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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More Art Than Science

I may be biased, but the arts faculty…

Hot men dying for their epic countries

When we walked into the World War I memorial in the museum my feeling was one of disconnect and apathy and slight irritation. While I respect the remembrance of lives lost, I can’t help but feel a little removed from and annoyed by what seems like a glorification of...

Perception

As Halloween recently passed, my mind shifts to the commodification of culture. Nowadays you can purchase anything from toy guns to real guns, and murdering video games to watching WW2 in colour. (Greatest Events of WW2 in Color - Netflix). I feel less as if war is in...

An Anthro Nerd Talks War

I love Anthro106 (issues and history in popular music), so I thought it’d be awesome to bring my new knowledge into art schol. I wanted to explore the music created during wartime and how it was influenced in the aftermath. I decided to focus on World War II and how...

Politicians and the Media

Our discussions surrounding positionality have been great and allowed me to have a lot of self reflection. Following  Tova O’Brien’s recent interview with Jami-Lee Ross and the large positive reception it’s had, my thoughts turned to  positionality within the media. ...

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...

Decision making and Subjectivity

Decisions are power. The decision-maker has agency over the representation, framing, analysis and conclusions drawn from their research. The process of decision making is abstracting - from broad, raw data, into a selection of options. The data is the input and the...

Diving deep

During Victoria Munn and Erin Griffey's research seminar, they discussed beauty in the likes of Renaissance paintings, reflecting the ever-growing importance of beauty within our society. Their work highlighted the importance of researchers developing a comprehensive...

War and Conflict’s Influence Upon Societal Reform

Change is an inevitable part of human existence, a fundamental component of our history that has so often been bolstered and revolutionised by war and conflict. Like change, conflict and by extension, war, are seemingly inevitable to our existence, events and ideas...

Politics Within Research

Many researchers may aim to keep a neutral political stance when conducting their investigations in order to prevent ‘bias’. Tracey McIntosh argues strongly against this goal. Within her research, McIntosh maintains that this is only another way in which unequal power...
The Power of the Camera

The Power of the Camera

I've been grappling with one of the focus questions in last week's session. "These are our stories, our people’ (Mike King) Why is it important for Maori to be a part of film and media?"   One of the biggest problems with minorities is that their experiences are...

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Change

Change

Various revolutions across the past 200 years have caused changes in social structure, political control, and the movement of our everyday lives. Today I tried to write about the french revolution. It is intriguing to look back upon the past and in their perspective...

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A Conceptual Analysis of Conflict

The eighth paperback Collins English dictionary defines conflict as: [An] opposition between ideas or interests. A struggle or battle. To be incompatible. The Latin root word of conflict is ‘confligere’, or ‘to combat’. While the Latin and second definition interest...

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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...

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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...

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An Ever Changing Song: An Anthem!

ANTHEMS OF CHANGE   What’s in an anthem? If you plugged the word ‘anthem’ into Google, you would perhaps one of the driest definitions I’ve seen yet: “A rousing or uplifting song identified with a particular group, body, or cause”. Coming first from religious...

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Where’s the blood?

Where’s the blood?

As I’ve been reading more about war, I keep on returning to that question posed in our very first lecture: where’s the blood? Going through the long lists of facts and statistics, it becomes easy to slip into this comfortable niche of studying conflict in a detached,...

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