Te Pānui Taura issue 1 May 2024

Te Pānui Taura

This issue: Learning to learn with ADHD, wellbeing at heart of research, reimagining the trauma plot, and much more!

This month:

Learning to learn with ADHD

Graduate Wellbeing Coach Nikki Fahey is working to better support postgraduate_ students with ADHD.

Wellbeing at heart of research

Research into the impact of the social and material world on neurodivergent people has won Franz van Beusekom the University of Otago Richard Kamman Wellbeing prize.

Reimagining the trauma plot

Could magical realism be used to tell explore traumatic stories experiences on stage in a more ethical and inclusive manner than standard realism?

Plus

Otago launches new tohu, ikoa Māori It’s not too late to sign up for Good Mahi! Calendar

Postgrads - you’re not alone

When attendees at a recent postgraduate event were asked how many of them had felt lonely in the past week, every person put up their hand.

OUSA postgraduate representative for 2024, Hanna Friedlander, wants to change that.

She is trying to install a sense of community among Otago’s postgraduate students by hosting weekly ‘Imposter Hour’ sessions where all postgraduate students are welcome to talk about how they have been.

“Each time, I’m tweaking [Imposter Hour], really trying to foster this safe, comfortable environment for people.”

“It’s this intermediary initiative that is seeking to help people and prevent them from going from having bad thoughts to needing clinical help.”

She says Chattam House rules apply - outside of Imposter Hour people can discuss issues and solutions raised, but in a way that doesn’t identify the original

speaker, if there is value in the situation.

She asks that attendees be respectful that people come from different backgrounds with different perspectives.

“Everyone has such an individualised [postgraduate] experience, if someone is coming there to rant, or they want affirmation from the group … that’s okay, that’s a common experience.”

The two Imposter Hour events she has run so far have had a small turn out, but Hanna will not be deterred.

“I’m not going to let small numbers of people showing up hold me back, you have to start somewhere, that’s how you make progress.”

She would like to see Imposter Hour and the postgrad club, the Society for Postgraduate Students, become “built into the postgraduate experience, not something you join but something that you’re a part of”.

The event recognises that

postgraduate students don’t fit into the “youth experience” many other Otago students are having, Hanna says.

“It is for postgrad students no matter how old. We’re all in this together.”

Hanna has a few other ideas for events she would like to run.

The first is a postgraduate open day – like a tertiary open day but for second and third year students.

It would give them an opportunity to learn more about the postgraduate programmes within the department of their interest, she says.

The second event she would like to get off of the ground is a University-wide conference.

“I just think it would be a really great way to bring the University together and showcase what all our postgrad students are up to.”

She believes a lot could be gained in hearing from people outside of your everyday bubble.

Learning to learn with ADHD

Korero by Koren Allpress

See full story online.

It’s been almost 18 months since Nikki Fahey was diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or Aroreretini - meaning ‘attention goes to many things’.

Nikki, Graduate Wellbeing Coach at the Graduate Research School began to wonder if she had ADHD after meeting postgraduate students seeking coaching for ADHD. In hearing their stories, she noticed many similarities between their experiences and hers.

“I genuinely felt like they were describing my life – this was unreal.”

Many people – especially women - don’t know they have ADHD, and as was the case with Nikki, they have been misdiagnosed with other things such as

impulsivity and/or hyperactivity that is severe and consistent enough to interfere with everyday functioning. These behaviours are due to the way the persons brain works, not due to a lack of intelligence or discipline, Nikki says.

People with ADHD experience executive disfunction where the task doesn’t provide enough stimulation to motivate them to do the task; “this is not rewarding for me because I don’t get dopamine from doing this”.

In response to a growing demand for her coaching service from postgraduate students to help manage ADHD, Nikki started an ADHD Coffee Catch Up in 2022.

Postgraduate students can be “really hard” on themselves, thinking they’re not working hard enough or producing enough.

“I love it when I get the chance to meet someone who has ADHD, and you’re like ‘Oh my god! Me too! Me too!’.”

depression or anxiety, she says. Research is now showing that women may not present as outwardly hyperactive, and be more internally hyperactive, or have the inattentive subtype, so it is not as readily identified.

“Outwardly, I look like I’m high performing and doing really well. Inwardly, it’s been really hard. [People with ADHD] mask a lot; I don’t want to look like I’m struggling. People pleasing too, it’s much easier to do things for other people than yourself,” she says.

Historically ADHD has been seen as a disorder of childhood, “but what we now know is people don’t grow out of it, they have it into adulthood”.

People with ADHD display a persistent pattern including inattention,

Postgraduate students with ADHD will be “really passionate” about their topic and be very motivated to learn and do the research, but it can then be hard to then sustain the ongoing focus required to complete the degree when it doesn’t feel novel, or exciting.

It can be hard for supervisors, also, because they’re not seeing any work being produced. Nikki says there are a lot of staff who are “doing cool things” to help students with ADHD, but there are also a lot of supervisors calling her asking for help.

“I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding about ADHD - it’s not that you can’t focus, it’s that you can’t regulate your focus.”

It’s not that people with ADHD don’t want to do things, she says. They are motivated and have goals, but some-

times they “just can’t”. They require a certain level of stimulation to initiate the task, which sometimes comes via medication.

Nikki has done a “deep dive” with librarians to find out what has been written on adults with ADHD undertaking graduate studies. At that time she one PhD thesis on how graduate women feel with ADHD and doing their studies.

“One thesis. That’s it.”

“It’s really hard to tell how many students in the university environment have ADHD.”

A common theme that arises in her coaching sessions is the recognition that high school qualifications and undergraduate degrees tend to be more structured than postgraduate programmes. Research or postgraduate degrees are much more self-directed and require postgraduate students to lead their project and plan their time.

“That’s when people hit prob-

lems,” she says.

“If we can understand how to utilise how the brain works and how to provide structure for that in the research space, then people can be really successful.”

Nikki is still learning about ADHD and how to provide support for postgraduate students. One thing she is confident about is the power of community, shared experience and the wellbeing that comes with not having to explain certain traits.

“I love it when I get the chance to meet someone who has ADHD, and you’re like ‘Oh my God! Me too! Me too!’.

“It’s been such a wonderful experience finally feeling like I’m in a group of people that speak the same language as me. It’s like being in our own unique culture and it’s really cool.”

Creating new forms of external accountability has helped.

“I get the most work done if I’m sitting with someone and they’re also doing work with me. That’s how we get it done, with mirror neurons.”

Nikki is working with the Dean of Teaching and Learning, Tim Cooper, and Dr Bronwyn Lennox Thompson, an academic with ADHD, and others to build a neurodiversity collective for staff and students to empower and support neurodivergent learners and staff. There will be a crowd sourced web page with a range of resources, workshops, events for staff and students to use.

Nikki likes to see neurodivergent researchers conducting research on neurodiversity so that “it’s lived experience stuff”.

Nikki will help any university postgraduate student, not just research students.

You can reach Nikki via email Nikki.fahey@otago.ac.nz

Right: Graduate Research School Graduate Wellbeing

Coach Nikki Fahey

Sharing the untold stories

Korero by Koren Allpress

A white marquee was set up on the ground floor of the University’s Central Library. It’s astro turf grass, white picket fence, and cross stiches hung on the wall – complete with prizes – could have left you feeling as though maybe you’d stepped into a stall at an A&P Show, but you’d have be wrong.

The marquee housed ‘Contribution to Field’ the first exhibition of PhD candidate Liz Breslin.

It featured a mixture of collage, cross stitch works and digital printed artworks as well as several zines, and aimed to shed light on the untold stories of rural Te Waipounamu, specifically settler coloniser stories.

“I’m looking at the stories that over and over again don’t get told, while over and over again we’re telling the stories of rural, white, masculine, strong on the land,” Liz says.

There’s a trio of men – Brian Turner (poet), Owen Marshall (writer), and Graham Sydney (painter), who are treated as the Central Otago cannon, meaning other stories don’t get heard, they say.

“There’s this very kind of singular story that excludes women’s stories, it excludes queer stories, and it excludes other kind of men’s stories that don’t fit in with the masculine thing, it excludes effeminate stories.

“There’s a real violence to that, to continuing to erase and ignore stories. Of course, the biggest violence is erasing the stories of mana whenua.”

Ōtūrēhua’s Ernest Hayes became well-known in farming circles in the late 1800s for redesigning a wire strainer for fencing. The lesser-known story is how his wife, Hannah, cycled on her own all over Ida Valley and beyond, peddling the device to famers which led

to the product’s popularity, and ultimately the family’s wealth.

“She saved that family business.”

In the Hayes family history document at Hayes Engineering and Homestead, this extraordinary part of Hannah’s role in the family history is given one paragraph, Liz says.

“In 1896 in the cities people were like ‘women can’t get on bicycles, this is the end of civilisation as we know it’.

“And yet there she was, cycling around. Where did she sleep? Did she feel safe? What did she eat? What were all the tracks like?”

If one woman was doing this, is it possible there were many more taking on similar challenges that nobody recalls because they weren’t documented, Liz asks.

A lot of Liz’s creative works are ‘cut ups’ – she cuts up lines of text from her own poetry and other publications and pastes them all together on one page.

She enjoys the juxtaposition and the way the “voices jam together” and seeing them hung up on walls for the first time.

Liz took inspiration for one particular piece, ‘Admit Impediments’, from American poet Dodie Bellamy, who is known for her ‘C**t Ups’.

“She gets old, white man stuff and jams it together with her dreams, and just things that the cannon doesn’t consider to be important, she puts them in there.”

Liz has experienced domestic violence while living in a small, rural town.

“There’s lots of ways you can normalise being abused when you’re in that situation, none of which are good. But one of the things that helped me normalise it was the colonisation outside was the same as the colonisation inside.

“I was being told everywhere that my story was unimportant. Some of what I’m doing here, the creative element of my work, is looking at the violence in a more explicit way, because it’s really not an uncommon story.”

She says her cross stich work hung up in the marquee is “really badly done” intentionally, to let people see the “mess of it all” in plain sight and bring some of those stories outwards.

When Liz isn’t working on her PhD through Otago’s English Programme you can find them performing or writing poetry. They have two published collections of poetry and hope to gain a third from their PhD.

“I’m looking at the stories that over and over again don’t get told, while over and over again we’re telling the stories of rural, white, masculine, strong on the land,”

Liz completed her undergraduate degree at Sussex University. She moved to Aotearoa New Zealand from the United Kingdom 20 years ago.

‘Contribution to Field’ was exhibited in Wanaka recently and will also travel to Ōtūrēhua and other Central Otago towns. It will be on display in the University’s Central Library until Thursday, 26 May.

Left: Liz poses with some of her favourite zines from the exhibition. Right: The exhibition all set up in Central Library.

Overcoming the odds

Korero by Koren Allpress

A serious head injury from a car accident in 2011 left Johnny Lisle (Te Rarawa, Te Aupouri, Ngāpuhi) unable to read.

But that, and two years of intensive recovery, did not stop him from pursuing his University dreams and gaining entrance to the highly competitive programmes of medicine, dentistry and more recently, physiotherapy.

Johnny – now in his final year of a physiotherapy degree – was working as an industrial electrician in 2011 when he realised he wanted to change his career so he could better serve his community. And seeing a friend from high school study medicine made

Johnny realise that attending university wasn’t just “for geniuses”.

“I wanted to work with people instead of machines,” he says.

So he signed up at Otago and started his first semester of Foundation Studies in June in the health sciences stream. But just six months later, aged 25, he was in a serious car accident.

“I had a broken neck and a fractured skull.”

The first two years following a head injury are the most important in terms of recovery, Johnny says.

“I had to learn to read again, I didn’t know how

to read. I knew my ABCs and the sound of them.”

He struggled, however, with digraphs – the sound that two letters make when put together, such as ‘th’ and ‘br’.

“I couldn’t recognise any words, I had to re-train my brain to recognise words. I’d forgotten all my nouns.”

Johnny’s brother visited him while he was in an Auckland rehabilitation centre for people with head injuries.

His brother held up a banana and asked, ‘what’s this?’.

“I could explain that it grows in hot places, and monkeys eat it, I just couldn’t think of the word ‘banana’.”

A physical fitness programme also played a large role in his recovery.

to finish another degree before he could apply again.

So in 2017, along with juggling his commitments at home, and as a volunteer with the Waitati Volunteer Fire Brigade, he started a Bachelor of Science, majoring in Human Nutrition.

As if that wasn’t enough, Johnny was also katiaki pūtea (treasurer) for the Māori science students’ group in 2018, Te Rōpū Māori in 2019 and the Waitati toy library in 2019.

He had experience volunteering as a surf life saver at St Clair in 2013 and 2014 and had another go at it in Warrington from 2020 until 2022.

as his “hidden disability” from the car crash.

“Otherwise I get exhausted very quickly with my reading and it slows right down and I’ll fall asleep after not too long. But with the reader on the computer I can keep a consistent pace and I listen to what it says and also scan with my eyes to get used to the pattern recognition of the words.

“This has helped me keep up with university and has also improved my ability over time with my reading speed. I still notice improvements each year but I can’t do without the technology to read to me.

“It’s a hidden disability and I’m sure I’m not the only one who has to deal with it,” he says.

“I had to learn to read again, I didn’t know how to read. I knew my ABCs and the sound of them... I couldn’t recognise any words, I had to re-train my brain to recognise words.”

A year and a half later, Johnny opted to repeat semester 1 of Foundation Studies to build up his confidence when it came to using all of the words he had forgotten.

“I ended up doing really well because I tried my hardest.”

The second semester was all new to him, but again, he did well. He took on Health Science First Year (HSFY) in 2014 and gained entrance to the highly competitive medicine, dentistry and physiotherapy programmes.

By this point however, he decided he would like to earn a little bit of money to help get him through his next few years of study, so deferred dentistry for a year for work.

Life had other plans though, and part way through 2016, his first child was born.

Johnny was no longer able to apply to dentistry based on his grades from HSFY, meaning he had

Despite his busy study and home life, he not only graduated with his degree, but with high enough grades to be accepted into medical school.

After one semester at medical school, though, Johnny knew it wasn’t for him. He needed time for his son.

“I’ve been in good paying jobs, and it doesn’t matter to me how much the pay is, when you’re not happy, it’s just not worth it.”

So he bided his time, and in 2022 Johnny was accepted into physiotherapy, and will graduate at the end of this year.

“I get to be hands on, and I get to have some flexibility for my family which you don’t always have in every career.”

Johnny was and is still reliant on technology – specifically the reader function on his computerto help with what he describes

Johnny is still involved with the fire service, has since taken up a volunteer role as a rugby team medic for Harbour Rugby Team, and is involved with Kā Rikarika o Tāne, the University’s mentoring programme for Māori students.

“This year I have been awarded Ahi Kā position with Kā Rikarika o Tāne after three years of taking part in the programme helping new Māori students.”

He discovered his Māori ancestry later in life, and so now is also learning Te Reo so he can in turn teach his children.

Johnny acknowledges getting to where he is now has not been a “straight line journey”.

A notebook from high school contains a list of careers he was interested in pursuing, including teaching and physiotherapy.

“It’s funny how you go back to what you knew when you were little.”

Wellbeing at heart of research

Korero by Koren Allpress

The Richard Kamman Wellbeing Prize was founded in 1986 in memory of Associate Professor Richard Kammann who taught in the Department of Psychology at the University of Otago and whose research interests included the application of psychology to human happiness, well-being, and real-world behaviour. This year the prize was awarded to two people –Franz van Beusekom and Ella Creagh.

Research into the impact of the social and material world on neurodivergent people has won Franz van Beusekom the University of Otago Richard Kamman Wellbeing prize.

Franz, who graduated with a Master of Arts from the School of Geography last December, was awarded the prize earlier this year. He is currently tutoring in the School of Geography and working as a research assistant.

“My thesis was basically about how autistic young people’s wellbeing is impacted and affected by their relationship with their social and material environment,” Franz says.

“As a participant, you’re not kind of put on the spot of what to talk about.

“A lot of research has this thing where the researcher asks the questions, and the interviewee responds to them. This is reshaping that because [the interviewees] take the photos; that’s already shaping what we end up talking about.”

It was a “really enjoyable” process that he wants to learn from and take further into PhD research, he says.

Using photography helped people think about things in different ways than they might have “in a conventional interview setting”.

During his master’s research he came across the term ‘neurocosmopolitianism’ which he says is the blending of the idea of cosmopolitan and the broader concept of

photography or drawings.”

Franz undertook his masters project following a conversation with his parents in 2020.

“They said that they’d considered getting me diagnosed when I was younger with autism. And that was surprising to me, I’d never thought about it before. It had never occurred to me that I might be autistic.”

He had conducted some geographic research around wellbeing during his undergraduate degree, and wanted to further explore that area, so melded these two ideas together to research what makes spaces more comfortable for neurodivergent people.

“But there are lots of other reasons that research like that needs to be done.”

“They provide an example, a picture of what’s going on, something that maybe can’t be said in words”

how people with different dispositions and neurotypes interact with physical spaces.

Autistic people and other neuro minorities form a marginalised group in society whose wellbeing is not really considered often, Franz says.

“Conventional wellbeing research probably doesn’t touch on it very much.”

He took a creative approach towards how he got information from his study recruits, all of whom are autistic. Franz gave each of them a camera for two weeks and tasked them to photograph any spaces they encountered in their day-to-day life that impacted on their wellbeing.

At the end of the two weeks, he caught up with each of them to discuss their photos.

He feels part of what made that interview process work so well was that the interviewees were able to do their “thinking beforehand”.

“I want to expand in that direction, thinking about that term in particular, and how we as a society might work towards developing genuinely inclusive and neurocosmopolitan spaces in society.”

Franz plans on undertaking a PhD and hopes to expand on the method of interview, potentially bringing in more visual methods such as drawing, mapping or making art.

“These things could go really well with your kind of standard qualitative research interview methods because they provide an example, a picture of what’s going on, something that maybe can’t be said in words, but can be said in

One way of dealing with the marginalisation is forming a body of research that discusses how and why the marginalisation occurs. Decision-makers and people in power can use the research to develop more inclusive policies and practices.

This is one of the more important reasons why this kind of research needs to be done, he says.

News he had won the Richard Kamman prize “came out of the blue”, he says. His supervisor, Associate Professor Christina Ergler, submitted his thesis as part of an application to be considered for the prize.

Don’t miss all your postgrad news online:

There’s still time to sign up: Good Mahi!

The inaugural Good Mahi - a student and staff community volunteering day this Friday - is being held to give anyone at the University of Otago’s Ōtepoti campus the chance to volunteer.

Social Impact Studio manager Sze-En Watts says their UniCrew team and OUSA have worked together to host the event.

The Studio has sourced a range of activities from different volunteer organisations around Ōtepoti which staff and students can sign up to volunteer at via the Social Impact Studio’s website.

Good Mahi aims to simplify the process of volunteering as the administration associated with volunteering can put people off.

See full story online .

New Tohu, ikoa Māori

The University of Otago officially launched its new brand on Wednesday. It is a bold change for Aotearoa New Zealand’s oldest university, with the introduction of a new reo Māori name and tohu (symbol), created in collaboration with mana whenua.

About 300 members of the University community and mana whenua gathered as the new signage was revealed on the Dunedin campus’ St David St plinth.

The name University of Otago remains but the reo name has changed to Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka – a metaphor meaning ‘A Place of Many Firsts’.

The new tohu draws inspiration from Ōtākou channel, in Otago Harbour, which brings water, kai and life to and from the region – just as the University brings and shares knowledge across Aotearoa and internationally.

See full story online .

Capping Show turns 130 years old Reimagining the trauma plot

The Capping Show will celebrate its 130th anniversary this year with a show jampacked with singing, dancing and joke cracking, topped off with a zeitgeisty spoof of mega blockbuster Barbie.

Step aside Barbie and Ken, it’s time for Beezie and Ben – the stars of this year’s Capping Show.

Barbie-spoof Beezie follows Otago students Beezie and Ben as they go out into the ‘real world’ and end up on an epic journey to save Scarfieland from predatory landlords.

It’s classic Capping Show, OUSA Event Coordinator Dane Oates says.

“It’s sharing student stories and highlighting student issues in a way that only a cast and crew of students is able to do.”

See full story online .

Could magical realism be used to tell explore traumatic experiences on stage in a more ethical and inclusive manner than standard realism? That is what one Otago PhD candidate is trying to find out.

Ellen Murray, of the School of Performing Arts, says magical realism is a prominent literary mode and genre.

“It’s quite influential in the literary sphere but it’s not as commonly studied or discussed in theatre.”

Ellen is exploring magical realism as a mode for stage performances with a goal of finding more flexible or authentic means to stage trauma narratives.

Moments of magic realism, when being used in a story or stage performance, will occur during an otherwise realistic story.

See full story online .