Te Aka Tauira, Issue six, August 2023

Te Aka tauira

Fundraising for Ōtepoti Whānau Refuge, Wāhine tauira in Health Sci and Critical race theory in Aotearoa

Contents

p4. Making the effort to help survivors of family violence

p8. annual creative writing competition:

Writer 2023

p10. Wāhine tauira create support network

p16. centring disenfranchised voices

WWW.OTAGO.AC.NZ/OTAGOBULLETIN/UNDERGRADUATE/

Debbie Bishop and Holly, Aotearoa’s first native frog detection dog.

Making the effort to help survivors of family violence

A fundraising baton has been passed on to a new set of hands as an Otago law student effort becomes a valued tradition.

Tauira from the Law School have been successfully putting on a series of events in their spare time to raise koha for the Ōtepoti-Dunedin Whānau Refuge for eight years now, raising thousands of dollars for the cause.

This year Julia Newman and Rebecca Bridgeman are heading the project.

Julia is a third year Law tauira, who is also working towards a Bachelor of Commerce and International Business, and Rebecca is a fourth year Law and History tauira.

Julia says that Law students first hear about the fundraising endeavour via email from the faculty, and those who are keen put their hand up to get involved.

“The women before us have really paved the way for the success of the events, and we can’t wait to contribute this year. It’s so cool that the baton is passed on from year to year.

“It’s a lot of hard work, but it is a really tangible way to help the community- and that is important to me.”

The Whānau Refuge website says the crisis line receives a call every six minutes and emphasises that family violence can impact anyone from any demographic- including students.

The charity’s crisis line has been receiving increasing numbers of calls from university students, which brings the topic closer to home, Julia says.

“The more I hear about the work the Whanāu Refuge do, the more it solidifies that what we do is making an impact in our community.”

Last year they made $66,000, and throughout July and August there will be a quiz night on July 26, a designer clothing sale on July 29, a bake sale on August 5, an auction on August 18 and a gig on September 22.

Rebecca says 100% of the proceeds go to Ōtepoti - Dunedin Whānau Refuge (previously known as Te Whare Pounamu Dunedin Women’s Refuge).

“They offer vital services to the community: including safe houses for women and children, education programmes, advocacy, and services for women to escape abusive relationships.

The Getting Creative

of

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

annual creative writing competition: Writer 2023

The University’s annual creative writing competition opens for entries today, with the theme: The Getting of Wisdom.

Writer 2023 is open to Otago staff, students and alumni, with each invited to submit one entry – either a poem or a short story – inspired by the theme.

One of the competition’s organisers, Nicola Cummins, a Senior Teaching Fellow in the English and Linguistics Programme, says this year’s theme “The Getting of Wisdom,” borrowed from Henry Handel Richardson’s famous Australian novel, will allow contestants to explore the universally appreciated quality of wisdom and the process of its acquisition.

“We imagine writers will deal with wisdom in many different contexts and the emotional resonances of making tricky choices, overcoming challenges, and

transacting moral dilemmas will encourage empathetic and authentic responses.”

The competition was established in 2019 as part of the University’s 150th celebrations and proved to be very popular.

This year’s judge is Kathryn van Beek, a New Zealand writer and editor, and the 2023 University of Otago Burns Fellow.

Van Beek won the Mindfood Short Story Competition and the Headland Prize, she has a collection of short stories, Pet, which is also is available as a podcast, and she is published in Overland, akahe, Newsroom, The Spinoff, and the Sunday Star-Times.

She lives with Bruce, a famous cat about whom she’s written two books: Bruce Finds a Home and Bruce Goes Outside.

“We’re thrilled to have a writer of Kathryn’s scope and experience judging the 2023 Writing Competition,” Ms Cummins says.

Co-organiser University Publications

Editor Lisa Dick says the competition always highlights the depth of writing talent within Otago’s staff, student and alumni communities.

“We’re really excited to read the entries again this year.”

The winning entries will be published across multiple platforms, including print and radio, as well as via social media.

The competition opens for entries, today [Monday, 17 July] and closes at midnight

on Monday, 11 September. Winners will be announced on Thursday, 12 October.

The competition is supported by University Book Shop, Otago University Press, Dunedin City of Literature, Otago Access Radio, and the Otago Daily Times – with prizes for each of the category winners.

Poems can be of any length (within reason), stories must be no more than 2,500 words (though we stress this is an absolute maximum not an aim, any length up to 2,500 will be accepted).

Stories and poems must be original and previously unpublished (entries will be run through the University’s plagiarism checking system Turnitin).

Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash

Julia Tan, second-year

Dental student

Wāhine tauira create a network of support

A supportive sisterhood of tauira is putting in the mahi to help future health professionals navigate the unique issues facing them.

Women in Health Network (WiHN) is a non-profit, student-led organisation which began in 2017 in Tāmaki Makaurau. It extended its reach to wāhine at Otago in 2022.

Alongside professional development events and opportunities to socialise, WiHN is working to support female future health professionals with its mentoring programme.

Mentors who are in at least the second year of a professional programme, a BSc or Health Science degree are assigned a first year in a similar programme with whom they can share guidance and advice.

The Otago branch director of the mentoring programme, fourth year Dental student Sonia Hua, says it’s like a big sister-little sister relationship.

“There are a lot of health inequalities for women, and we know that increasing representation in the

medical profession will lessen the inherent disadvantages women face when going to see a practitioner.

“To do this we have to support women going into this fast-paced and intense workforce, and one key way to do this is whakawhanaungatanga or relationship building.”

Mentors can provide first year students with help navigating academic or pastoral struggles and also provide a friendly familiar face.

Sonia says another crucial element of the programme is providing visual representation of a woman succeeding in one of these degrees.

“As women, people often tell us we can’t do things. It’s helpful to see someone just like you achieving the thing you want - it shows you that you CAN do it.”

Mentor Salma Abdalla is in the final year of her Pharmacy degree, she was on the executive committee of WiHN last year but really craved the personal one-to-one relationships she had experienced in her time as an RA.

Salma Abdalla, final year Pharmacy student

Sonia Hua, Otago branch director of the mentoring programme and fourth year Dental student

“My mentee is really special, and I find our relationship so rewarding. I see her as my little sister, and I cherish my role helping her to navigate what can be a tricky first year.”

Salma says she loves the community of women in WiHN, especially highlighting the significance of women helping to raise up other women.

“Support and sisterhood, that’s what WiHN gives you.”

Mentor Julia Tan is a second-year Dental student who found a huge amount of solace in a similar programme at her college during her Biomedical Science degree.

Once she felt more established at Otago she wanted to return the favour.

“The transition from high school to university is so hard, and having a role model can be really helpful.”

Today, in 2023, the health sector in New Zealand is a woman-dominated field. Despite this women still face significant gender disparities throughout their careers.

The Women in Health Network website says the issues facing women health professionals today include pay gaps, uneven opportunities for advancement and unbalanced representation in leadership and decision making.

“When gender intersects with other social categorisations, such as socioeconomic status, overlapping systems of disadvantage can work against women in achieving their personal and professional aspirations.”

WiHN provides community and support to women entering these professions, which Salma says helps them to have someone to lean on, to be part of something bigger and to believe that anything is possible.

Sonia says that the group is open to anyone who identifies as a woman and/or relates to the title.

“We are working to encourage more people to be a part of our mentoring programme and wider community for the future!”

Photo by Diane Serik on Unsplash

A concerted effort to centre the voices of the disenfranchised

Critical race theory is something mentioned increasingly in culture wars conversations at present – but what is it and how does it fit into an Antipodean context?

These are questions most people don’t really know the answers to, says Dr Christine Winter, a Senior Lecturer in environmental, climate change, multispecies and indigenous politics, who is teaching the paper “Settler state politics in Aotearoa and Australia” for the first time at Otago this year.

Dr Winter’s Tōrakapū (Politics) page outlines her research focusing on academic political theory, and particularly theories of justice, with a focus on the ways these theories continue to perpetuate injustice for some people, and more specifically for Māori, and the environment.

She came up with the idea for the POLS230 paper after returning from Australia, where she taught a class on Aboriginal politics at the University of Sydney.

“The decision to teach that paper was fraught in a lot of ways, I knew I wasn’t the person who should have been teaching it but there was no-one of Australian Indigenous heritage in the department and the paper had been shelved.

“I knew it was important that it was taught, and the students loved it.”

Upon returning to Aotearoa, Dr Winter decided it would be useful for students to have a comparison between settler state politics in Aotearoa and Australia, from a decolonial perspective and through the lens of political theories.

“It is so current, people are so desperate for information and education on this topic.”

The paper is presented through a decolonial lens so that students can understand decolonial theory and critical race theory with specific examples that they can relate to.

Dr Winter says she likes working in the abstract but that can be “so hard” for undergraduate students.

To show real comparisons between Australia and Aotearoa is very helpful for their understanding of the concepts, she says.

“It can be easy to get lost in the weeds of what happens in New Zealand, without realising that the oppression and domination of Māori is not just something that happens here - it is a part of a colonial system, and it happens globally.”

Dr

Winter says

Māori, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander

experiences of settler colonialism are both very different and dismally similar.

“In this course we discuss the philosophic and political fictions that underwrote colonialism and the theft of land, waters, seas, and associated life forms, and framed the deliberate attempts to suppress Māori, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander politics, knowledge systems, philosophies, culture and spirituality.”

Helena is a BA Sociology second year, in their first year at Otago.

They grew up in Hauraki but their parents are from Germany.

They say they took Dr Winter’s paper because it seemed relevant to current discussions in the media, but with a focus on issues more locally.

There is often a rosy image from outside Aotearoa, and even within Pākehā Aotearoa, that “at least we aren’t as bad as Australia or America” but this course has showed them that that isn’t really the case, they say.

“My parents immigrated here from Germany, and I am fascinated by the idea of utopia/dystopia in this context. New Zealand is a colonial capitalist utopia which is an indigenous dystopia.

“The dystopia that Pākehā see approaching through the climate crisis is what Pākehā caused for Māori.”

Helena says Dr Winter does a great job of highlighting the similarities between strategies of resistance and colonisation, but also the differences.

“She talks a lot about time and how settler colonial perspectives of time and land are very different and how different cultural groups have viewed the world.”

Alessandro, who is double majoring in Anthropology and Environmental Studies and minoring in Global Studies, is a third year tauira originally from Italy, but here for the semester on exchange from their university in the United States.

As a “foreigner”, this paper has challenged the rhetoric about New Zealand they had heard in Italy.

“One of the biggest things people think in Italy is that New Zealand is the perfect

country where no racism exists, it’s a very sustainable country and it’s what the whole world should be like.

“I have been learning through this course the way that Māori and the environment are affected by settler state politics, which has allowed me to have a better understanding of the reality and debunk some of the ideas I learnt back home.”

They say almost all the readings for the paper are written by Māori and Aboriginal writers, which would be “very unusual” for a course in Italy or the States.

“The readings gave me a glimpse of what this looks like for the people it affects and I found it very, very beautiful.”

Alessandro says that in the course structure there has been a concerted effort to centre the voices of the disenfranchised.

Helena wants people to remember that colonisation is a structure not an event and that colonial power structures are still operating globally.

“Neither of us are actually studying politics, which is interesting. It shows that this paper has a wide use and interest for a variety of different disciplines.

“In fact, this course is an important basis to almost any discipline, especially for Pākehā in New Zealand.”

Alessandro says he thinks it is particularly important for international students: “we are being hosted here and we should not forget that this country is not just Pākehā New Zealand”.

“I will tell my friends coming on exchange next semester to take Christine’s papers.”

Housekeeping with OUSA president Quintin Jane

Kia ora,

Hopefully semester 2 is treating you well, you’ve settled in to your classes and looking forward to it getting a little warmer.

It’s coming into flat hunting season, so it’s worth taking the opportunity to familiarize yourself with your rights and responsibilities as a tenant.

For current tenants: Your landlord cannot put pressure on you to decide what you’re doing next year. If you’re on a fixed term tenancy and haven’t decided what you’re up to next year yet, you don’t have to tell your landlord if you want to stay or leave until 28 days before the end of your tenancy. Of course, if you know sooner you can tell them, but don’t feel pressured.

This week’s critic has a copy of OUSAs honest flat review. If your flat is getting rented out, make sure to put this up somewhere in your flat so that prospective tenants can really understand what it’s like to live there.

For prospective tenants:

A landlord cannot ask for more than four weeks’ worth of rent as a bond. They also can’t ask for more than two weeks rent in advance.

Your landlord must lodge your bond with tenancy services.

When looking at a flat, think about what it would be like to actually live there. How many plugs are in each room? Is the kitchen big enough to have multiple people cooking together? How many bathrooms are there?

If you have any questions about anything tenancy related, don’t hesitate to reach out to OUSA for support. Just send us an email, or pop into our student support centre on Ethel Benjamin Place. The team can even review your tenancy agreement before you sign if you have any questions.

Quintin