Message from Academy Chair

What has it meant for Aotearoa’s research community to work within closed borders?

As we approach the anniversary of New Zealand going into an unprecedented Level 4 lockdown in the face of the exponential spread of the COVID-19 virus, it is useful to reflect on the impact of a forced insularity. International in its demographic composition and its frameworks of reference and operation, the closing of the nation’s borders marks a highly significant moment for us as researchers. Many of our normal expectations stopped in their tracks. Our community and activity is also situated and focussed on the local. Yet much of the work of those of us researching Aotearoa New Zealand also relies on international networks. Amongst the most international of our research community are those engaged in global Indigenous collaborations.

For all of us the past year has been one of disruption, uncertainty, invention, de-arrangement, arrangement and re-arrangement. We are still in this state. Travel has been the most directly affected. Our habits of meeting and hosting colleagues, being able to get to fieldwork, archives or cognate laboratories, have been most severely curtailed. Conferences we had planned to attend have fallen off researchers’ agendas and itineraries. So too, have those we had planned to host. While some of these have been retrofitted as online events, others have been postponed or cancelled.

While we have all accepted these shifts as necessary in the face of a catastrophic emergency, how long can such disruption last? What might be the impact on our small, highly skilled, specialist workforce and research community located in a part of the world that offers great benefits but also costs (human and economic) to those who have come to rely on global mobility?

The opportunities to meet with colleagues across the world when we have all found ourselves ‘at home’ has resulted in some new and invigorating discussions. But there are paths and opportunities that have been temporarily corked by COVID-19. New graduates looking to those first jobs in other parts of the world; a step into employment bound up with the venture of travel. The new graduates from the rest of the world for whom Aotearoa offers a first place of employment or advanced study, combined with the chance to live and explore a place which offers many attractions. The continuing renewal of our research priorities, activities and community relies on the coming and going of people. We may need to be more inventive in the interim in considering how we retain this element.

At the same time we have a great opportunity to showcase Aotearoa New Zealand’s research to the world. The success of New Zealand’s COVID-19 response, following an evidence-based strategy, provides an exceptionally powerful card for us as a research community, to play in the global game in which we are all engaged. We may all wish 2020-21 had not brought the sticky unwanted-ness of covid amongst us, but we have a rare chance to promote ourselves to the world.

Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou,

Charlotte Macdonald FRSNZ
Professor of History