Come along to hear five community members share 15 minute talks on things that light them up and activate our capacity for creative response to change!

This Monday night, we’ll be hearing from:

Oliver Thomas
Paige Koedijk
Jayn Verkerk
Eleanor Pollard
Luke Edwards

…and exploring the following themes (more information below):

How to be a Tree
The Peninsula
Envisioning an ethical, more caring internet through tangible craft and critical making
Sheltering at the bottom of the world: Exploring prepping practices in Aotearoa
How can technology bridge humans’ relationship with the natural world?

How to be a Tree

“It’s simple,” they say, “and you too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine.” \

When I am among the Trees by Mary Oliver

How do we nourish our wairuatanga, listening deeply to our own inner critical signals, when we’re seeing the natural world collapse and repair around us?

Through Qi Gong, Zen Buddhism and Deep Listening, how can this aliveness continue to be taken care of as the winds blow stronger?

The Peninsula

Paige’s research contributes to the field of disaster risk reduction by utilising visual storytelling to emphasise the critical role of resilient communities in mitigating the impacts of climate-accelerated disasters, which disproportionately affect vulnerable populations.

The Peninsula, a fictional pānui designed by Paige, explores the mātauranga Māori principle of whakawhanaungatanga through the depiction of ordinary members from the Miramar Peninsula community in tongue-in-cheek survival situations during an ongoing zombie catastrophe. Leveraging Wellingtonians’ appreciation for b-horror/humour storytelling seen in productions such as What We Do in the Shadows and Wellington Paranormal, the use of humour and the spectacle of a zombie context is an engaging narrative experience for readers to consider their contributions within their community in an emergency.

Envisioning an ethical, more caring internet through tangible craft and critical making

Data surveillance, the costs of running data centres and streaming, the impacts of resourcing and e-waste of devices are some of the outcomes of the current centralised internet. Because we connect through screens to a largely invisible internet infrastructure housed in hidden locations we have little material form to help make sense of the technology. In response, craft making offers a way to investigate the immaterial internet through making the invisible visible and materialising our experience.

Craft making and doing is tethered to lived experience and the insights gained through the physical engagement with materials. As humans we live with and through things and mould them around ourselves, in turn we understand ourselves through doing this.

This talk shares the ‘Care label’ workshop in which we provided space to raise issues and reimagine a more humane internet, from the ground up. Craft making as a method may work for opening up discussions on other complex, abstract systems through raising awareness and empowering conversations.

Sheltering at the bottom of the world: Exploring prepping practices in Aotearoa

I am a current master’s student in Anthropology at Te Herenga Waka. My thesis focuses on ‘preppers’; people who take preparatory measures to mitigate the personal impact of a perceived crisis or disaster. I am interested in how prepping functions as a response to crisis in Aotearoa, and have been using anthropological fieldwork to examine the forces that motivate preppers living here. In this talk I will discuss initial finding and themes from my fieldwork and interviews with New Zealand-based preppers, as well as looking at anthropologies of the future, crisis, and the state and how my research hopes to contribute to these discussions.

How can technology bridge humans’ relationship with the natural world?

Much of human lived experience of nature is now mediated through technology. Using the example of listening to the soil, we will discuss technologies as mediators of human-nature relations, and how this may influence perceptions of the natural world and reflect co-evolved landscapes.

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