Te Herenga Waka Vice-Chancellor Professor Grant Guilford says, “With a passion for finding solutions to real-world problems, our staff pursue ambitious research that is designed to challenge the status quo and push the boundaries of new knowledge.
“It is a matter of immense pride that so many of our staff are being recognised as part of the Research Honours this year. These honours are Aotearoa New Zealand’s highest recognition for exemplary work in areas that can deliver transformative outcomes for the world we live in.”
The Pou Aronui Award, which recognises distinguished service to the humanities over a sustained period, has been presented to Professor Harry Ricketts, a writer, teacher, editor, and promoter of local intellectual culture who is acknowledged as one of Aotearoa’s most significant literary figures.
Dr Emily Beausoleil has been presented the 2021 Royal Society Te Apārangi Early Career Research Excellence Award for Social Science for her research that seeks to enhance equality of voice in diverse communities by studying the conditions that underlie chronic inattention and inaction by advantaged groups, and the insights these have for designing more effective forms of civic engagement.
The Imagining Decolonised Cities team, which was presented the Te Rangaunua Hiranga Māori Award, is a collaboration of staff from various organisations, including Dr Rebecca Kiddle (previously with the Wellington School of Architecture), Dr Ocean Mercier, Dr Mike Ross and Dr Amanda Thomas. The award recognises excellent, innovative co-created research conducted by Māori that has made a distinctive contribution to community wellbeing and development in Aotearoa, and the team has been recognised for its innovative work combining decolonial scholarship with urbanism practice.
Recently, researchers from Te Herenga Waka also received 22 Marsden grants, totalling over $14 million, and four Rutherford Discovery Fellowships, further consolidating its position as New Zealand’s number one University for intensity of high-quality research.
For details about the work of individual researchers, please find brief synopses below:
Professor Harry Ricketts
A distinguished writer, Harry has written/edited around 30 books on topics ranging from the poets of World War 1 to New Zealand literature to spiritual verse to cricket and has profoundly contributed to many facets of New Zealand literature. His biography of Kipling, The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling, positioned him as one of the world’s leading Kipling scholars and was internationally acclaimed. Having joined the University’s English Programme in 1981, Harry established himself as an engaging and popular lecturer and has successfully supervised around 40 PhD and MA students in English Literature and Creative Writing. From 1998 to 2019, Harry was co-editor of the quarterly New Zealand Review of Books Pukapuka Aotearoa, the only local periodical solely dedicated to long-form reviews of major New Zealand publications. From 1998-2007, he was The Listener’s theatre critic. Harry’s own literary reviews have appeared in The London Review of Books, The Financial Times, Landfall, The Listener and Metro, to name a few places. His Selected Poems was published by Victoria University Press in 2021. He retired from the English Programme the same year as an Emeritus Professor.
Dr Emily Beausoleil
Emily works to clarify both why it is hard for advantaged groups to hear when disadvantaged groups speak and how listening itself can prove a potent strategy to foster receptivity and unlock entrenched views. Her work reaches past the usual disciplinary boundaries of political theory—learning from neuroscience, artistic performance, tikanga marae, conflict meditation, therapy—to invigorate and expand our terms for addressing key political questions of voice and structural justice. Her work comes from both scholarly research and experience from her time as a social actor working in and with communities. By outlining the bare issues of structural injustice, Emily identifies key obstacles for listening among advantaged groups and has generated effective anti-racism strategies. She has applied these theories to help develop society’s understanding of the challenges and power of structural injustice through the unique listening-based anti-racism ‘Tauiwi Tautoko’ programme co-created with ActionStation in 2018.
Imagining Decolonised Cities (IDC)
A close collaboration between staff at the University, and members of Ngāti Toa Rangatira and Ngāti Kahungungu, Ngāti Porou, Rongomaiwahine, the IDC team began by exploring what decolonisation might mean for Aotearoa’s towns and cities. This research, recognised nationally and internationally, has shifted thinking in communities, making current understandings of often misunderstood ideas around decolonisation more accessible. The work of the team has promoted the fact that urban spaces have always been indigenous spaces and has explored how to better exemplify this fact. The interdisciplinary collaboration between iwi and university researchers alongside rangatahi has ensured that the work is relevant and accessible to whānau, hapū and Māori communities.
The team has co-designed a board game as an educational tool for use by secondary school and university educators to create a fun and accessible way to learn about colonisation and decolonisation, besides co-authoring an easy-to-read short text, Imagining Decolonisation. The second bestselling book in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington in 2020 (Unity Bestseller list), this text has appeared on lists of anti-racism readings and is used by academics in their teaching across the country and overseas, relating to various disciplines and has led to clear and thoughtful discussions of what decolonisation could look like.