Message from Academy Chair
Professor Charlotte Macdonald shares her foreword as Chair of the Academy Executive Committee.
Tēnā koutou katoa.
I am writing on the second Friday of the August 2021 lockdown as we await the next announcement of if, and when, New Zealand – or some part of Aotearoa New Zealand – will shift out of Level 4.
The sudden move to Level 4 in the evening of Tuesday 17 August came abruptly. Delta leaves little room to hesitate. Very quickly we have watched the speed at which an outbreak of this variant can spread. We see, once again, the critical role played by epidemiologists, modellers, virologists, microbiologists, and a host of communicators, in ensuring the most effective collective containment of COVID-19 across the whole of our national community. Amongst these frontline experts are a number of members of our Academy. We acknowledge their work, and the pressure under which they are undertaking their responsibilities.
As we cancel, postpone, re-schedule and adjust our various commitments, our work and our lives, we are reminded once more of the power of uncertainty. As researchers we embrace the thrill, the excitement, the impetus of uncertainty when it drives the questions we seek to answer, the things we want to find out. The uncertainty of Covid gives us a darker side, the uncertainty of a dangerous infection, the alarm and fear that disruption wreaks. As a historian, my training is one that insists on setting aside the certainty of hindsight in order to capture the contingency, the unknown in which people acted as individuals and as groups in the past. It is never easy to set those known consequences aside.
Across all the subject areas represented in the Academy, the methods of moving between the certain and the uncertain, varies hugely. What we know, what we want to know, and how we signal the certainty of our knowledge is always at the forefront of our endeavours.
As we enter the uncertain kōanga – spring of 2021 let’s recall the generating force of our uncertainty: what drives our questioning, and our respectful conversations across our knowledge areas.
Kia kaha,
Charlotte Macdonald FRSNZ
Professor of History