Ki te Taumata: a Personal Journey into the Multiple Identities of Academically High Achieving Māori Girls

<p>This thesis investigates the multiple identities of four academically high achieving, Māori girls negotiated in one English Medium mainstream schooling environment. The study sought to determine how these young women have grown to define and develop diverse understandings of what it means to “be Māori” and “high achieving” within this context. The metaphor of plotting a path from the foothills to the peak of a mountain is used to describe the journey that the participants of this study, and I as a researcher, undertook during this process. Participating in this journey were 13 travellers; four academically high achieving Māori girls, four caregivers and four of the girls’ friends. I also identify myself as a Māori female researcher as a traveller since I tell a story that has attempted to be transparent and personal. This case study was guided by Kaupapa Māori research protocols (Smith, 1999; Bishop & Glynn, 2003) and Personal Experience methodology (Clandinin & Connelly, 1994). Such protocols were useful in enabling me to tell this research story. However, this was not the research journey I expected to take when I first set off. Through this inquiry process I learned about the influence of society and colonisation on the construction of identity. I learned how pressures and stereotypes, aligned with socialisation processes, lie beneath our consciousness and inform our individual and collective identities. The conversations with fellow participants of the study highlight the limitations in our understanding of what it means to be Māori and achieve educational success “as Māori” amongst contemporary youth today. The findings of this study suggest that multiple complex Māori identities exist amongst contemporary Māori youth. Further research and discussion about what it means to “be Māori” needs to occur to ensure that we cater for the needs of all Māori learners. Recommendations include establishing a professional development programme for teachers to address the way knowledge is constructed and perpetuated in a contemporary, postcolonial society. A focus on motivation, gender, indigeneity and special/gifted abilities was not investigated in this thesis.</p>

Ki te Taumata: a Personal Journey into the Multiple Identities of Academically High Achieving Māori Girls

<p>This thesis investigates the multiple identities of four academically high achieving, Māori girls negotiated in one English Medium mainstream schooling environment. The study sought to determine how these young women have grown to define and develop diverse understandings of what it means to “be Māori” and “high achieving” within this context. The metaphor of plotting a path from the foothills to the peak of a mountain is used to describe the journey that the participants of this study, and I as a researcher, undertook during this process. Participating in this journey were 13 travellers; four academically high achieving Māori girls, four caregivers and four of the girls’ friends. I also identify myself as a Māori female researcher as a traveller since I tell a story that has attempted to be transparent and personal. This case study was guided by Kaupapa Māori research protocols (Smith, 1999; Bishop & Glynn, 2003) and Personal Experience methodology (Clandinin & Connelly, 1994). Such protocols were useful in enabling me to tell this research story. However, this was not the research journey I expected to take when I first set off. Through this inquiry process I learned about the influence of society and colonisation on the construction of identity. I learned how pressures and stereotypes, aligned with socialisation processes, lie beneath our consciousness and inform our individual and collective identities. The conversations with fellow participants of the study highlight the limitations in our understanding of what it means to be Māori and achieve educational success “as Māori” amongst contemporary youth today. The findings of this study suggest that multiple complex Māori identities exist amongst contemporary Māori youth. Further research and discussion about what it means to “be Māori” needs to occur to ensure that we cater for the needs of all Māori learners. Recommendations include establishing a professional development programme for teachers to address the way knowledge is constructed and perpetuated in a contemporary, postcolonial society. A focus on motivation, gender, indigeneity and special/gifted abilities was not investigated in this thesis.</p>

Becoming a sexademic: Reflections on a ‘dirty’ research project

Sex and sexuality research can be understood as a form of ‘dirty work’, as despite its public need, it continues to be marginalised and demeaned within the academy and beyond. Through association, sex and sexuality researchers come to be labelled ‘dirty workers’ and are vulnerable to experiencing a range of stigmatised responses and negative repercussions. This article contributes to knowledge about the challenges involved in doing dirty work, through reflexively examining my experiences as a doctoral researcher investigating pornography’s gendered influence. It explores the various institutional, professional and personal hurdles that I encountered during my dirty work journey and illustrates how these experiences may have been affected by my identity as a young, female researcher.

Intersectionality and Reflexivity: Narratives From a BME Female Researcher Inside the Hidden Social World of Prison Visits

This article examines the importance of intersectionality; and how this has been influential to analyzing my (the author’s) research journey as a Black Minority Ethnic (African and Asian descent) female researcher, using ethnographic approaches to collate data in three Scottish prisons. Intersectionality is a powerful tool to capture; and to interrogate the realities of fieldwork. It enables researchers to reflect on their social position, in response to the relational dynamics which occur in the field ( Bochner, 1997 ; Ellis & Bochner, 2006 ). Inspired by intersectional scholars, this paper will capture the nuances and complexities of the day to day realities in the field by exploring the importance of social identity. Furthermore, this paper will extend the discussion on social identity by analyzing the lived experiences and emotions occupied in certain spaces in the penal system; and how this has steered the narrative to collating data on the lived experiences of families of prisoners. This paper will capture the pleasantries, celebrations and complexities in conducting research in the waiting rooms of prisons by narrating on three themes: Power; Emotions in the field; and the Outsider within.

Railway Engineering

This chapter is a case study of the dissemination of railway engineering research in Latin America developed by a railway engineering research group. The leader of the group is a female researcher. The authors aim to inspire to other women researchers in Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries who are trying to develop research in IT areas, many times facing serious difficulties, incomprehension, and great challenges. This chapter is divided in set sections like introduction, background, development of railway engineering research. This third section is divided into subsections like timetable planning and trains control, characterization of Panama metro line 1, dwelling times, fuzzy logic, artificial intelligence, social-economics railway externalities, and environmental railway externalities. The fourth section presents the results of the relationship between research activity and teaching of railway engineering obtained in this case study. Finally, the authors present a brief vision about future and emerging regional trends about railway engineering projects.

“Are you crewed up with that bird from the uni?” the complexities of conducting ethnographic research in policing

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to provide some initial reflections on the complexities and challenges faced when conducting observations with police officers working in response and neighbourhood policing roles from the perspective of a young, female, researcher.Design/methodology/approachThe research consisted of 200 hours spent with operational police officers in a medium sized UK police force, predominantly in 3 cities, to explore the realities of frontline policing and policy implementation. This paper offers a reflexive account of conducting the research, as opposed to a discussion of the findings which align to the original research aim.FindingsConducting this fieldwork highlighted a number of complexities arising as a result of conducting ethnographic research in policing. This paper is concerned with the constructing of a researcher identity and navigating moral dilemmas based on the culture and use of language observed.Originality/valueWhilst this will be of interest to those engaged with similar policing research, such findings are also likely to apply to those conducting ethnography where there is conflict between their insider/outsider status, the potential for internalised moral debates and women conducting research in male-dominated settings.

Constructional collection theory: A critical theoretical perspective for the duality of construction and action: نظرية التشكيل البنائي: ثنائية البناء والفعل – رؤية نظرية نقدية –

This paper sought to identify why Antony Gednaz formulated the theory of constructional collection and the relationship with major theories (structural-functional, Marxism) and minor theories (symbolic interactive) through contrasting and comparing them as well as the comparison between the concept of social symmetry in the verb theory by Parsons and the constructional collection by Gednaz. The paper tried to identify the most important concepts and principles of the constructional collection theory, through a review of the literature in the books of social theories. The paper also included the critical vision of the (female) researcher about the constructional collection theory. The paper concluded that (Antony Gednaz) formulated the constructional collection theory to fill the outstanding gap between structure and action in both major and minor theories and that Gednaz opposes the idea of studying societies based on construction in major theories, and the idea of relying on the action as a unit of study societies in minor theories. He believes that the principal area to study societies is the social practices regulated through time and place. For a social system, Parsons views the system as a group of individual actors, ignoring spatial and temporal conditions that may affect the actions of individuals, while Gednaz sees the system as the sum of acts that are reproduced among the actors in a given place and time. The concept of the constructional collection is the main concept in the collection theory, which means that the collection of actors and buildings are not independent phenomena (i.e. dual), but they represent duplication. In the critical review of the (female) researcher is taken on the central idea of the constructional collection theory that it is not possible to generalize the possibility of reproducing construction. The generalization may be become possible in case replacing the idea of "reproducing construction" by the idea of "modifying construction or parts of construction" or determining what kind of buildings can be reproduced or not. The (female) researcher fully agrees with the idea that the verb produces the structure and after it forms the structure, the structure becomes an intermediary.

A weave of symbolic violence: dominance and complicity in sociolinguistic research on multilingualism

This paper discusses symbolic violence in sociolinguistic research on multilingualism. It revisits an archived recording of a group discussion between four boys about their chances of having sex with a female researcher. The data is rife with symbolic violence. Most obviously, the conversation enacted a heterosexist form of symbolic violence. This was, however, not the only direction in which violence was exerted. As argued by (Bourdieu & Wacquant. 1992. An invitation to reflexive sociology. Cambridge: Polity), symbolic violence involves two fundamental elements – domination and complicity. In the case at hand, the boys’ sexist banter conformed to dominant expectations about their linguistic behavior, imbued in the research event. This is symbolic complicity of the kind that the Bourdieusian notion foresees. Yet another subordination to the dominant vision occurred when the researchers captured the conversation on tape, but decided to exempt it from publication. Here, we argue that giving deepened attention to sociolinguists’ own run-ins with symbolic violence during research is valuable, because it provides an opportunity to reflexively consider the social conditions of the research practices, in relation to the data produced and analyzed. Ultimately, this reflexive exercise may help sociolinguists sharpen their tools for understanding the give and take of dominance and complicity unfolding in their data.