Current Visiting Scholars
Read about our resident scholars’ previous achievements as well as their current projects with the Centre.
Hilary Moss
Hilary Moss is professor of History and Black Studies, and soon to be Education Studies, at Amherst College. As an historian of education and the African American experience, her research explores how communities have allocated educational opportunity in its many forms. At Amherst College, she teaches courses on African American history and foundational courses in Education Studies. She has served as chair of the Black Studies department (2013–2015) as well as chair of the History Department (2019–2020). She is especially proud of her efforts to help create a program in Education Studies at Amherst, 2021. Her next book, "There Goes the Neighborhood School: A Comparative and Transnational History of Zoning and Choice in late 20th century New Zealand and the United States," explores how ideas about the neighborhood school evolved during two experiments with public school choice and de-zoning that unfolded during the late twentieth century—one in Cambridge, Massachusetts and the other in New Zealand.
Fine Brendtner
Fine Brendtner is a PhD fellow in environmental anthropology at Aarhus University, Denmark, with a background in science, technology and society studies, as well as in visual anthropology. She is further affiliated with the CEH—Centre for Environmental Humanities at Aarhus University. Her work centers around critical ocean studies, marine scientific imaginaries and biosocial relations of climate change.
For her PhD, Fine studies the anthropogenic drivers of ocean acidifaction and its effects on local aquaculture and marine care practices. She further investigates experimental scientific setups that grapple with the challenge of recording a largely ineffable biogeochemical change at sea and posits the importance of understanding anthropogenic global change via its effects on marine animals.
During her time in Aotearoa New Zealand, Fine researches offshore pH monitoring sites alongside NIWA and DOC staff. Her work expands on these sites’ social and cultural significance for coastal communities and documents local knowledge on environmental change. A particular focus lies in the role of shellfish threatened from ocean acidifcation (such as paua, oysters and mussels) and their role as climate change sentinels. Fine is a visiting scholar with the Stout Research Center for New Zealand Studies in 2024.
Ingjerd Hoem
Ingjerd Hoem is a Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway; she has been a former visiting scholar at the Stout Research Centre. Her work, since 1987, is on Tokelau, and covers a variety of issues, ranging from language to politics. Among her latest publications are: Languages of Governance in Conflict. Negotiating democracy in Tokelau. John Benjamins Publishing Company: Amsterdam (2015), State, labour and kin: tensions of value in an egalitarian community, in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2018) and Theatre and Political Process: Staging Identities in Tokelau and New Zealand. Berghahn, Oxford, New York (2004). Ingjerd has returned to Norway, but will be returning again to the Stout, later in the year.
Graeme Aitken
Author/Researcher
Graeme Aitken is a 70 year old who, over his career, has worked extensively in and around issues relating to Māori and their land and other Treaty rights. His roles have included:
- Working for the Office of Treaty Settlements when it was first established in the early/mid 1990s.
- Setting up Māori Focus Units in prisons in the mid/late 1990s.
- Advising Moriori and other Treaty claimants in the early 2000s.
- Assisting Te Puni Kōkiri with reviews of Te Ture Whenau Māori Act, the Māori Community Development Act, and other matters; involvement in reviews relating to legislative frameworks for kōhanga reo, Māori in local government in more recent times.
- Stints at the Office of Treaty Settlements in 2007 and 2018.
Graeme also spent two years in Melbourne in the mid 2000s as the Manager and Lead Negotiator for the State of Victoria, responsible for progressing native title claims. Graeme enrolled in the Victoria’s Institute of Modern Letters writing programme in 2022, and graduated with a Master’s Degree (with merit) in early 2023. He is now writing a memoire about his life as a Pākeha in and around te ao Māori, aiming to provide insights into our history and into the evolution of Aotearoa/New Zealand towards a Treaty based multi-cultural society. He expects to complete a first draft by mid 2024.
Renate Schelwald
Bio:
Renate Schelwald is a visual ethnographer with a background in psychology and film. She completed her MA in Visual Ethnography in 2019 with her film 'In the Arms of the Ocean', which was showcased at various film festivals. She continued her education with an MA in Clinical Psychology. After completion, she started working as an ethnographer for the University of St. Petersburg and Bielefeld University on a project concerning community engagement in flood risk management. Schelwald is currently working as PhD researcher at the University of Rotterdam, studying food-scapes and -practices and their impact on climate change. Renate is also a self-employed videographer and editor and works as a volunteer for Surfrider Foundation Netherlands, as the social media manager.
Abstract:
Food practices such as cooking, shopping, and waste disposal, are intricately shaped by the social, institutional, and material structures that underpin our daily lives. This research constitutes a thorough examination of the connection between humans and food, the 'community' that grows and uses food, and the impact of our food practices on the natural environment. The main question is, how can we reconnect with our food? In the case study in Aotearoa, the research focusses on how western notions of sustainability are shaping our strategies to mitigate the impact of food practices. This includes looking at how the Māori conceptual framing “Ki uta ki tai” (Hutchings et.al., 2020), which reflects the interconnectedness and interdependencies of the natural world, can contribute to strategies for identifying, maintaining and enhancing a sustainable foodscape. Through this framework the research deepens the understanding of how food practices are shaped through interconnections, engaging more productively with the more-than-human. Using visual ethnographic methods, this project allows for a multifaceted portrayal of the foodscape of Poneke while documenting and analyze local food practices, but it also aims to contribute to a dialogue that fosters cross-cultural understanding and lays the foundation for more inclusive and globally applicable sustainability strategies.
Nicola Saker
Nicola gained her M.A. at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. Katherine Mansfield has been the focus for much of Nicola’s research including her thesis “The Performative Katherine Mansfield”. Most recently, in she edited the books “Woman in Love: The Love Letters of Katherine Mansfield” (2021) and “The Katherine Mansfield Cookbook” (2018). She has presented papers to Katherine Mansfield Society conferences: “Behind the Mask”, (Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka (2014), “Bookends: The beginning and end of Mansfield’s Life”, Sorbonne Nouvelle (2014) and “A Performer in the pure air of Bloomsbury” Newberry Library (2015). Food and food history is another area of Nicola’s research. In 2011 she presented a paper “By Their Menus Ye Shall Know Them” to the N.Z. Food History Symposium which was subsequently published in The Aristologist, the Antipodean Journal of Food History. In 2018 she presented a paper “Beyond the Garden Party: The Katherine Mansfield Cookbook” at the 2019 symposium.
In 2022 “North and South” magazine published her article “The Forever Files” which detailed the state surveillance of her father and many of his friends in the 1940s and 1950s, two of whom were made to resign from their diplomatic careers in what was then the Department of External Affairs, now MFAT. The research involved in “The Forever Files” developed an interest in General Freyberg’s intelligence unit in WW2 as one of the men who resigned, Doug Lake, was part of the corps. General Freyberg, who trained as a dentist and didn’t cultivate an intellectual dimension, surrounded himself with men of exceptionally high intellectual capacity both in his intelligence unit and his wider group: Dan Davin, Paddy Costello, Geoffrey Cox, John White and Doug Lake to name some of them. These men have been written about in an atomised way, as part of a larger theme such as in “Dance of the Peacocks” (James McNeish), or in biographies of them as individuals, or in works regarding General Freyberg himself. The project would initially seek to analyse the diversity represented within the group and the military leadership that engendered its cohesion and supported that diversity. Other themes could well emerge during the process. Nicola joins the Stout in March.
Violet Blue
Author and journalist
Violet Blue is a six-time Independent Publisher Book Award ("IPPY") winning investigative journalist on cybersecurity, Covid-19, privacy, and human rights, having bylined for outlets including O The Oprah Magazine, Engadget, Financial Times, CNN, CBS News, San Francisco Chronicle, Popular Science, Yahoo News, and many others. Ms. Blue's books have sold over 2.2 million copies and have been translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian. Her most notable book appearance was on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Ms. Blue’s most notable charity contribution was donation of over 200,000 sales of The Smart Girl’s Guide to Privacy to Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders, the International Rescue Committee, and the American Civil Liberties Union, raising £3.7m for migrant charities. Guardian UK called Ms. Blue, "One of the leading figures in tech writing in the world."
She is a member of the Internet Press Guild, The Authors Guild, The New Zealand Society of Authors, the International Federation of Journalists , PEN, the World Health Network, and Advisor to online legal privacy resource Without My Consent.
Her new book A Fish Has No Word For Water won 2023 Independent Publisher Book Awards GOLD and has been selected as National Indie Book Awards 2023 Finalist. KIRKUS called it “Gripping.” BookLife/Publisher's Weekly describes it as a “Superb memoir” with "Sharp dialogue, incisive observations, and polished prose." Blue's book on personal digital privacy and security, The Smart Girl’s Guide to Privacy, was praised by ELLE Magazine as, “An illuminating handbook for women.” Ingram Collection Development Librarian Becky Walton wrote, “Highly recommended for public and school libraries, as well as social science and technology classes.” Violet has presented two Google Tech Talks, she is a crisis counselor, a harm reduction educator and a media crisis NGO trainer. Ms. Blue's father was a nuclear engineer and mother was a defense engineer for the US government. Blue is the only surviving member of her family and grew up homeless on the streets of San Francisco.
Violet has joined the Stout Research Centre as a long-term visiting scholar position to undertake research on her next book.
Professor Takeshi Ohno
Takeshi Ohno is professor of Labour Sociology in College of Social Science at Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto. He is the author of Work in Lean Production System: Based on Participant Observations at Automobile Factories, Ochanomizu Press, Tokyo which received the Incentive Award from the Japanese Association of Labor Sociology in 2004. His research interests include international comparison of industrial relations and labour protections laws, especially minimum wage laws. Among his latest papers are: ‘1130-1212 Birth of Craft Gilds in England and London’s Wage Regulation Ordinance,’ and ‘Anti-Sweating Campaign and the First Minimum Wage Law in the United States: Compared to the United Kingdom.’ As New Zealand is the first country to enact the minimum wage law in the world, he is delighted to be accepted by the Stout Research Center as a visiting scholar. Professor Ohno will arrive in September 2024.