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Here Be Dragons: Navigating a Left Approach to Basic Income in Aotearoa New Zealand
Get PDFThis article is, in part, an extended report from a national workshop held at Kotare in May 2018 in which participants from around the country considered the question: ‘A progressive Basic Income (or UBI) in Aotearoa New Zealand?’ It includes primary research which provides the first known attempt to bring together a history of BI/UBI advocacy from a left and community-based perspective, with some interrogation of that history. I also include brief background context around nomenclature, history and definition; consider the defining characteristics of a ‘left’ BI and the question of how to pay for it; look at some of the main arguments for and against BI from left and union perspectives, and consider the opportunities and dangers for those of us on the left who may wish to engage in this work. I finish with a short conclusion which places our debates within the international context and offers some thoughts of my own on the path forward.
 
Shock and Care
Get PDFAn introduction to this special issue of Counterfutures on art and the Left.
 
The construction of new scientific norms for solving Grand Challenges
Get PDFThere is an increasing recognition that there is a class of problems that society must solve urgently in the twenty-first century if humanity is to survive into the twenty-second century – the so-called ‘Grand Challenges’. Science policymakers have been active in recognising these challenges and the attendant need to develop new multidisciplinary ways of working. But embracing multidisciplinarity is not a straightforward choice for scientists, who individually are strongly steered by norms and values inculcated through their past scientific experiences. In this paper, therefore, we ask whether new funding approaches can contribute to creating new ways of working by scientists towards challenge-driven research, specifically by changing scientists’ expectations and beliefs. We address this research question with reference to a single new experimental method, the ‘research sandpit’, implemented experimentally in a single national science system, Norway. Our data are derived from interviews with scientists involved in the five research projects funded as a result of the first sandpit, called ‘Idélab’ (idea lab) and held in 2014, and with the Research Council of Norway. We conclude that the sandpit approach appeared to shift research perceptions of individual scientists, particularly around long-term belief structures. This implies that, when well managed, the sandpit model can indeed be useful to generate multidisciplinary research as part of a multifaceted approach to funding scientific research
A Scotsman abroad: the architecture of John Scotland in colonial Nelson
Get PDFJohn Scotland was one of a small number of architects practising in Nelson during the 1870s. Born in Stirlingshire in 1812, he was the son of a master mason and followed that same calling. However, only scant details of his life are known until he emigrated to New Zealand aged in his mid-50s. As with a number of his contemporaries in the building trades, Scotland turned to architecture, and established a practice in Nelson in 1866. He designed some of that city's grandest homes, including Melrose and Fellworth, both now listed by Heritage New Zealand, as well as various commercial premises and a synagogue. Scotland returned to his native land in 1885, and died in Glasgow two years later
By-laws under the Municipal Corporations Act: building controls in the 1870s
Get PDFAlthough the Municipal Corporations Act 1867 was the first to permit local authorities to make by-laws which could impact on buildings, the coverage was expanded in the Municipal Corporations Acts of 1876 and 1886. The 1867 Act by-laws dealt with combustible materials in roofs and chimneys, distance between buildings, height and thickness of party and external walls, manufactory buildings and the erection of tents. The 1876 Act adds construction and materials of fireplaces, furnaces and chimneys, and the 1886 adds public health, lighting and gas and porters. The three top topics (by count) in the Acts were transport, sanitation and public facilities followed by buildings. The model codes provided in the Acts were inadequate for buildings, so by examination of three 1870s codes (Timaru, Auckland and Wellington) it is shown how the (London) Metropolitan Building Acts of 1844 and 1855 provided suitable details for practical by-laws. Links to Britain through imports of house construction technologies and materials are also discussed
200 Architects in the 1870s? Is that figure real?
Get PDFIn this paper we are using our architects dataset to identify every person who called themself an architect in New Zealand in the 1870s. An initial check of our database produced around 200 names, but we know from our previous studies that this figure needs to be refined to gauge the importance of their work, or even determine whether some of them could be truly called architects.We have taken our data and used key attributes to try to quantify and qualify our architects. For example, one initial crude sort was based on the numbers of buildings designed over their total careers; this should give some indication of their presumed competence and possible success in the profession. So-called architects who designed zero structures were assigned to the lowest class; other classes were; 1-5 structures; 6-20; and >21, the latter appearing to be the most successful. We also considered where each person was located for the bulk of the 1870s to see if there might be geographical trends related to their success or otherwise. To finish our analysis we have chosen a few architects as examples from each of our classes and described them in more detail to explain perceived trends
Bayesian confirmation, connexivism and an unkindness of ravens
Get PDFBayesian confirmation theories (BCTs) might be the best standing theories of confirmation to date, but they are certainly not paradox-free. Here I recognize that BCTs’ appeal mainly comes from the fact that they capture some of our intuitions about confirmation better than those the- ories that came before them and that the superiority of BCTs is suffi- ciently justified by those advantages. Instead, I will focus on Sylvan and Nola’s claim that it is desirable that our best theory of confirmation be as paradox-free as possible. For this reason, I will show that, as they respond to different interests, the project of the BCTs is not incompatible with Sylvan and Nola’s project of a paradox-free confirmation logic. In fact, it will turn out that, provided we are ready to embrace some degree of non-classicality, both projects complement each other nicely
Introduction - Reading Raymond Williams in Aotearoa
Get PDF“Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact.”[i]Williams’s famous phrase may, in the hands of his latter-day epigones in a depoliticised institutional Cultural Studies, have been turned towards justifications for the study of and accommodation to what is, but, in its originating New Left moment, this was always an assertion of what might be. Ordinary culture, and the cultures of ordinary people, were conceived, by Williams and his collaborators, as part of “a genuine revolution, transforming [people] and institutions; continually extended and deepened by the actions of millions, continually and variously opposed by explicit reaction and by the pressure of habitual forms and ideas.”[ii] Williams wrote, thought, and organised across his varied career as a socialist intellectual and activist, offering resources of hope and strategic reflections on how cultural work might contribute to the anti-capitalist project of working-class self-organisation and social transformation. That project, difficult enough in the post-war period of his own life and all the more urgent and complex in its conception in our own, the era of Trumpian reaction and ecological collapse, demanded that committed intellectuals parse the “dominant” culture—the culture of capital—for signs of the “emergent,” the collectivity to come, and traces of the “residual,” habits, products and processes from previous class societies carried over into, and deployed, in capitalist cultures.[iii] Dominant, residual and emergent were terms Williams used to map the complex and internally contradictory work of culture in class society, and to trace some of its tears, cracks and openings. The vocabulary he bequeathed us, from “structures of feeling” to “long revolution,” has a rich relevance for the rickety and crisis-prone world we find ourselves in now, after the holograms of post-modernism have ceased to be projected but before newly-coherent ruling-class images and narratives have formed. There are signs, in everything from Social Reproduction Theory to the so-called Affective Turn, of a Williams revival amongst committed intellectuals today.[iv] Materialist criticism has returned for our bad new days.
[i] Raymond Williams, “Culture is Ordinary,” in Conviction, ed. Norman MacKenzie (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1958), 75.
[ii] Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Penguin, 1961), 10.
[iii] See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 121–28.
[iv] See, inter alia, Tithi Bhattacharya, ed., Social Reproduction Theory (London: Pluto, 2016), an exhilaratingly revisionist socialist-feminist text studded with Williams references and asides; Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), chapter two; Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), and Jennifer Lawn, Neoliberalism and Cultural Transition in New Zealand 1984–2008: Market Fictions (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). An extended review of Lawn’s text by Shintaro Kono will appear in the next issue of this journal
Introduction
Get PDFThe motif of this issue of the journal is that of complicating and complexifying New Zealand studies. It has three broad themes
Representing trans: Linguistic, legal and everyday perspectives
Get PDFRepresenting Trans is not only an apt descriptor for the themes explored in this book. It also speaks to the work performed by the book as a whole: it joins a body of new scholarship giving voice to trans lives and experience, at a time when the question of the gender binary seems to have become an acute focus in popular culture and even a determining factor in politics globally
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