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Ten University of Waikato PhD candidates will tonight take the three-minute thesis challenge, where they will try to explain their research to an audience of non-academics in just three minutes.
Creative practice researcher Richard Kereopa says he's looking forward to sharing what he has learned about the ways Maori use the arts to communicate their knowledge and world view.
He's a weaver who also works in performance art, digital video and creative writing.
He says raranga is logical and scientific, like research.
"As you are engaged in this quite logical way of planning and forecasting, you have this beautiful creative thing that comes out and so while you are constructing a story through harakeke or whatever fibres you use as a weaver, a whole other story comes out and it's really abstract, so you create a beautiful kete or a beautiful whariki, and embedded in that whariki is a whole lot of other knowledge – knowledge about the universe, knowledge about atua, knowledge about whanau, knowledge about relationship to whenua," Mr Kereopa says.
Other thesis subjects to be crunched into three minutes include differences in water allocation laws between New Zealand and Australia, the mathematics of solar flares, domestic violence among Indian women in Aotearoa, bio-foam packaging and Gloria Clarke's work on successful young Maori men.
FOR THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD KEREOPA CLICK ON THE LINK
https://secure.zeald.com/uma/play_podcast?podlink=MjM1MTM=
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