Seminars

This seminar explores Māori concepts of resilience. It draws from an existing research project and is based on reviews of literature, targeted case studies, presentations and interviews with key informants. It presents a framework for considering the cultural aspects of resilience and how these might be nurtured and promoted within and throughout whānau.

Addictions are now epidemic in New Zealand society and the lifestyles of Māori modelled on non-Māori is now creating considerable health issues in whānau. Results of an exploratory study on the impact of gambling on Māori will be presented in relation to the need for Whānau Ora to be a bipartisan policy and programme for at least a decade or more to address intergenerational trauma.

Just as there is no global economic justice without cognitive social justice, equally there can be no equity within academia without cognitive equity. However, indigenous knowledge remains inequitably positioned within the academy yet in this great transitional moment, indigenous knowledge is more critically relevant than perhaps ever before.

The most important response to the post-war period changes in Central America, to the exhaustion of testimonio and to the hybrid contradictions of representation of the subaltern subject by the Mestizo letrado, is given by Maya literature. Maya literature is a notable effort because of both its bilingualism and its representation of a uniquely different gaze on the Americas as a whole.

For many years indigenous or traditional Māori knowledge (mātauranga) has been considered incompatible with Western empirical based science, mainly because of the inclusion of holistic and spiritual components in the former. Increasingly the parallels between the two are being recognised and both scientists and holders of mātauranga are beginning to work with each other.

Despite an increase in the number of people speaking Maori today, the quality of the language being used has declined as the number of native-speakers of Maori language has declined. This seminar is about a research project based on twenty hour-long recordings from Radio Kahungunu featuring two elderly women conversing in the Maori language.

Recent innovations in the means by which location information is obtained from vagile animals have catalysed the development of ‘movement ecology’ (see Nathan et al., PNAS, 2008), a new scientific sub-discipline which seeks to understand what factors influence the ecology and behaviour of animals by quantifying how, where, and when they move, and by identifying what factors influence the course

Since receiving a Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga grant in 2005 the sculpture and video installation 'Āniwaniwa', by Brett Graham and Rachael Rākena, has been exhibited in Palmerston North, Hamilton, the International Arts Festival, Wellington, the 'Ten Days On the Island' festival, Hobart, Tasmania, and the 52nd Venice Biennale.