Join us in celebrating the very substantive contribution to academia made by Professor Annie Potts and Professor Michael Plank in the next presentation of our Professorial Lecture Series for 2019.
- Date: Thursday 2 May, from 4.30 – 6.00 p.m.
- Location: E14 – Engineering Core
All staff and postgraduate students are encouraged to attend the lecture series to actively support our new Professors, and take the opportunity to appreciate the fantastic research being undertaken in parts of the University you may be less familiar with.
You’ll find further information on each presentation, below.
Ngā mihi
Professor Ian Wright
Deputy Vice-Chancellor | Tumu Tuarua
Presentation details:
Kapa Kaiota: The Intersectional Politics of Veganism
Presented by Professor Annie Potts
Director of the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies
For students and researchers of human-animal relationships, the words ‘vegan’ and ‘veganism’ have begun to function not only as the descriptors of a practice – a way of living and being in the world – but also as critical terms.
In this regard we can say that ‘vegan’ and ‘veganism’ refer to a particular kind of conceptual approach, one characterised by an ethical and political commitment to the identification, analysis and rejection – as far as possible – of the ideologies that justify and enable the exploitation of nonhuman animals.
In addition veganism, both as a practice and a critical method, increasingly tends to combine with ‘intersectional’ forms of thinking, which aim to recognize the ways in which human-animal relations are intricately linked with the politics of race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, class, and physical ability and disability.
This presentation will introduce key theories of veganism, placing particular emphasis on new critical thinking emerging from Intersectional Vegan Studies.
Special attention will also be paid to representations of meat and its consumption (as well as meat and dairy refusal and veganism) – phenomena that should be central to any thoroughgoing understanding of food futures, both in Aotearoa New Zealand and around the world.
Size-based models of marine ecosystems and the effects of fishing
Presented by Professor Michael Plank
School of Mathematics & Statistics
Many species of fish begin life as tiny larvae and grow to be several million times larger as adults. Over the course of its lifetime, a fish’s predators and prey change drastically as it grows bigger. This means that body size is a crucial variable in any population.
Size-spectrum models are a type of mathematical model that calculate changes in body size as a results of biomass being transferred from prey to predator, and from parent to offspring. This is a different paradigm from a classical species-based predator-prey model.
In this talk, I will give an overview of how size-spectrum models work and the insights they have given into marine ecosystem dynamics. I will show how these models can be used to investigate the ecosystem-level effects of different approaches of fishing, such as different size-based fishing regulations. This includes short-term considerations such as sustainable yield and effects on ecosystem structure, as well as longer-term change such as fisheries-induced evolution.
