The Think & Drink

Dr Sara Buttsworth was born and grew up in Perth, Western Australia, and moved to New Zealand in 2003 after marrying her Kiwi husband and completing her PhD. She is a Senior Lecturer in History at Waipapa Taumata Rau | University of Auckland, where she has been teaching since 2004. While her training and much of her teaching are located in history, her research interests and approaches have always been a little un-disciplined. She has designed an entire course around unravelling yarns and how we knit monsters. Stitched to this is her research, which has focussed primarily on issues of gender and representation, expanding the ways in which we think about war, and the importance of understanding storytelling.

ABSTRACT: Mirror Mirror on the World: Wondering about Fairy Tales and War Stories - What does a story about two children lost in the woods, a house made of gingerbread, and a witch with a large oven have to do with war? What can a dystopian vision of teenagers fighting one another to the death possibly have to do with a most beloved fairy tale? How might the intertwining of these two stories provide commentary on war and society? The overlap between fairy tales and war stories is undeniable. Stories that valorise certain people as heroes and cast others as ogres are definitely in fairy tale territory. Fairy tales directly reference the consumption of children, the decimation of environments, soldiers cast adrift, and the selfishness of ‘kings’ who are motivated by greed and power. From Hansel and Gretel to The Hunger Games, the parallels here to situations, particularly wars, past and present are unavoidable.

Professor Alexandra Andhov is the chair in Law and Technology at the University of Auckland and director of the Centre for Advancing Law and Technology Responsibly (ALTeR). Alexandra specialises in the regulation of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and blockchain and has published extensively on these topics, including her work Computational Law, which explores how technology is reshaping legal thinking itself. She is a Fulbright scholar and a regular Forbes contributor who works closely with tech start-ups and regulatory bodies on understanding how law must evolve to keep pace with rapidly advancing technology.

ABSTRACT: Code red for democracy: when big tech becomes bigger than government - What if a handful of corporations could decide what you see, believe and even think? This isn’t science fiction or a distant dystopia – it’s the world we’re living in. Tech giants like Google, Meta and Amazon now control the AI systems that shape our daily lives: what news we read, what we buy, who we date and what we consider “true”. As these companies race to deploy ever more powerful AI – without oversight – they’re not just building better search engines or chatbots; they’re creating a monopoly over human perception itself. Join Professor Alexandra Andhov for an urgent wake-up talk about how Big Tech’s unchecked AI development threatens the foundations of society. This goes far beyond privacy or competition – it’s about who controls the lens through which we see the world.