Hi Friend,

A few weeks ago, we emailed  <[link removed]>about some of the ridiculous funding that is being handed out by the Royal Society of New Zealand through the "Marsden Fund" <[link removed]> – which is supposed to be for the crème de la crème of New Zealand academia, showcasing the highest standards of scholarly excellence and innovation.

As a reminder, according to the Society's website the Fund "Supports excellence in science, engineering, maths, social sciences and the humanities in New Zealand by providing grants for investigator-initiated research" and gave out $83.5 million of taxpayer money last year alone.


Like last time, you be the judge of these latest projects our team have uncovered...

Researching the "Big Things"

Ever seen those roadside sculptures, , and thought "someone should really study those"? You'll be delighted to learn that $360,000 has been spent to do that very road trip, I mean research! 🗿🗿🗿🚐

Grant ID: 22-VUW-021 

Recipient: Dr M Zonjic, Victoria University of Wellington

Big Things, Complex Shadows: investigating intersecting stories of place, identity, and erasure through large roadside sculptures in Aotearoa

"During the 1980s economic recession, struggling small towns across Aotearoa started building large roadside sculptures – or "Big Things" – to sell unique provincial identities and attract passing motorists. Currently, more than two dozen "Big Things" are peppered across the country's landscape, contributing to the production, performance, and tourism marketing of particular places and identities. But whose stories do these novelty structures tell? And which narratives are obscured by their literal and proverbial shadows?

This project brings a critical gaze to the privileging of Pākehā-centred narratives in current research on roadside "Big Things".

Adopting a transformative epistemology, it attends to the ways in which "Big Things" can be an apparatus of forgetting settler-colonial histories, to provoke a new way of thinking about hegemonic constructions of colonial objects and the way these obscure land dispossession.

Weaving together feminist, participatory, and filmic geographies, this project seeks to re-centre alternative stories currently hidden in the Big Things’ shadows, culminating in a scholarly monograph and six short films - one from each field-site.

Internationally, this research provides a timely Antipodean contribution to contemporary scholarship examining the complex negotiations of decolonising public spaces, and the role that statues, however innocuous they may seem, occupy within them."

Approved funding: $360,000

"Big things" indeed! 👀

Climate change is big thing. As is its impact on oceans. This creative academic, Dr BJ Etherington, has heroically managed to shoehorn disability studies and poetry to feast at the climate change trough research pool! See if you can make sense of this one:

Grant ID: 23-VUW-025 

Recipient: Dr BJ Etherington, Victoria University of Wellington

Literatures of Environment and Disability from Oceania

"A diverse range of environmental impacts is hitting Oceania in this current moment of climate change, and disabled people, especially disabled Indigenous people, are increasingly at risk from those impacts. Yet the stories these people tell are often overlooked by literary researchers.

It is imperative to highlight disabled people’s stories from Oceania as those who live here face progressively volatile environmental situations. These literatures emerge from contexts where military and extractive contamination often cause disabilities, and where disabled people are considered collateral damage during disasters, including the Covid-19 pandemic.

My project analyses novels, short stories, creative nonfiction, and poems from Aotearoa, Guåhan, Hawai‘i, Sāmoa, West Papua, Papua New Guinea, and Fiji, establishing how such stories resist ableist narratives and theorise and advance disability-centred ways of creating sustainable and just environmental futures.

This project argues that we cannot emphasise climate justice and account for those living in precarious environmental conditions without also prioritising the stories of disabled peoples. These literatures offer strategies for caring for one another and our environments as we all, abled and disabled, grapple with diverse ecological conditions once considered deviant.

Approved funding: $360,000

Frankly, I'm astonished there is more than a handful of poems and stories about disabled pacific people taking on climate change. But then again, if I was given 360 grand, I'd travel through the Oceania hotspots to go looking! 🛫🏖️👋

How often do you see the words "alcohol", "dark sludge" and "Māori methodologies" together? This one feels like Massey University has been making use of its random word generator again.

Grant ID: 23-MAU-022 

Recipient: Associate Professor T Huckle, Massey University

Dark nudges and sludge: big alcohol and dark advertising on social media

We will
1) explore alcohol industry dark nudging and sludge [using cognitive biases to make psychological resistance more difficult] on social media;
2) investigate the experiences of dark nudging and sludge among rangatahi/young people;
3) build theory around these practices to advance knowledge within a rapidly developing digital world.

We will explore the experiences of dark nudging and sludge among rangatahi Māori and Tangata Tiriti aged 16-24 years using an approach grounded in young people’s online worlds and real-time experiences. We will draw on Māori methodologies and approaches.

Our research will produce ground-breaking knowledge and establish Aotearoa, New Zealand at the forefront of this new research area.

We will also be the first to extend public health and social science theory into the “darkness” of current alcohol-industry exploitive tactics and transform global debate on unhealthy industry practices that restrict individual autonomy for informed choice in an unregulated digital environment."

Approved funding: $861,000

An alternative name for this $861,000 research could be "Breaking News: Advertising encourages people to buy stuff".

Speaking of $861k, how about this grant look at a couple of fisheries across the world and what they tell us about "imperial" borders and governance of the ocean. Really?  🎣

Grant ID: 23-UOW-057 

Recipient: Dr FE McCormack, University of Waikato

Marine inequality and environmental demise: Identifying imperial borders in ocean governance

"By foregrounding the role of ‘border imperialism’ in institutionalising marine exclusions, the research draws critical attention to the relationship between environmental decline, social inequality, and the longue durée of imperialist ideologies in ocean governance.

The project’s field sites are four island nation states: Aotearoa, Hawaii, Iceland and Ireland, each of which has a distinct marine culture as well as historically diverse fishing economies and livelihoods. Each too has a different history of colonialism alongside a rich legacy of anti-colonial resistances and other forms of social movements, broadly rooted in claims to the commons.

This research proposes that these oft-contentious histories are uniquely patterned in their ocean economies and regulatory regimes. Employing a comparative ethnographic approach to investigate four case studies—marine aquaculture in Aotearoa, the wild, angler and farmed salmon fisheries in Iceland and Ireland, and the aquarium fishery in Hawaii—the research will generate fundamental knowledge to support ongoing imperatives to decolonise ocean worlds."

Approved funding: $861,000

Who knew "ocean worlds" (i.e fish) are racist colonisers? 😮

Note too the reference to "field sites". That's code for Ireland, Iceland, Hawaii round the world business class travel – sorry, research.

Now we move on to end-of-life experiences, and asking that age old question of whether end of life experiences are determined by astrology?

In the world of our crème de la crème research grants, death is indeed linked to the stars! ✨

And thank goodness too that some of this 'science' money is going to be used to "make a documentary" (a whole new take to high school science, no doubt). 🤯

Grant ID: 23-MAU-090 

Recipient: Associate Professor NA Tassell-Matamua, Massey University

Kua whetūrangihia koe. Linking the celestial spheres to end-of-life experiences.

"What compelled Māori to link the celestial sphere with death, and what continues to inspire narratives, rituals and practices that reinforce this link?

This first of its kind to explore this question, this study will gather accounts of death-related phenomena via an online tool and use interviews to further explore how Māori make meaning from these experiences and link them to the celestial sphere.

Innovatively mapping death-related experiences onto the annual movement of Matariki over time, we will examine whether linkages exist between the timing and features of such experiences and Kōkōrangi Māori (Māori astronomy), and share our findings via a short documentary.

In doing so, we will create opportunities to rekindle the ancient connection to the stars and re-imagine the meaning of death, while also advancing understandings about the practical application of Māori astronomy in contemporary times."

Approved funding: $861,000

These five grants alone amount to $3.3million. And with $83.5 million in annual taxpayer funding each year just for Marsden, this trough is large. 

The media aren't doing their job. This nonsense needs to be exposed.

Friend, I wish we were making up these research grants! It's exposing the wasteful spending which the media aren't that is the reason David and I founded the Taxpayers' Union. Who else will hold these taxpayer funded quangos and academics to account? <[link removed]>

Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and the only thing that will prompt MPs and Ministers to take on the vested interests and return science funding to, well, science.

Few would resent paying taxes for genuine scientific research. But every week we're uncovering more nonsense at Marsden/the Royal Society, the Health Research Council, and our universities.

This work is only made possible by the New Zealanders who chip-in and allow us to keep the lights on (and keep digging to expose wasteful spending).To make a confidential, secure donation, click here. <[link removed]>

<[link removed]>

Thank you for your support.


Jordan Williams
Executive Director
New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union



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