Here we will feature work by our Science Communication course students, and our Master’s and PhD students.
2022 Showcase
Explore some of the fabulous work of our 2022 students: Centre for Science in Society Showcase
SCIS 589 Science Communication Project
In 2019, Kelly Body and Emma ten Have both developed science communication projects in association with Forest and Bird.
Kelly fused art and science by creating illustrations of New Zealand’s extinct frogs, building on research on what is known about their bones and DNA.
Emma explored the use of tattoos to raise awareness of native bird conservation in ExtINKtion.
Read about Kelly and Emma’s work in the Forest and Bird Journal:
Read more about SCIS 589.
SCIS 412 Contemporary Issues in Science, Environment and Technology
As part of their assessment for SCIS 412, our students write blogs.
In Guided Collaboration: Vulnerability in Science, Naomi Puketapu-Waite describes previous efforts to establish collaborations between New Zealand science and Mātauranga Māori. Naomi suggests an alternative approach to creating genuine relationships between Māori and scientists. “It is through the acts of listening, participating, power sharing, learning, acknowledging, and allowing oneself to be vulnerable in this interface that good science can evolve.”
In Fingerprints on the Microscope Lens: Working Towards a Decolonized Science, Casey Spearin critically examines how we can practice science while respectfully bringing together different worldviews to help us understand our world.
In When Creativity Gets Serious, Sarah Wilkins discusses how bringing art to science, and science to art, can foster creativity in understanding our world and in approaches to issues.
Read more about SCIS 412.
Master of Science in Society student Casey Spearin’s work in the Forest & Bird journal
Casey has been volunteering at Forest and Bird, helping with a project to digitise their journals from as far back as 1924. Casey writes about the “Historical Treasures” in these journals and the challenges with digitising the content in the Spring 2019 Issue.
SCIS 414 Science and Humanities
In SCIS 414 Science and Humanities, our students produce creative works. Here we feature several works from our 2019 students.
Read more about SCIS 414.
Kelly Body – Gulliver’s Journey
This artwork is a representation of the story of the kākāpō and their journey to how they became a critically endangered species brought back from the brink of extinction. The style represents how their survival has been intertwined with colonisation, introduced pests and now, intense management.
The ships and waka represent both the people that came to Aotearoa and the animals they brought with them. A stoat, rat and deer surround the kākāpō in this painting, interlinked with its survival. As we move our eyes down the bottom of the painting, we can see the technology used in kākāpō management. Sperm carrying drones, planes, antennae and satellites, and DNA filled with binary code, a syringe to represent artificial insemination and the saxophone (give it a Google).
However, this technology is useless without the splashes of red. This represents the rimu berries that trigger kākāpō breeding. If the rimu do not mast, then kākāpō will not breed. There are so many living and non-living things that play a role in kākāpō survival,
Russyl Gilling – We Are The Same
I produced this piece to show that race is a social construct. The writing is the sentence “we are the same” written in genetic code, reinforcing the idea that there is no such thing as biological race and the differences seen are all genetic variation between people. The different people have different skin tones to represent the range of ethnicities.
Abi Hart – Self Portrait
My work is an edited photograph comprising 24 panels depicting fragments of my own personal data, my raw DNA dataset, which (apparently) comprise how I exist in the physical sense, but also how I exist in the form of data. Each panel depicts data from a single chromosome. In my preparation for this project, I ambitiously (or naively) wanted to use the totality of my dataset until I discovered it totalled 14,030 pages. This speaks rather poignantly to the issue of the limitations of human consciousness in terms of our ability to process data and the way in which the machine apprehends the world in a way that does not correspond to human senses and understanding.
Liz Hibbs – Magazine Covers
These magazine covers represent two opposing expressions of cultural stereotypes, ‘passive females and heroic males’; mainstream norms that have influenced scientific understanding of fertilisation and conception. Immersed in their own cultural context, scientists have traditionally ascribed stereotypical roles to the ‘personalities’ of gametes, constructing the facts in metaphorical, cultural terms which perpetuate and reinforce the problematic cultural construct that it is one gender’s role to act, and the other’s to be acted upon.
Emma ten Have
This project depicts some of the ways plastic in the Pacific is affecting its’ inhabitants, using traditional scientific Illustration. This style of drawing is a (somewhat outdated) form of Science Communication, usually exhibiting plants and animals that are considered to be very ‘Natural’. This medium was chosen for the impact of juxtaposition between an old form of communication and a very contemporary issue, as well as between this ‘natural’ format and a very ‘unnatural’ subject.
Sarah Wilkins – The Naturocene
The Naturocene is an interactive mural for an urban space.
The Naturocene presents a world of ‘tentacular’ networks; an entanglement of humans, nature and technology. By suggesting we stay with the ‘trouble’, this living artwork gradually mutates to eventually obliterate the traces of human involvement.
The mural is composed of a series of intertwined biological symbols, circuit board components and botanical elements, evoking the interconnectivity of humanity, nature and technology. The mural was designed for the tower walls of the Pukehinau council flats at 320 Willis Street.
Attached to the mural wall are small pots, containing seedlings of native vines, creepers and lichens. Over time the plants will grow, eventually covering the wall entirely. Nature will replace the imagined “web of relatedness” with an urban ecosystem, housing “creatures of all kinds”. It will provide a vertical green space, inhabited by birds and insects, co-exisiting with the human inhabitants of the surrounding flats, and in turn improving their quality of life.
Click here to see an animated growth sequence.
War and Peas–Zoe Heine
One of our Master’s students, Zoë Heine, wrote a blog on War and Peas: Women, gardens and World War Two for The Garden History Research Foundation. Read it here.