Rate My Professor Gareth Schott

Professor Gareth Schott is Professor in Media and Creative Technologies at the University of Waikato, where he serves as Head of Te Kura Toi, School of Arts, within the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences. Holding a BSc (Hons) in Behavioural Sciences and a PhD in Psychology of Education from Cardiff University (1995-1998), along with a Diploma in Social Science Research Methods from the same institution, Schott specializes in media psychology. His academic career at Waikato includes progression from lecturer to professor, with appointment to full professorship in 2022. As a media and creative technologies scholar and creative practitioner, Schott also holds the role of NZUWI Liaison and has contributed to external panels, such as the Creative Communities Scheme funding panel for Waipā District Council.

Schott's research focuses on death studies, encompassing thana-technology, post-mortem identities, media representations of death, and death rights; digital games and player experience; and minority languages in popular music, particularly Māori punk and bicultural collisions in glocalized genres. Key publications include the edited volume The Language of Music: Minority Languages in Popular Music (Routledge, 2025), the book Death as Entertainment: Young People and Death Awareness (2023), and articles such as 'Digital Afterlives: A verbatim theatre expression of research accounts of emergent digital griefscapes' (Applied Theatre Research, 2025), 'Western expansionism via subject-dispersing technologies' (English Language Notes, 2024), and earlier works on games like 'That Dragon, Cancer' (2017). His scholarship has over 2,100 citations on Google Scholar. In teaching, Schott delivers courses including MEDIA100: Understanding Visual Culture, MEDIA202: Film Production 2, ARTSW301: Professional Practice in the Arts, and postgraduate research supervision, earning the University Teaching Excellence Award and Divisional Teaching Excellence Award in 2021. He is author of Violent Games: Rules, Realism and Effect and engages in creative outputs like digital art.