A new Director has been appointed to lead Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga (NPM), New Zealand’s Indigenous Centre of Research Excellence. Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga and the University of Auckland are thrilled and excited by the prospects of the appointment of Associate Professor Tracey McIntosh as Director of NPM. Associate Professor McIntosh is not new to NPM or the Directorship, previously being a Joint Director, but now she takes on the directorship as a sole lead Director. With the welcomed recent announcement of specific funding available for a Māori Centre of Research Excellence (CoRE) this role is crucial and Associate Professor McIntosh is well placed to offer leadership in this area.
Associate Professor Tracey McIntosh is of Tūhoe decent. She teaches into the sociology and criminology programme at the University of Auckland. Tracey has been involved in Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga as a foundation member of the Research Committee and then took up the Joint Director role in 2007 - 2009 alongside Professor Michael Walker. In 2010 she took up the role of Head of Department of Sociology.
Associate Professor McIntosh brings a wide level of experience to her role at NPM in international work, community development, student equity and in her wider contributions to the academic community. Prior to returning to the University of Auckland in 1999 Tracey lectured at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji and previous to that lived in France, Burundi and Tonga. In 2002 she was awarded a University of Auckland Distinguished Teaching Award and in 2004 was a Fulbright Visiting Lecturer in New Zealand Studies at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. and since then she has served on Fulbright selection panels and as a Fulbright student advisor. She was also the Associate Dean (Equity) in the Faculty of Arts in 2003-2007 and was Deputy Pro Vice-Chancellor (Equal Opportunities) for the University of Auckland from 2005- 2008. She has wide experience of being on external research assessment panels including the Marsden Fund Social Science Panel, the Rutherford Discovery Humanities and Social Science Panel and on the FoRST Te Tipu o te Wānanga Māori Research Investment Panel.
In 2012 she was the co-chair of the Children’s Commissioner’s Expert Advisory Group on Solutions to Child Poverty and she sits on a number of governance boards particularly in the area of social harm reduction including the Robson Hanan Trust: Rethinking Crime and Punishment and Te Waka Moemoea: Being the Change Trust. Tracey also offers education support and teaches a creative writing course in Auckland Women’s Prison. Tracey is the current joint editor of AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples alongside Professor Michael Walker. Tracey’s recent research focuses on incarceration (particularly of indigenous peoples), inequality, poverty and justice, where she has published extensively and is frequently called upon to present her work internationally and nationally.
Having taken on the Acting Director role in April, Associate Professor McIntosh formally commences the role as Director 1st of July for a period of 18 months, to 31st of December 2015 when the current CoRE funding and contract for NPM ends.
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