis and dimension of war and inspired by Sara’s mentioning a study finding women survived better than men during the blockade of Leningrad, I have been doing some reading on the event. Namely, I’ve been reading The War Within, by Alexis Peri,...

Marriage or the internet – which matures a 19-year-old more?

Frost's discussion of the fight for youth voting rights encapsulated many talking points about civil rights, democracy, protest and strength in diversity. What grabbed my attention the most, however, was one throw-away line in the middle of her lecture. “Youth today...

Not strictly relevant to our theme

But we have had many anthems and this one was so important to my mum and therefore to me... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rptW7zOPX2E Vale Helen Reddy

Revising Rosie: The Myth that Encompasses the Riveter

She dominates our perception of female empowerment – the face of modern feminism. Unfortunately, Our perception of Rosie the Riveter is doused in myth, distorting our view of feminist history …

Age through sex: considering masculinity, maturity, and music

Jennifer Frost’s response to the predictably brilliant question posed by Antonia Grant about how the reasoning that fuelled support for the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution – that citizens too young to vote were old enough to fight – applied to women – led me...

Removing My Blinders

Patrick Thomsen’s story, and ultimately his research, was personal to him. His exposure to multiple cultural perceptions as a gay man led to his investigation of a Korean gay man’s navigation of race, culture, religion, and sexual invisibility. Although not Korean...

Who we are

Dr Patrick Thomsens work really made me understand how much of who we are translates into our work. Whether that be figuring out parts ourselves, or through projecting what we want to understand - then ultimately finding/discovering something that was much bigger than...

War and Peace and All That Jazz!

Briefly, citing written academic articles in a post so entrenched in audiovisual mediums didn’t seem ‘hip’ as the Jazz cats would say, so I’ve also referred to various documentary clips of musicians performing and speaking about their music. Also I’d recommend reading...

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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