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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On peering at the world through a microscope

As a student of Global Studies and Sociology, my learning often centres on people and social structures. This involves a fair amount of generalising and theorising about people whom I have no lived experiences with. For example, when we were asked to make a...

A reflection on food, productivity and Positive Peace during quarantine…

Over the last few weeks, I have watched from my screen (and the sixth-floor window of my apartment building) as people have improvised and slowly adapted to our new reality, in a range of creative and exciting ways. Charles Allen’s lecture on Positive Peace made me...

Tell a story for fun

Patrick Thomsen’s seminar on genealogies of knowledge and the construction of research questions made me reflect on why I even want to do research. He described the complexities of the social world, such as how the several intersecting aspects of his ex-partner’s...

Development Without Conflict – The Tang Dynasty

When we spoke about how the development of a nation or a culture can only really be achieved through conflict, it left me feeling rather despondent. In all of human existence, was every major steppingstone in our cultural evolutions spurred on by a need to overcome...

What does ‘Conflict(s)’ mean? ​ ‘Context(s)’? ​ ‘In’???

Wherein I philosophise about how defining a context for a war is as impossible as finding all of them.

Like a Peacock

It's been a long year. The world has changed in so many ways in only a few months, yet things are still oddly the same. Time has blurred. Things that have happened only a week ago feel like old hat. Movements have progressed rapidly, and at the same time achieved...

The Western Gaze

The post-colonial perspective of Dr Patrick Thomsen, despite his position as a queer Pasifika man, reflects the importance of the researcher’s consideration of knowledge genealogy. Thomsen’s research seminar is a reminder of the Western gaze that is pushed upon us; of...

Violence and Legitimacy

It is September in the year of our Lord 2020, and the world is ending once again. In the midst of our second stay away from university, (US)America has refused to go down without more high-profile cases of police brutality, bringing the Black Lives Matter protests...

Conflict in modern societies

I’m a scientist at heart, and something I find interesting is that we believe we’re ‘pacifists’ compared to other organisms. One of our focus questions this semester was that all animals except humans have conflict for resources - why are we determined to prove...

Grit and bear it

To achieve a long-term goal, one must have the passion and perseverance to reach it. This is the basic concept of grit and it is something that I find keeps popping up in these discussions with researchers, and here in my bubble of isolation, the reminders are...

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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