Masters Thesis Abstract: Victoria Guyatt
Reconciling Multiple Identities – Maori Women Scientists in Aotearoa/New Zealand
This thesis explores the contradictory and conflicting multiple identities and subjectivities that Maori women scientists adopt and (re)negotiate. In particular I discuss how these multiple identities are played out within the workplace, and also how the workplaces themselves (re)constitute these multiple identities.
Based on information drawn from interviews with 11 Maori women scientists from around Aotearoa, and analysed using discursive analytical techniques, I argue that in exploring these identities and subjectivities, we need to understand the adoption of particular racialised, gendered and colonial discourses that these women use when discussing their experiences. In exploring these identities I have endeavoured to incorporate an Indigenous agenda into the enquiry.
In exploring and utilising both Indigenous theory (mana wahine) and Indigenous methodology (Kaupapa Maori research) I hope to provide another lens through which to view and understand Indigenous peoples experiences and identities, and to create theoretical space within geography for theories that counter hegemonic colonial masculinist ideology. In combining Indigenous theory and method, and existing post-structural theory, I argue that a multiplicity of theories and methods can be used to provide nuanced and integrative modes of analysis, which to date have been somewhat neglected in geographical literature in Aotearoa.