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Recent Submissions

Regulating online hate speech and harmful content in Aotearoa New Zealand - beyond criminalisation and towards a statutory duty of care
(The University of Waikato, 2025-12) Tan, Rachel Sue Yin; Alvarez-Jimenez, Alberto; Barton, Barry; Dizon, Michael
This thesis examines how New Zealand regulates online hate speech and harmful content, and evaluates whether current law provides effective protection in the digital environment. The study considers how social-media platforms shape the spread of harmful expression and assesses whether New Zealand’s existing legal framework is equipped to respond to these risks while maintaining the right to freedom of expression. The central question guiding the research is whether the present approach is adequate, and what reforms may be needed to address harm more effectively. The thesis adopts an interpretivist and qualitative methodology, drawing on doctrinal, socio-legal, comparative, and political-legal methods. It uses behavioural, regulatory, and normative theories, including the Online Disinhibition Effect, modalities of regulation, and dignity- and equality-based approaches to free expression. These perspectives help explain why harmful content escalates so quickly online and why traditional legal tools struggle to respond. The analysis proceeds in three stages. First, it examines the operation of digital platforms, focusing on algorithmic amplification, design choices, and the limits of automated moderation. Second, it reviews New Zealand’s legal framework, including the Harmful Digital Communications Act 2015, the Human Rights Act 1993, and the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990. This review shows that the current system is reactive, fragmented, and heavily dependent on voluntary platform policies. Third, the thesis draws comparative insights from the United Kingdom, Australia, France, Germany, and the European Union, where more proactive models, particularly statutory duties of care and transparency obligations, have begun to address platform-level risks. The research concludes that New Zealand’s present approach does not adequately respond to systemic and group-based harms. It argues that a statutory duty of care, supported by risk-assessment requirements, algorithmic transparency, and proportionate safeguards for freedom of expression, offers a more effective and balanced framework. The thesis contributes to existing scholarship by integrating behavioural and regulatory theory with comparative legal analysis and by proposing a model of platform accountability tailored to Aotearoa New Zealand’s legal context and human rights commitments.
Indigenous data sovereignty
(2020) Tahau-Hodges, Pania
Indigenous peoples have long recognised storytelling as a vital mechanism for transmitting knowledge, culture, and identity (Hodge, Pasqua, Marquez, & Geishirt-Cantrell, 2002; Rani & Raj, 2023). Yet across colonised nations, the power to shape and share Indigenous stories – particularly in children’s literature – has often rested in the hands of non-Indigenous creators and institutions (Barnwell, 2021; Hampton & DeMartini, 2017). This lecture explores the concept of story sovereignty in the context of Māori children’s picturebooks, asking: What happens when Indigenous peoples reclaim authorship and editorial control over our own narratives for children? Drawing on doctoral research that includes data from research conversations with Indigenous publishing practitioners and creative practice-based inquiry, this lecture centres on story sovereignty as both a conceptual and practical framework for reclaiming control over Indigenous narratives (Sium & Ritskes, 2013; Whiteduck, 2013). It critically examines the power dynamics embedded in the publishing industry, where Indigenous voices and ways of knowing continue to be marginalised (Sengupta, 2023). At the same time, it highlights the transformative potential of story sovereignty – where Māori exercise tino rangatiratanga (self-determination) over our stories, determining which stories we want to tell, how we tell them, and who we tell them to (Whiteduck, 2013). Findings suggest that Indigenous-led creation of  picturebooks can be a powerful act of resistance and resurgence – cultivating cultural memory, promoting wellbeing, and contributing to the realisation of mana motuhake (control over one’s destiny) and tino rangatiratanga (Sium & Ritskes, 2013; Sengupta, 2023). Through an Indigenous lens, this lecture explores the significance of story sovereignty in children’s publishing and argues that reclaiming narrative power is not only a political act, but also a vital expression of cultural survival and self-determination (Hampton & DeMartini, 2017).
Stratigraphy and sedimentology of conglomerates in the Kidnappers Group, Hawke’s Bay
(The University of Waikato, 1978) Kamp, Peter J.J.; Nelson, Campbell S.
The Middle to Late Pleistocene Kidnappers Group comprises 400 m of diverse lithologies deposited in fluvial, marginal marine and shallow marine environments. The stratigraphy and sedimentology of the greywacke conglomerates, the dominant lithology in the group, is investigated, in part using three new computer programmes. Five environmentally sensitive lithologies are recognised: Lithotype 1 - Imbricated, inverse to normally graded conglomerate; Lithotype 2 - Planar cross-stratified conglomerate; Lithotype 3 - Thin, massive to stratified conglomerate; Lithotype 4 - Planar cross-stratified, shelly, sandy conglomerate; Lithotype 5 - Thin, massive to low-angle cross-stratified, shelly conglomerate. On the basis of cross-stratification types, fossil content and the shapes, orientation fabrics and grain-size analyses of clasts, Lithotypes 1, 2 and 3 have a braided fluvial origin and Lithotypes 4 and 5 a shallow marine origin. Differences between Lithotypes 1, 2 and 3 identify a proximal-distal sequence within the braided fluvial environment. Lithotype 1 is interpreted as proximal channel and longitudinal bar facies, Lithotype 2 as mid-reach transverse and longitudinal/diagonal bar facies, and Lithotype 3 as channel and topstratum overbank deposits in the distal reaches of a braided river system. From the vertical succession of conglomeratic facies and marine fossiliferous units, a chronology of submergence and emergence events in the Kidnappers Group has been established. This succession is dominantly controlled by glacio-eustatic fluctuations in sea level which agree in frequency and period with sea level fluctuations derived from deep sea core data from 0.5 to 0.1 m.y.B.P. Tectonism has also influenced the supply of sediment to the group and reinforced the magnitude of the submergence and emergence events.
Trade publishing indigenous works in the United States: One author’s perspective
(2026-02-04) Sorell , Traci
Traci Sorell shares her experiences as a fiction, nonfiction and poetry author working with a variety of trade publishers from multinational corporations to family-owned companies in the United States. She will reveal successes, challenges, and recommendations for navigating these business relationships as a creative connected to one’s Indigenous community.
Sense and sensibilities: Translating picturebooks into te reo Māori
(2026-02-05) Joseph, Darryn; Teepa, Kawata
What goes through the mind of an expert translator as they take a European language and transform the text into a Polynesian one? Should it be a literal translation, a poetic translation or full of common slang and uncommon idiom? What is more important here - the translation, the story or the reader? This lecture and workshop walk you through the decision-making behind turning English language picturebooks into the Māori language appropriate for a Māori audience. We dive into Tūhoe translator Kawata Teepa's processes from his first book at HUIA Publishers Ngārimu: te Tohu Toa to the many books with Sacha Cotter and Josh Morgan: Ngā Kī (2014), Te Kaihanga Māpere (2016), Te Pohū (2018) and Ringa Kōreko (2023). What did it take for Kawata to bring these stories to life in te reo rangatira? Are there translation concepts and methods that we can generalise and take away with us for our own creative projects?