Search Marsden awards 2008–2017
Search awarded Marsden Fund grants 2008–2017
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Fast-Start
Year Awarded: 2016
Title: 'A Union of Hearts and Wills'? Second World War Conscription and New Zealand Society
Recipient(s): Dr DC Littlewood | PI | Massey University
Public Summary: On New Zealand’s entry into the Second World War, Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage asserted that its people would fight with ‘a union of hearts and wills’. But this claim was sorely tested by the implementation of conscription. From June 1940, 306,000 men were called up for military service, and tens of thousands of men and women were ‘manpowered’ into essential war industries. While historians have examined the consequences for the small minority of individuals who raised conscientious objections, no one has yet investigated the domestic, social, and economic upheaval that conscription caused for New Zealand’s entire population. It posed ideological dilemmas for the previously anti-conscriptionist Labour Government, led to a dramatic extension of state control, shattered family units, altered the gender balance of the workforce, prompted a re-assessment of the Crown’s relationship with Māori, and threw into question ideas of ‘Britishness’. My project will be the first integrated analysis of New Zealand as a conscripted society, and the first to examine how its experiences compared to those of the other mobilised democracies in the British Empire. This approach will open up new avenues of enquiry into how New Zealanders perceived both themselves, and their country’s place in the world.
Total Awarded: $300,000
Duration: 3
Host: Massey University
Contact Person: Dr DC Littlewood
Panel: HUM
Project ID: 16-MAU-028
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2017
Title: 'Living' wages: Transforming lives, transforming work?
Recipient(s): Professor SC Carr | PI | Massey University Auckland
Dr S Alefaio-Tugia | PI | Massey University Auckland
Professor J Arrowsmith | PI | Massey University Auckland
Professor JM Haar | PI | Auckland University of Technology
Professor DJ Hodgetts | PI | Massey University Auckland
Professor J Parker | PI | Massey University Auckland
Public Summary: If employment is a solution to poverty, and prosperity includes quality of living, then earning a living wage is pivotal. But what is a living wage, what freedoms and qualities of (work) life can it enable? Living wages are widely touted as empowering individuals and households, providing a pathway from poverty to work-life satisfaction and greater shared prosperity. Yet living wage debates themselves remain shrouded in material, pecuniary concerns, from the cost of shopping baskets to the hourly pay rate that buys them.
Our approach differs because we explore a wage spectrum; diverse perspectives of employers and employees; and use research techniques that will deliver findings of breadth and depth over time. First, with livelihoods positioned across a wage spectrum, we examine when, how and by what means lives can be enhanced, using surveys anchored in lower-income communities. Second, we explore wage-setting and its impact on the organisational functioning and livelihood-quality of life nexus, using organisational case studies. Third, we investigate decision-making around the wage spectrum with employers, using focus groups. Throughout, we draw insights from, and engage with, a purpose-built global living wage network (https://youtu.be/zbZafHgqumo). This project will inform public deliberations on living wages in an age of societal and organisational transformation.
Total Awarded: $845,000
Duration: 3
Host: Massey University Auckland
Contact Person: Professor SC Carr
Panel: SOC
Project ID: 17-MAU-137
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Fast-Start
Year Awarded: 2013
Title: 'Time slows down whenever you're around': the evolutionary psychology of timing and perceived attractiveness
Recipient(s): Dr J Arantes | PI | University of Canterbury
Professor JH Wearden | AI | Keele University
Public Summary: What happens when we first feel attracted to another person? A common trope in literature and popular culture is that time slows down or even stops. We plan the first systematic investigation of how time perception changes during interpersonal attraction. The research builds on our recent report that females’ reproduced duration of briefly-viewed photos of attractive males was longer than for photos of unattractive males, whereas there was no difference for photos of attractive vs. unattractive females. To explain this result, we proposed that the human timing system evolved to include adaptations to enhance fitness. The proposed studies will explore how subjective time changes in situations related to interpersonal attraction, whether these changes can be understood as an evolutionary adaptation, the cognitive processes that mediate them and their electrophysiological correlates, and whether they predict attraction in real life. Current research on attraction depends largely on what people say – that is, on conscious cognition that may reflect inaccurate biases. We will use both laboratory and realistic methods to explore what happens automatically and instinctively in the cognitive system during interpersonal attraction.
Total Awarded: $300,000
Duration: 3
Host: University of Canterbury
Contact Person: Dr J Arantes
Panel: EHB
Project ID: 13-UOC-105
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2016
Title: 'Woe is me': women and complaint in the English Renaissance
Recipient(s): Dr SCE Ross | PI | Victoria University of Wellington
Professor MF O'Callaghan | AI | University of Reading
Associate Professor RL Smith | AI | University of Newcastle
Public Summary: This three-year project examines English Renaissance women’s engagement with complaint, a powerful and ubiquitous rhetorical mode that voices erotic, religious, and political protest and loss. Renaissance complaint against fickle lovers, harsh deities, and unfavourable times often foregrounds the voice and body of a lamenting woman, but it is largely understood as male-authored, an act of literary ventriloquy. Scholars have no collective sense of how Renaissance women used this culturally central mode.
Our project brings together a uniquely qualified, internationally recognised research team to undertake the first comprehensive interrogation of Renaissance women’s engagement with complaint as writers, readers, patrons, collaborators, editors, and performers. We will explore elite literary texts alongside religious works, gallows confessions, popular ballads and songs, and examine printed works alongside manuscript literatures. In a co-authored monograph on Women and Complaint in the English Renaissance, and a journal special issue and symposium on The Politics of Complaint, we will produce a new account of how the voices of the disempowered, railing against their circumstances, helped to shaped the literary and social cultures of the English Renaissance. This account will challenge current understandings of what constitutes Renaissance experience and expression, and about the extent and reach of ‘the Renaissance’ itself.
Total Awarded: $450,000
Duration: 3
Host: Victoria University of Wellington
Contact Person: Dr SCE Ross
Panel: HUM
Project ID: 16-VUW-057
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2014
Title: 8,000 years of hunter-gatherer adaptation: burial and bioarchaeology at Roonka, Australia
Recipient(s): Associate Professor JH Littleton | PI | The University of Auckland
Dr KA Walshe | PI | Museum of South Australia
Associate Professor HA Allen | AI | The University of Auckland
Professor MA Katzenberg | AI | University of Calgary
Dr F Petchey | AI | University of Waikato
Public Summary: Using 216+ human remains and detailed records from Roonka, Australia, dating to the last 8,000 years, we will study burials as individual events. Analysing each in terms of its date, burial practices, and the individual histories of diet, health and activity will allow us to construct individual osteobiographies providing evidence of constraint and variation in Aboriginal lifeways. Conventional approaches aggregate burials into broad time spans (e.g. 5000 years) rather we will use osteobiographies to reconstruct a picture of historical change in human health and behaviour over the Holocene. This new model of hunter-gatherer behaviour will be developed with the collaboration and support of local Aboriginal community.
Total Awarded: $675,000
Duration: 3
Host: The University of Auckland
Contact Person: Associate Professor JH Littleton
Panel: EHB
Project ID: 14-UOA-019
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Fast-Start
Year Awarded: 2008
Title:
Can dietary lignans reduce abnormal cell growth?
Recipient(s):
Dr MJ McCann | PI | AgResearch
Prof I Rowland | AI | University of Reading
Dr NC Roy | AI | AgResearch
Public Summary:
All mammalian cell growth occurs as a function of the cell cycle. Enterolignans (gut-derived metabolites of phytochemicals found in cereals, fruits and vegetables) are thought to possess biological properties that may restore normal or restrain abnormal cell cycle progression and growth. The capacity of physiological doses of lignans to affect cell cycle progression will be investigated using an in vitro and in vivo model system of human tissue, with the molecular mechanisms characterised using quantitative real-time PCR and Western blotting. How lignans reduce abnormal cell growth is the subject of my proposal.
Total Awarded: $266,667
Duration: 3
Host: AgResearch
Contact Person: Dr MJ McCann
Panel: CMP
Project ID: 08-AGR-003
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2016
Title: A 'Big Data' Approach to the Problem of Electoral Turnout
Recipient(s): Professor J Vowles | PI | Victoria University of Wellington
Public Summary: Why has New Zealand’s electoral turnout declined? What can be done about it? Previous research can partly answer the first question. But to answer the second, we need to know more about the people who move in and out of voting, a group inaccessible in previous research relying on surveys with low response rates among those not voting. Taking a ‘big data’ approach, using marked electoral rolls, and with a sample of 30,000 we will map and explain stability and change in voting and not voting over two general elections and two local elections. We will track movement between the general and Maori rolls, and by comparison of roll and census information generate simulated responses for the 7-8 per cent not on the rolls. The research tests four hypotheses: that turnout behaviour in the first election a person is eligible to vote will predict later behaviour; if the first opportunity to vote is a local rather than a national election, this will adversely affect later turnout behaviour; turnout behaviour becomes less fluid as people get older; and that Maori enrolment, turnout, and roll choice are affected by a mixture of socio-economic and cultural factors.
Total Awarded: $635,000
Duration: 3
Host: Victoria University of Wellington
Contact Person: Professor J Vowles
Panel: SOC
Project ID: 16-VUW-100
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2015
Title: A baby's eye view: theory of mind development through exposure to repeated behaviours
Recipient(s): Professor T Ruffman | PI | University of Otago
Dr DK Scarf | AI | University of Otago
Dr MM Taumoepeau | AI | University of Otago
Public Summary: Most researchers argue that babies are 'mind readers'. Mind reading, or theory-of-mind (ToM), entails an understanding of others' desires and beliefs. It is 'the most important development in early childhood social cognition', and is reliably linked to children's empathy, popularity and social skills. The idea that babies have a ToM is consistent with the current zeitgeist that infants possess 'core innate knowledge'. Instead, we argue that infants begin by understanding behaviour, which they learn about by virtue of their exposure to environmental regularities and their innate capacity for statistical learning, enabling learning about patterns. Most regard such ideas as far-fetched. However, we placed a head camera on 39 12- to 24-month-olds to film the world from their perspective, finding that children's ToM was closely related to their exposure to environmental regularities (repeated behaviours such as drinking from a cup over and over), as well as their imitation of such behaviours. Our findings are, however, impotent without a larger longitudinal study. The proposed research will utilize cutting-edge techniques to show that children's rich exposure to environmental information fuels their ToM, findings with profound theoretical implications for children's general development, which will also reveal optimal parenting strategies facilitating their well-being.
Total Awarded: $767,000
Duration: 3
Host: University of Otago
Contact Person: Professor T Ruffman
Panel: EHB
Project ID: 15-UOO-185
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Fast-Start
Year Awarded: 2014
Title: A banner of peace? Missions and peace activism, 1814-1850
Recipient(s): Dr GM Troughton | PI | Victoria University of Wellington
Public Summary: New Zealanders are known internationally for their commitment to peace. Historians generally associate this characteristic with developments in the twentieth century. This project argues that the beginnings of a peace tradition may be found much earlier, in forms of missionary Christianity that have more commonly been regarded as agents of conflict and cultural disruption. The research examines the fascinating, hitherto unexamined role of peaceable ideas and activism in missionary Christianity. In so doing, it offers a fresh analysis of early nineteenth-century New Zealand history, and of global missionary projects, focusing on crucial dynamics of cultural exchange and religious adaptation.
The project provides the first significant examination of missionary peace teaching in New Zealand or, indeed, of nineteenth-century missionary peace teaching anywhere. It will explore how Christian missionaries promoted peace as central to their theology, and examine the implications of this theology during the intense phase of missionary activity and religious change between 1814 and 1850. The research will re-evaluate simple assumptions about the role of religion in peace and conflict, and examine how the legacy of early missions in New Zealand may continue to influence deeply held national values, even among those who no longer identify with religion.
Total Awarded: $300,000
Duration: 3
Host: Victoria University of Wellington
Contact Person: Dr GM Troughton
Panel: HUM
Project ID: 14-VUW-109
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2009
Title: A bee-line into memory mechanisms
Recipient(s): Professor AR Mercer | PI | University of Otago
Professor P Kloppenburg | AI | University of Cologne
Mr HJ McQuillan | AI | University of Otago
Professor U Mueller | AI | University of Saarland
Public Summary: Understanding the cellular mechanisms involved in memory formation remains one of the most interesting and important challenges facing neuroscientists today. We wish to develop a novel approach using developmental changes in the learning ability of the honeybee, Apis mellifera, to identify cellular and molecular events involved in the formation of associative olfactory memories. Our goal is to understand how memory traces that predict punishment differ from those predicting reward, a goal that has potential medical relevance and is of broad scientific interest. This work will grow existing research capabilities in New Zealand and establish a New Zealand-led research initiative.
Total Awarded: $866,667
Duration: 3
Host: University of Otago
Contact Person: Professor AR Mercer
Panel: CMP
Project ID: 09-UOO-136