Aroha mai! A belated roundup of Te Tumu research news.
Professor Poia Rewi
In July we were treated to Poia Rewi’s Inaugural Professorial Lecture, held to celebrate his ascension to this tūranga rangatira within the university. The title of his talk was “Hoka : Motivators of Time”, a tour alongside Poia as he recounted his own academic journey, and his ZePA model of developing positivity around the use of te reo Māori. This was well attended by Poia’s whānau, staff and students, as well as many from the community, and was capped off with haka, waiata and karakia. The lecture can now be viewed on ITunes U.
Sandra Spence
Dr Gianna Leoni
In July Te Tumu were privileged to host Professor Michael Harkin as a William Evans Fellow. Professor Harkin, a cultural anthropologist and inaugural editor of Ethnohistory, gave several talks: a public lecture “The Trump at the End of the World: Monsters and Marvels in our Parlous Age”, in which he brought his knowledge of societies past and present together, and a departmental seminar, “‘The Emotional Archive’: The case of Residential Schools in Canada”, in which he examined ‘the relative lack of negative narratives [he] elicited…during fieldwork in British Columbia in the 1980s–2000s’, while also exploring ‘various forms of social memory, proposing the notion of an “emotional archive” that contains non-narrative memory traces’.
It is always great when our students gain their postgraduate degrees, after months or years of working on, and writing up their research. We had three such students graduating this August: Sandra Spence (Pākehā) and Raaniera Te Whata (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Porou, Te Whānau a Apanui, Airihi) with the Master of Indigenous Studies, and Gianna Leoni (Ngāti Kurī, Ngāti Takoto, Itariana) with a PhD.
Dr Lyn Carter supervised Sandra, whose research was on “Kāi Tahu Chinese Unions and Identity in Otago and Southland/Murihiku”; Associate Professor Merata Kāwharu supervised Rāniera (“Tautoro, tū te ao, tū te pō (The endurance of Tautoro heritage): Investigating challenges and opportunities”); Professor Poia Rewi and Associate Professor Lachy Paterson supervised Gianna (“Mā te Taki te Kāhui Ka Tau: Te Waiaro ki te Reo Māori i ngā Hinonga Kāwanatanga”) who wrote her thesis in te reo Māori. Gianna is teaching MAOR312: Te Māhuri 2 this semster.
The abstract of Gianna’s PhD. Click to enlarge.
