Smart Talk

Kristen Ghodsee and Marilyn Waring talk to Kathryn Ryan about the fight for valuing women's economic contribution to society - at the 2020 New Zealand Festival writers' programme.

American ethnographer Kristen Ghodsee and activist-writer Marilyn Waring talk to Kathryn Ryan about the fight for valuing women's economic contribution to society.

Recorded at the 2020 New Zealand Festival writers' programme.

Listen to the conversation here

From the discussion:

Kathryn Ryan:

We see governments beginning to attempt well-being exercises that look at things like unpaid labour. You were scathing in your recent BWB book Still Counting over how the Treasury here has designed the wellbeing framework. When we begin to analyse unpaid labour as part of our economies, where does it go wrong? Where is it so often misguided?

Marilyn Waring:

I think the key problem is that we do try to make a monetary value for it. And that way we co-op entirely into this system that thinks, that munitions manufacturing and the black market and everything from pharmaceuticals to armaments is all great for growth. I don't find it an answer to think then we'll go and also put a market value on the work that is creating and sustaining humans on the planet.

Marilyn Waring:

And besides, like Kristen, over the years, I've got really sick of it always being undervalued. A few look at the discriminatory payments made in care paid work, which are overwhelmingly gendered. If you have ever cared for somebody who is totally dependent, you will know this is not about toileting, showering, feeding. This is an extraordinary technical, logistical, administrative, scarcely-sleeping endeavour. That's what it is. It's a very high powered job.

Marilyn Waring:

So I get really tired of seeing it encapsulated in this little silo called caring. Then I do not know an efficient woman carer, who does not do two or more tasks simultaneously. If you're only doing one, you wonder what you're doing wrong. We do know from time-use surveys that there's a really major distinction between the simultaneity of output of women and the singularity of men doing a task. And we can measure the time this takes.

It's not one of those cheap and dirty telephone calls that says, "Do you remember what you did in the last 48 hours?" Or, you know, one of the ones that just asked the head of the household - haha, like they would know - how much unpaid work is going on.

Marilyn Waring:…

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Serhii Plokhy argues that the catastrophe at Chernobyl was a nuclear disaster waiting to happen. He talks to Toby Manhire.

Listen to Serhii Plokhy talk with Toby Manhire in this highlight from the 2020 New Zealand Arts Festival writers' programme

Serhii Plokhy's award-winning account of the nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl is, according to the New York Review of Books, "a masterful account of how the USSR's bureaucratic dysfunction, censorship, and impossible economic targets produced the disaster and hindered the response."

In Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy Plokhy lays out his argument that it was a disaster waiting to happen.

The tense hours in the lead up to the 1986 catastrophe, and the political fallout that occurred after it, are recounted in Serhii's acclaimed survey of the events.

Having won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction 2018, Plokhy's historical study has received fresh attention from viewers of the acclaimed HBO fictionalisation of the events, as they go in search of information to expand their understanding of what happened and why.

The largest peacetime nuclear disaster, Chernobyl now inspires tourists to visit, and Plokhy's conversation with Toby Manhire brings the conversation up to date with reflections on both the resurgence of natural life in the irradiated zone, and the role of Chernobyl in hastening the end of the Soviet Union.

The nuclear frontier suddenly seemed less appealing territory to explore as a result of what happened.

And what does this historian, for whom the events of Chernobyl are woven into his memory of growing up in Ukraine, think about the HBO series?

Given that it's a fictionalised version of the story, he's impressed. Despite a recasting of some of the figures as either heroes or villains, when the reality was more ambiguous, Plokhy thinks it does a good job of explaining how the authoritarian tendency of the Soviet system towards secrecy set up the conditions in which the disaster could occur.

About the speakers

Serhii Plokhy

Serhii Plokhy is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard University. He has published in English, Russian and Ukrainian as well as having taught in Canada, Ukraine and the USA. His bestselling book Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction 2018. His latest book, Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front: An Untold Story of World War II was published in October 2019.

Toby Manhire

Toby Manhire is the editor of The Spinoff and the editor of a Spinoff book called The Spinoff Book, which is published in October. He was a staff journalist at The Guardian between 2000 - 2010…

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Bart van Es discusses The Cut Out Girl, his remarkable true story of how a Jewish girl in the Netherlands was hidden by his family from the Nazis during World War II.

Listen to Bart van Es talk with Miri Young-Moir in this highlight from the 2020 New Zealand Festival writers' programme

The Cut Out Girl is a harrowing true story about a young girl's struggle to survive Nazi persecution, and a man's attempt to unveil his family's secrets about her connection to them.

Bart van Es's award-winning book is the biography of Hesseline de Jong-Spiero, a Jewish girl fostered by the author's own family when the Netherlands was occupied by Germany.

The last time Lien saw her parents was in the Hague, where she was collected at the door by a stranger and taken away to be hidden from the Nazis. She was raised by a succession of foster families as one of their own, but a falling out after the war put an end to her relationship with one couple who had looked after her.

Their grandson Bart van Es wondered what her side of the story was, and what really happened during the war, and after?

So began an investigation that would consume and transform both Bart's life and Lien's. This is an astonishing portrait of a young girl's struggle to survive war, and her powerful, tumultuous and painful ties with her foster family.

In Bart van Es's conversation with Miri Young-Moir, he reveals some of the extraordinary coincidences which would reveal new information about a time of secrecy which had been either forgotten about or deliberately suppressed.

And the talk concludes with some sombre reflections on the book's foreshadowing of the current state of Europe. Van Es decries the rise of intolerance and the loss of faith in democracy which accompanies rising levels of scapegoating and repression.

About the speakers

Bart van Es

Bart van Es is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St. Catherine's College. He is the author of Spenser's Forms of History, Shakespeare in Company, and Shakespeare's Comedies. He was born in the Netherlands and now lives with his family in England.

Miri Young-Moir

Head of Public Programming at Te Papa, Miri Young-Moir has a background in museums and Holocaust studies. She holds a Masters in Humanities and Social Thought, completed at New York University (USA) as a Fulbright Fellow, and a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Religious Studies and a Post Graduate Diploma in Education from Victoria University, Wellington.

Her academic research has focused on the intersection of memorialisation, art, education and museums, and the representation of trauma and the Holocaust.

…

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Jokha Alharthi, the Omani author of Celestial Bodies, talks about her literary world and what winning the Man Booker International prize has meant for Arabic literature and for herself.

Listen to Jokha Alharti talk with Kiran Dass in this highlight from the 2020 New Zealand Arts Festival writers' programme

2019 Booker International prize winner Jokha Alharthi is the first Omani woman ever to have had her work translated into English. Celestial Bodies offers deep insight into Oman's history through its story of three sisters growing up at a time of change.

Alharti explores to talk about her literary world with Kiran Dass, and what winning the Booker has meant for Arabic literature and for the author herself. She provides vivid insights into growing up in a family which revered literature and classical Arabic writing and poetry, and explains why the novel came to be written, and published, in Scotland.

Although a fluent speaker and writer in English, Alharti worked with her translator Marilyn Booth on the English-language version of the text, and the author talks illuminatingly about how the translated title was decided on. For the International Booker prize, both author and translator receive the award jointly, in recognition of the role of translation in expanding the world's literature in English.

The chair of judges for the Booker prize, historian Bettany Hughes described Celestial Bodies as a "richly imagined, engaging and poetic insight into a society in transition and into lives previously obscured."

She adds, "Through the different tentacles of people's lives and loves and losses we come to learn about this society - all its degrees, from the very poorest of the slave families working there to those making money through the advent of a new wealth in Oman and Muscat. It starts in a room and ends in a world."

"We felt we were getting access to ideas and thoughts and experiences you aren't normally given in English. It avoids every stereotype you might expect in its analysis of gender and race and social distinction and slavery. There are surprises throughout. We fell in love with it."

About the speakers

Jokha Alharthi

Jokha Alharthi is the author of two previous collections of short fiction, a children's book, and three novels. She completed a PhD in Classical Arabic Poetry in Edinburgh, and teaches at Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat. She was shortlisted for the Shaikh Zayed Award for Young Writers and won the prize for best Omani novel for Celestial Bodies, which also won the Man Booker International Prize in 2019.

Kiran Dass…

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Two very different books celebrate the importance of scent and sensory experience in coming to terms with loss. The authors Laurence Fearnley and Long Litt Woon talk with Jessie Bray-Sharpin.

Listen to Laurence Fearnley and Long Litt Woon talk with Jessie Bray-Sharpin in this highlight from the 2020 New Zealand Arts Festival writers' programme

Sensory awareness links the work of two authors speaking at the New Zealand Arts Festival in March 2020. In the memoir of Malaysian writer Long Litt Woon The Way Through the Woods, foraging in the wild for mushrooms provides her first experience of joy after the death of her husband. And it allows her to find her path out of mourning into eventually being able to celebrate the pleasures of life.

Woon talks not only of her scientific interest in mycology, but of the way in which the publication of her memoir has introduced her to a world of mushroom celebrations such as the Telluride Festival in the USA.

For Dunedin writer Laurence Fearnley, the world of scent - so powerful in her own life - frames the discovery the principal character of her novel Scented makes about herself. Having lost an academic position due to the downsizing of the university's humanities division, she becomes absorbed not only in the process of creating perfume, but in discovering the scents of the natural world which surround her.

Fearnley talks vividly about the power of smell, and its role in evoking the past. Having fallen out of her love affair with the outdoors seen from the great New Zealand hiking trails, she turned instead to thinking of landscape in terms of how it smells. And so although Signal Hill overlooking Otago Harbour has a lot of rather unattractive slash - scrubby regrowth occurring after logging - it has a rich variety of flowering plants which create scent at different times of year.

For someone as interested in the world of smell, her experience in this location has transformed her idea of what is beautiful.

About the speakers

Long Litt Woon

Born in 1958 in Malaysia, Long Litt Woon is an anthropologist and Norwegian Mycological Association-certified mushroom professional. She first visited Norway as a young exchange student. There she met and married Norwegian Eiolf Olsen. She currently lives in Oslo, Norway. According to Chinese naming tradition, 'Long' is her surname and 'Litt Woon' her first name.

Long Litt Woon's memoir The Way Through the Woods is discussed in the session.

Laurence Fearnley…

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Kim Hill speaks with Dr Kristen Ghodsee about her book Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism in this highlight from the 2020 New Zealand Arts Festival writers' programme.

Is Capitalism bad for women?

Dr Kristen Ghodsee asserted as such in a NY Times opinion piece that went viral and led to her book Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence.

Drawing upon decades of research, Ghodsee argues that capitalism suppresses women, who are happier and healthier in societies which value a smaller gap between those with wealth and those without.

The Professor of Russian and East European Studies, and author of nine books, talks with Kim Hill, in a session recorded on 12 March 2020, as the COVID-19 situation was unfolding.

Listen to the conversation here

This audio was recorded in partnership with the Writers programme at the 2020 New Zealand Festival of the Arts in Wellington.

About the speaker

Dr Kristen Ghodsee

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Kristen R. Ghodsee was travelling in Europe and spent the summer of 1990 witnessing first-hand the initial hope and euphoria that followed the sudden and unexpected collapse of state socialism in the former Eastern Bloc.

The political and economic chaos that followed inspired Ghodsee to pursue an academic career studying this upheaval, focusing on how ordinary people's lives - and women's particularly - changed when state socialism gave way to capitalism.

For the last two decades, she has visited the region regularly and lived for over three years in Bulgaria and the Eastern parts of reunified Germany. Now a professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, she has won many awards for her work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has written nine books on gender, socialism, and post-socialism, examining the everyday experiences of upheaval and displacement that continue to haunt the region to this day.

Ghodsee also writes on women's issues for the Chronicle of Higher Education and is the co-author of Professor Mommy: Finding Work/Family Balance in Academia. Her articles and essays have appeared in publications such as Eurozine, Aeon, Dissent, Foreign Affairs and The New York Times.

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Kinley Salmon, the New Zealand economist and author of Jobs, Robots & Us, talks about the future of work in a time of rapidly-developing automation. A 2020 New Zealand Arts Festival highlight.

Listen to Kinley Salmon, author of Jobs, Robots & Us, discussing the future of work in Aotearoa in a time of rapidly-developing artificial intelligence. Recorded at the 2020 NZ Arts Festival in Wellington.

Kinley Salmon, author of Jobs, Robots & Us, presents a view into the future of work in Aotearoa. The New Zealand economist, now based in the USA, details what AI and automation could do to our workplaces, education system, and domestic lives. Should we be worried or excited? And what can we do to build a positive future for work in New Zealand?

About the speaker

Kinley Salmon

New Zealander Kinley Salmon was born and grew up in Nelson and now works as an economist in Washington D.C. He previously worked as a consultant at McKinsey and Company and has written for The Economist.

Kinley holds a Master's in Public Administration in International Development from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University as well as a Graduate Diploma in Economics and a BA in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge.

This audio was recorded in partnership with the Writers programme at the 2020 New Zealand Festival of the Arts in Wellington. https://www.festival.nz/

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At the NZ Arts Festival 2020, Rebecca Priestley talks about Antarctica with the Prime Minister's Chief Science Advisor Juliet Gerrard.

Listen to Rebecca Priestley discussing her book Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica with the Prime Minister's Chief Science Advisor Juliet Gerrard. Recorded at the 2020 NZ Arts Festival in Wellington.

Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica tells a personal story of time spent on Earth's most mysterious and precious frontier. The book is a poignant and relatable reminder of the complexities of our wishes and the vulnerability of our ideals.

But it also reveals the strength that art and science, research and exploration can gift to us all. Rebecca Priestley discusses a life influenced by the frozen white continent with the Prime Minister's Chief Science Advisor, Juliet Gerrard.

About the speakers

Rebecca Priestley

Rebecca Priestley is an associate professor at Victoria University of Wellington and director of the university's Centre for Science in Society. Rebecca was science columnist for the NZ Listener for six years and is the author or editor of five previous books, the most recent of which is Dispatches from Continent Seven: An Anthology of Antarctic Science (2016). She is a winner of the Royal Society of New Zealand Science Book Prize (2009) and the Prime Minister's Science Communication Prize (2016). In 2018 she was made a Companion of the Royal Society Te Apārangi. She has an undergraduate degree in geology, a PhD in the history of science and an MA in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters.

Juliet Gerrard

Professor Juliet Gerrard trained at Oxford University, where she completed a First Class Honours degree in Chemistry and a DPhil in Biological Chemistry.

In 1993, she moved to Aotearoa New Zealand, as a research scientist at Crop & Food Research. She was appointed as a Lecturer in Biochemistry at the University of Canterbury in 1998, where she became Professor and Co-Director of the Biomolecular Interaction Centre.

In 2014, she moved to the University of Auckland as a Professor in the School of Biological Sciences and the School of Chemical Sciences and later the Associate Dean for Research in the Faculty of Science.

Juliet's research covers a broad base and is interdisciplinary, cutting across biochemistry, chemistry, health, agricultural and food science and biomaterial design. It also incorporates a full spectrum of fundamental and applied research. She has held an Industry and Outreach Fellowship with Callaghan Innovation and founded a start-up company…

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At the NZ Arts Festival 2020, RNZ's Lynn Freeman talks to Rajorshi Chakraborti about his novel Shakti, a fantastical story which has insights into the real-life world of India today.

Listen to Rajorshi Chakraborti talking about fiction and reality with Lynn Freeman

What can the power of women achieve in a world run by men? Rajorshi Chakraborti's just-released novel, Shakti, is a fast-paced story of standing up for what is right in a world going very wrong. Mind-reading, wish-granting goddesses, right-wing regimes and the everyday trials of life in a city collide.

RNZ's Lynn Freeman talks to Rajorshi about writing fiction that challenges, entertains and takes readers into places they might never think to go. Their conversation is particularly illuminating as it explores the relationship between the superhero genre and the real-life situation in today's India, much affected by factional and religious divides exploited by populists who hold political power.

About the author

Rajorshi Chakraborti is an Indian-born novelist, essayist and short-story writer. He was born in 1977 in Calcutta, and grew up there and in Mumbai. Rajorshi is the author of six novels and a collection of short fiction. Or the Day Seizes You was shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award in 2006, one of the best-known prizes for English-language writing in India, and has appeared in a Spanish translation entitled La Vida Que Nos Lleva.

Mumbai Rollercoaster received an honourable mention in the Children's Writing category of the Crossword Book Awards, 2011. The Man Who Would Not See was longlisted in the fiction section of the 2019 Ockham NZ Book Awards. Shakti, Rajorshi's latest novel, a supernatural mystery thriller, was published in February 2020.

This audio was recorded in partnership with the Writers programme at the 2020 New Zealand Festival of the Arts in Wellington. 

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Thomas Sainsbury talks with Louisa Wall MP, Prof. Welby Ings, Professor Emeritus Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, and award winning artist and filmmaker Tanu Gago.

Comedian Tom Sainsbury chairs a discussion explores LGBTQ+ life in New Zealand at Pride Festival Aotearoa.

It features four panellists with decades of involvement in the gay scene as creators, advocates and agents of change: Louisa Wall MP, Prof. Welby Ings, Professor Emeritus Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, and award-winning artist and filmmaker Tanu Gago.

Their conversation surveys many aspects of our recent history, from the dark years of the 1950s when it was illegal to be gay up to marriage reform.

Listen to the discussion

The protection of LGBTQ+ rights is advanced in Aotearoa, relative to other countries in Oceania, and is one of the most liberal in the world, with the country being the first in the region to enact same-sex marriage.

However, none of the panellists believes that we are living in a post-queer world, and several warn against assuming that the freedoms LGBTQ+ individuals have achieved in Aotearoa are replicated in other countries, or indeed that they will necessarily remain intact.

There are still countries in the world where being queer, gay, bisexual or transgender is a criminal offence or worse, punished by death. And in many, including in the Pacific, non-heterosexual people do not feel free to live their authentic lives.

About the participants:

Louisa Wall

Louisa Wall is the MP for Manurewa, having stood for the New Zealand Labour Party. She has represented New Zealand in both netball as a Silver Fern and rugby union as a member of the Black Ferns.

Born in Taupo, Wall has Ngāti Tūwharetoa and Waikato ancestry. She was named after her father's cousin Louis, who died on the day she was born.

She attended secondary school at Taupo-nui-a-Tia College and earned qualifications from the Waikato Institute of Technology, the University of Waikato and Massey University. She worked in the health field. She is openly lesbian and is a strong advocate for human rights.

In May 2012, Wall submitted a Bill to legalise same-sex marriage in New Zealand to the Member's bill ballot. it was subsequently drawn and introduced to Parliament in late July 2012.

On 29 August 2012, the Marriage (Definition of Marriage) Amendment Bill passed its first reading with a vote of 80-40. On 17 April 2013, the Bill was passed into law by 77 votes to 44, making New Zealand the 13th nation to allow same-sex marriage. The Bill came into effect on 19 August 2013, since then married same-sex couples in New Zealand have been able to adopt children jointly…

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