Project supervisors: Dr Tania Cliffe-Tautari & Dr Luke Fitzmaurice

Institution: Waipapa Taumata Rau

Raumati interns: Courtney Smith (Ngāti Kahungunu ki Te Wairoa) & Danielle Matthews (Ngāpuhi)

This research programme will examine how we might envision an approach to placemaking that would result in outcomes that facilitate the expression of mātauranga Māori, tikanga, whānaungatanga and orangatanga in urban areas. The programme will do this by examining concrete innovations through a series of case studies. These examples will demonstrate the optimism that transformative urban activity brings in terms of the potential to redress the struggles of the past (Awatere et al. 2008; Harmsworth 2004).

While the terms racism and equity are increasingly commonly used, action that meaningfully addresses racism and eliminates inequities is less common. This programme seeks to uncover how commitments to equity and ending racism are undermined, ‘non-performative’ or symbolic only, and how they may need to be reconfigured in the context of Aotearoa to align with rangatiratanga. Understandings of racism and (in)equity are strongly shaped by contextual factors and dominant, frequently changing discourses. These in turn influence assumptions and logics underpinning research questions, methods, datasets, analytical frameworks, indicators and interventions.

This project forms the first phase of a broader initiative to create guidelines to help direct Rainbow Organisations (RO) in ensuring their work is successful in supporting the long-term flourishing of rangatahi takatāpui. 

Indigenous people will be more severely affected by global climate change than other populations. Despite  increasing awareness of these inequities, national and global responses to climate change often fail to address issues of specific concern to Indigenous peoples and tend to overlook the potential contribution of Indigenous knowledges. Indigenous peoples’ knowledges are based on holistic and interdependent understandings of the environment and have the potential to inform action towards climate transformation.

Toiora, Hauora is a Kaupapa Māori arts-based collaboration to theorise the pedagogy of Māori creative practices that support flourishing Māori whānau wellbeing. This innovative research centres Māori arts-based practice ‘as teacher’, bringing together three established Māori arts scholar-practitioners to expand the currently under-researched field of Māori pedagogies, and to highlight the critical role of Māori arts practice and pedagogy to grow well and flourishing Māori futures.

Teachers are increasingly tasked with acknowledging their racial biases and the resulting impacts on their students’ learning and wellbeing. However, anti-bias trainings are typically generalised learning experiences with little effect. Through focus groups with Māori students in Northland schools, this project will identify common incidents of racism.

Māori youth are over-represented in the negative indices for youth court apprehensions (8.3 times higher than non-Māori) (Ministry of Justice, 2020). Despite this, there is a dearth of research about the experiences of rangatahi Māori who offend, and their whānau (Suaalii-Sauni, Tauri & Webb, 2018).This project builds on recent PhD findings (Cliffe-Tautari, 2021) which indicated that Māori youth who offend, and their whānau, experience considerable trauma in their lives prior to, and during the times of rangatahi’ offending; including trauma resulting from state intervention into their lives.

PhD Candidate: Hannah Rapata (Kāi Tahu)

Primary Supervisors: Associate Professor Donna Cormack

This research is focused on “Te Kai Ora a Kāi Tahu” and will use kaupapa Māori qualitative methods to explore opportunities to strengthen connections between Kāi Tahu whenua, peoples, and waters.

The centrality of mahika kai to Kāi Tahu identity will be explored with regards to the future of Kāi Tahu whānau and hapori control over kai sources, kai systems and kai practices for kai ora.