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News and Events at the School of Communication Studies

This page gives an overview of events and activities happening around the School of Communication Studies.

News & Events

AUT is a proud sponsor of the World’s #1 Limited-Time Filmmaking Contest.

Back in Auckland for its 9th year, Semi-Permanent will once again be bringing a large dose of ideas and inspiration to the big smoke. We'll be flying over and sourcing locally some of the worlds most talented creatives, from a range of different industries, to present their work, their lives and their progressive ideas with you.

  • AUT Asia-Pacific Journalism Student Interviews Alec Ross, Senior Adviser for Innovation to US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton 



  • AUT Bachelor of Communcation Studies Graduates Receive Award
Lucy Morgan and Tabitha ColemanAUT BCS grads Lucy Morgan and Tabitha Coleman received the 2011 Student Marketer of the Year Award on 24 February 2012.

This is the fourth time AUT has won the award (out of a total five years that the Award has been made) and the third time in a row. Jane Berney has tutored the project and Dave Brown has overseen the art direction for the last three winning years, so congrats to them too.

This time all the shortlisted finalists were from AUT Advertising Creativity. Runners-up were Raymond Tiong, Kate Cullinane and JessWoodward, AUT Graphic Design students taking the AC papers.

The brief this year came from Telecom NZ and was mammoth – get smart phone users to try Telecom – before Telecom had the iPhone on offer.The solution, the judges said was a "clever marketing strategy, brought to life by a smart, simple effortless idea, using multiple channels."

"The Student Marketer of the Year Award acknowledges excellence in marketing strategy, design and creativity in one brilliant tertiary student or student team. Sponsored by New Zealand Post, a keen supporter of graduates in the direct marketing discipline, this award opens doors for the talented recipient," says NZ Post. And indeed a couple of agency creative directors sought out the winners on the night and invited them for interview.

The killing and abduction of journalists in Indonesian-occupied West Papua has been highlighted in a special new report on Pacific media freedom over the past year by Pacific Journalism Review.

  • AUT student journalists report top international event
    September 2011
A strong team of postgraduate journalism students from the Asia-Pacific Journalism course in AUT's School of Communication Studies had their very own scoop in the first week of September.
 
They covered the 42nd Pacific Islands Forum leaders summit representing 15 countries in the region, including New Zealand - only Fiji was missing, suspended because of its military regime.

Along with the Forum, the students covered the visit of the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and the head of the European Commission.

Top of the agenda were issues such as climate change, regional security and "turning opportunity into prosperity".
 
At the end of the week, several prime ministers attended the World Rugby Cup opening match between New Zealand and Tonga, won by the All Blacks 41-10.

The students' stories, videos and audio reports were published on their course website Pacific Scoop www.pacific.scoop.co.nz
 
Their live coverage was organised by AUT's Pacific Media Centre and supervised by director Associate Professor David Robie, who said: "This is quite extraordinary for students to have an opportunity to cover an international event of this calibre - and all the students excelled."
 
Scoop co-editor Alastair Thompson told the students: I think this has been the best reported Pacific Islands Forum ever - by your team in particular. And in doing such a marvellous job, you have set a new bar of professionalism for student/industry journalism projects."



This video news story on the Pacific "showcase"was reported by Christopher Chang and Alexander Winkler.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-j5iQXkNmaM

The archive of student stories is on Pacific Scoop here:
http://pacific.scoop.co.nz/category/pacific-islands-forum/
  • AUT graduates win Young Lions Print Award 2011
    June 2011
Mike Felix and Matt SwinburneAUT graduates Mike Felix and Matt Swinburne have beaten the world's best young advertising creative teams to take out the Young Lions Print Award 2011.

Mike and Matt competed in the 48 hour competition against teams from 42 countries around the world in Cannes France, to answer a brief for Pump Aid, a water and sanitation charity operating in Africa.

Mike and Matt are currently a creative team at Leo Burnett Sydney and gradated from AUT in 2003 and 2004. Since graduating they have worked together and separately at Saatchi & Saatchi and DDB in New Zealand where they gained reputations as award winners, both as a team and in their own rights.

To get to Cannes Mike and Matt had to beat every other young team in Australia to win the Cannes Young Lions Print Australian Award 2011.

Meanwhile from New Zealand, AUT graduates Jenny Ko and Pip Perkins won the Cannes Young Lions Print New Zealand Award 2011 and also flew to Cannes to compete against Mike and Matt.

Mike and Matt both studied graphic design at AUT and each chose to specialise in advertising. Mike took Advertising Creativity papers as part of his bachelor degree, while Matt chose to complete his first degree than take the Graduate Diploma in Advertising Creativity.

Past Events

Innovation and social change through digital and social media with some of the top thinkers from government, business and academia.

  • Visiting Scholar Seminar: Tartan in Pop: Rebellion, Belonging and Showing Out by Dr J Mark Percival, Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh
    4 July 2012, WH125, City Campus

Tartan in post-1940s Anglo-US popular music culture is a site where notions of Scottishness and national identity meet discourses of commerce, creativity and authenticity. This lecture explores issues of tartan and meaning in rock and pop in an international context. The contrasting meanings constructed around the use of tartan by artists perceived as either Scottish or non-Scottish will also be discussed. The historical context and development of the multivalent, often contradictory significations of tartan are particularly visible in popular music. These will be addressed in a number of key examples from the 1950s through to the early 21st century.

The paper divides its discussion of tartan and popular music culture into two broad eras:
(i) Rock and roll to Glam: tradition and showing out, 1954-1975;
(ii) Punk and its legacy: irony, subversion and new authenticities, 1976-2010.

J. Mark Percival is Programme Leader for Media at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh and lives in Glasgow, Scotland. His 2007 doctoral thesis at the University of Stirling, Making Music Radio, focused on the social dynamics of the relationship between record industry pluggers and music radio programmers in the UK. He has written about Scottish indie music production in Popular Music History (2009) and in Studies in Music from the University of Western Ontario (2011), and has contributed book chapters on popular music and identity, to Brown (Ed.) (2010), From Tartan to Tartanry: Scottish Culture, History and Myth, and to Bennett and Stratton (Eds.) (2010), Britpop and the English Music Tradition. He has also written about mediation of popular music in Dauncey and Le Guern (Eds.) (2011), Stereo: Comparative Perspectives on the Sociological Study of Popular Music in France and Britain, and on music radio's imagined audience in Mollgaard (Ed.), Radio and Society (Cambridge Scholars, 2012).

Mark has presented papers on local music production and on music radio at numerous international conferences. Since 2008 he has been chair of the UK and Ireland branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM UK/I). Mark is a member of the Radio Studies Network. Alongside his academic career he has been a Mercury Music Prize judging committee member (1999 and 2000) and a DJ for BBC Radio Scotland (1988-2000), playing alternative, indie and electronica.
  • Thomas Friedman - public lecture at AUT UniversityThomas Friedman Lecture - Is America In Decline?
    26 March 2012 @ AUT Conference Centre, AUT City Campus, 55 Wellesley Street East

World-renowned American journalist, columnist and author Thomas Friedman will give a free public lecture at AUT University on Monday 26 March. Mr Friedman writes a twice-weekly column for The New York Times and has written extensively on foreign affairs, global trade, the Middle East and environmental issues. He has won the Pulitzer Prize three times, and is the author of six best-selling books. He is visiting New Zealand as a John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow, awarded by Fulbright New Zealand.

Thomas Friedman on Wikipedia
More information on the lecture at AUT

  • Premiere of the documentary Mental Notes at World Cinema Showcase
    March 31, Rialto Newmarket
The secret, often shameful history of New Zealand’s psychiatric hospitals is laid bare in Mental Notes, a new feature-length documentary by award-winning filmmaker Jim Marbrook. Screening as part of the upcoming World Cinema Showcase, Mental Notes is a “gently affirmative” film, according to Bill Gosden, the festival’s director.

Featuring the testimony of five survivors of the “very bad old days of mental health care in New Zealand”, it “honours their endurance and enables their stories to emerge from the shadows and leave their indelible blemishes on our social history,” says Gosden.

Jim Marbrook’s interest in the subject was prompted by earlier work he’d done with people who’d experienced mental health difficulties, much of which he drew on for his award-winning 2005 documentary Dark Horse.

“I realised there was a kind of hidden social history in the memories of those who went through our old mental institutions, colloquially called ‘the Bins’,” says Marbrook. “These stories were so strong I realised I needed to find a way of telling them.”

With a grant from the Frozen Funds Trust, Marbrook undertook a three-year odyssey during which he crisscrossed the country, visiting every ‘Bin’ ever built, ploughing through mountains of archival material, and interviewing survivors of what was an often inhumane system. The interviews, in which former patients recall their experiences with (in Gosden’s words) “dismay, disbelief and a touch of gallows humour”, form the heart of the film.

One of these survivors is Anne Helm, who observes that “for many, the path to healing is about accepting that things have happened”.

In 2005 Helm served as a panel member of a Government-appointed confidential forum for former patients that heard corroborated evidence of poor practice and abuse in the old psychiatric hospitals.

“The saddest thing about doing the Confidential Forum for me,” says Helm, “was that at the end of that process, where people gave so much of their souls, really, we made a very thorough report.

“That report was given to the Government in a real hope that there would be some formal recognition and there never has been.”

Mental Notes enables the voices of people too long ignored to finally be heard.

View trailer
More about Mental Notes
Last updated: 16 May 2013 3:30pm

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