VOLUME 9(3) • 2021
Editorial: The Politics and Practices of Kindness
ABSTRACT. This issue asks what a politics of kindness looks like in practice by presenting a series of examples from Aotearoa New Zealand. These articles in their various foci – ranging from the justice system to social policy, to education, to artistic practice – are drawn from a long-term transdis..
Investigating the Call to Kindness: A Study with Community Participants in Aotearoa New Zealand
ABSTRACT. Here in Aotearoa New Zealand there is a ‘call’ for kindness often associated with Jacinda Ardern and the Covid-19 response. But how do ‘ordinary’ people experience and understand kindness? What do their understandings and the tensions within these reveal about the call to kindness? In 2019..
‘Kindness’ as Violence in the Settler-Colonial State of New Zealand
ABSTRACT. The ‘politics of kindness’ adopted by New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has come under strong criticism recently. This criticism has largely been in response to the ongoing failure of the current Labour-led Government to take the actions that are perceived necessary against pover..
Kindness in Court in Aotearoa New Zealand
ABSTRACT. Those caught up in criminal court processes are often seen as ‘undeserving’ of kindness. However, specialist courts based on the principles of non-adversarial justice use legal processes in an empathetic manner to give voice to defendants and address their health and social needs. Using Cl..
The Politics and Policies of Kindness in Aotearoa New Zealand
ABSTRACT. This paper considers two questions. The first is the extent to which recent kindness narratives in Aotearoa New Zealand have been matched by political choices and actions which will build a kinder New Zealand. I investigate how kindness has been practised in tangible ways since the beginni..
The Crisis of Housing Affordability: Kindness to People and Environmental Resilience?
ABSTRACT. Cities in Aotearoa New Zealand face simultaneous crises: housing affordability and the climate emergency. Both issues are two sides of a single metaphorical coin. Humans depend on safe environments, but the unaffordable housing crisis has resulted in families living in cars, garages or wit..
Kindness in Giving? Giving to and through the Arts in the Time of COVID-19
ABSTRACT. This article uses kindness as a lens through which to analyse examples of giving to and through the arts in Aotearoa during the first year of COVID-19. We consider whether the exceptional conditions created by COVID-19 caused reconsideration of the way the arts look after society and why a..
Manaakitanga me te kōrero: Helping Hands and Conversations: Conditions of Possibility in Kindness in Live Art and Performance-based Art
ABSTRACT. What can it mean to engage in public art performance practices that explore acts of kindness through the Māori concept of manaakitanga? Selected art practices of Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland artists Layne Waerea (2021), Jeremy Leatinu‘u (2021), Rebecca Ann Hobbs (2018) and Mark Harvey (2021) a..
Teaching the Totality of a Person: Manaakitanga, Kindness and Pedagogy: An Interview with Dr Hirini Kaa
ABSTRACT. In 2019, the Faculty of Arts at the University of Auckland launched a programme called Ako Arts, aimed at embedding Māori and Pasifika epistemologies and knowledges into our curriculum and approaches to teaching. This initiative was developed by Dr Hirini Kaa and piloted by eight courses i..
Kindness in Educational Critique
ABSTRACT. Opening up one’s work to critique can place a creator in a vulnerable position. We explore what kindness might bring to the tricky, emotionally charged, risky event of the critique. Can kindness enhance the critique’s potential to be educational, by nurturing the creator’s capacity to crea..
Kindness as Water in the University
ABSTRACT. If kindness were a thing, what would it look like? A rose without thorns? A cat without claws? Acts of kindness are often associated with feelings of warmth and softness: things that makes us feel comfortable, cared for. When we think of kindness as a form of activism, however, we find our..
Editorial Conclusion: Kindness in the Review Process
ABSTRACT. A guiding ethos of the Agencies of Kindness project was that our academic practice should enact the very thing we researched. Our challenge as an editorial team was to bring kindness to the process of academic refereeing. The standard blind peer review process is often a disheartening expe..