Doctoral Thesis

Ashlea Gillon (Ngāti Awa, Ngāpuhi), The University of Auckland 

Luke Fitzmaurice (Te Aupōuri), Otago University

My research examines Māori perspectives on child protection, children's rights, and children's voices, including the perceived tension between the voices of children and the voices of whānau in the child protection context. The research addresses how appropriate the recent emphasis on children's voices within the child protection system might be from an Indigenous perspective, given the potential tension between the Western individualised view of children and the importance of whānau within a Māori worldview.

The question guiding my research is: "How should decisions about the safety and wellbeing of tamariki Māori be made, and what role should whānau and tamariki themselves play in that process?" My research seeks to answer this question from the perspectives of tamariki, whānau members, and kaimahi. This will help to illustrate Māori perspectives on children's rights, children's voices, and child protection, contrasting these perspectives with non-Māori perspectives that dominate the design and operation of the current child protection system.

Christine Elers (Ngāti Kauwhata), Massey University

The broad aim of this research is to utilise the culture-centered approach (CCA) to foreground the voices of Whānau Māori, whose lived experiences reflect socio-economic disadvantage and voice erasure from mainstream and Māori discursive spaces. The CCA is an approach to social change communication that emphasises the nuances of listening to communities (Dutta, 2014); centering their knowledge claims, strategies and solutions that are often tied to structural injustices. The CCA method intentionally centers Whānau Māori as the experts of their own realities.

By building infrastructures for listening and co-creating platforms for voice, community participatory communicative spaces emerge often disrupting the hegemony of knowledge production and decision-making by dominant actors for the very Whānau and communities who have been erased from these sites of participation.

Chelsea Cunningham (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Kai Tahu), Univeristy of Otago

The whakapapa that defines my geographical and cultural centre is captured concisely in our pepeha; it represents how we position ourselves within this world, for myself, a descendant of Ngāti Kahungunu.

The aim of this research is to reconnect to our pepeha by engaging with ancestral landscapes within Ngāti Kahungunu, retracing the footsteps of our tīpuna as told through pūrākau that have been passed down from generation to generation. Further to this, we will capture our engagement through the use of GoPro and drone technology to create short films for our whānau who are unable to physically engage with us, as a means to reconnect them through our experiences.

Alison Anitawaru, Cole (Ngāti ;Ruanui, Ngāruahine, Taranaki Whānui), Victoria University of Wellington

This research is examines Māori approaches to climate in order to propose an Indigenous foundation for sovereignty over our means of survival. The structure of our neo-colonial world systems is deeply enmeshed in the causes of the climate crisis, and it is of no historically derived coincidence that the communities experiencing the first waves of climate change are Indigenous, i.e. the social grouping most excluded from the colonial spaces creating the current climate change responses. I am developing a new approach based on the lived experience of our iwi as we build solutions to safeguard our future.

Tania Cliffe-Tautari (Tania Cliffe-Tautari), The University of Auckland

The purpose of this scoping exercise is to explore the research potential of a key issue emerging from my PhD thesis which was titled ‘Cultural identity as a resilience factor to reduce Māori youth offending’. One research area highlighted in my PhD is that there is a need to explore how Māori learners at risk of educational disengagement transition from Māori-medium and bilingual education settings to mainstream classrooms.

Research findings from my PhD indicated that rangatahi Māori felt that there was a lack of support provided due to being a second language learner of English. They felt that this impacted on their under achievement in the classroom. Consequently influencing their disengagement in education. Therefore, this scoping exercise will primarily be targeted towards Māori young people and children who have been in the care system and are at risk of future offending.