We dismiss the ‘fluffy’ stuff at our peril

The government’s decision this week to stop funding research in the humanities and social sciences, through the Marsden Fund, will cost us more than we gain, argues Dr Pounamu Jade Aikman.

 

“That’s all a bit fluffy, isn’t it?” said a National MP I sat next to on a domestic flight a few years ago. This was after I’d explained some of my work as a kaupapa Māori researcher.

But that so-called fluffy stuff is precisely what enabled me to show how whanaungatanga builds trust and confidence in contemporary Aotearoa policing.

During my two-year research project, “Understanding Policing Delivery”, I spent time working with the police, and saw, over and over, how building relationships with communities pays off, particularly in reducing the need for intensive tactical operations. I was able to identify this because of whanaungatanga — the “fluffy” stuff, as the National MP would’ve said — carefully building relationships with police officers and emphasising that I was there to listen and understand, not to judge.

When done right, the fluffy stuff has concrete outcomes.

But all this was made possible through the humanities-based foundations of my research skills and training, nurtured in social sciences from my undergraduate study to my PhD.

So I was dismayed to see the government announcing that the Marsden Fund —  Aotearoa’s premier fund for investing in innovative “blue skies” research — will no longer support the humanities and social sciences.

In making the announcement, Judith Collins, the science, innovation and technology minister, said Marsden funding would now focus on areas such as physics, chemistry, maths, engineering and biomedical sciences that made more of an impact on the economy.

“The government has been clear in its mandate to rebuild our economy,” she said. We are focused on a system that supports growth, and a science sector that drives high-tech, high-productivity, high-value businesses and jobs.”

Yes, we live in challenging economic times, but this framing ignores an unavoidable truth: our challenges are social and human. The humanities puts the “human” into knowledge, helping us understand how we think, act, and connect with others — essential ingredients in developing solutions to the problems of our day.

Take vaccine hesitancy. While the development of Covid vaccines was a triumph for science, its rollout uncovered myriad concerns among Māori communities. Mistrust and misinformation proved frightening for an already at-risk population, and this is where the human element became even more important. Addressing these barriers meant incorporating insights — and tools and methods — from anthropology, linguistics, history, and public health. Campaigns to encourage Māori uptake of the vaccine, like Be a doer! KARAWHIUA, relied on speaking across these multiple fields of knowledge.

But this shift speaks to a much deeper, more fundamental divide. Science and the humanities aren’t rivals, but partners committed to interpreting the cosmos.

Harnessing the mauri of each in figuring out the “so what?”, we come together to ask the big pātai: What do we do from here? How do we respond to climate change? Economic uncertainty? Criminal justice reform?

As Professor Nicola Gaston, of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology writes: “We can do all the work in developing clean technologies we want, but if we don’t understand the barriers to people purchasing that tech? It becomes useless.”

Science can show us the “how”, but the humanities give us the “what” and “why’. Funding one without the other is like sailing without a compass: you can move forward, but without direction or purpose. We lose more than we gain.

I and my colleague Dr Lisa Tompson, a crime scientist from Waikato University, were recently awarded a Marsden grant. Our research, called Tiaki Tāne, fuses kaupapa Māori and crime science methodologies to explore the causes of youth offending among rangatahi tāne Māori.

Lisa and I were driven by the greater possibilities of working together, drawing on our respective tūrangawaewae or disciplines. As the whakakataukī “Ehara taku toa” tells us, strength is realised through collective contribution.

Leveraging insights from both domains — science and the humanities — helps culturally ground a pressing issue for us today, but it’s dependent on our partnership across different horizons of knowledge.

Our ultimate goal is to inform what effective interventions for rangatahi tāne Māori might look like, with kōrero across the pae of kaupapa Māori and crime science showing us the what, how, and why.

The government’s move will disproportionately affect Māori and Pasifika researchers who work on the threshold between these different horizons, and often in community settings. Gathering insights from communities is no easy task, and yet it is critical in understanding the effects of interventions, technologies, and policies at the flaxroots.

I recently led evaluations of Aotearoa Reorua: Bilingual Towns and Cities and Ka Ora, Ka Ako: Healthy School Lunches Programme. Both programmes seek to deliver tangible outcomes for communities. But understanding their impacts on the ground means knowing how to connect, engage, and listen to whānau and hapū, as well as to schools and local government.

This is the fluffy stuff in action, and it takes tremendous effort and expertise. The blueprint for this “how” was built by first learning the “what” and “why”, grounded in the tūāpapa or foundation of the humanities that formed the core of my training and study. Insights like these will now be jeopardised: you can have all the technology you want, but it won’t work if you can’t appreciate how people engage with it — or if they want to engage with it at all.

One of the most powerful benefits of my humanities-based training and research is critical thinking and the ability to communicate in simple terms.

This could involve, for example, explaining why a hapū’s knowledge of waterways and flooding can better help local government plan for climate change in the future. Or how the aunties at the pā are best suited to know how to connect with hard-to-reach whānau for health or education initiatives. While this process may seem straightforward, it’s far from simple. It demands not just technical expertise, but a deep understanding of people, place, and values.

A biochemistry colleague once told me about how he’d asked his students to reflect on the “so what” of their research. While they had all mastered the technical skills of their discipline, they struggled to articulate why their work mattered.

This gap between knowledge and meaning is exactly where the humanities shine. Bridging data and understanding, ideas and action, is what we in the humanities are trained to do — and it’s what helps turn good ideas into effective outcomes with real impact.

We dismiss the “fluffy” stuff at our peril. It is the fusion of different ways of knowing that makes the most tangible, powerful differences for our communities and economic prosperity.

 

Dr Pounamu Jade Aikman, hailing from Waikato, Mātaatua, Tauranga Moana, and Te Arawa, is an independent scholar working in the criminal justice, education, and health sectors. He is a Fulbright Scholar and holds degrees in Māori studies and anthropology from the University of Otago and a PhD from the Australian National University. Dr Aikman is a 2025 Marsden Fund recipient and Te Herenga Waka Victoria University’s 2025 Emerging Māori Writer in Residence. He is also the director of Mana Pounamu Consulting, a kaupapa Māori and Pacific-based research consultancy.

E-Tangata, 2024