This series invites seasoned philosophers to share critical reflections on emergent and institutionalized shapes of and encounters within philosophy. The series collects experience-based explorations of philosophy’s personal, institutional, and disciplinary evolution that will also help young academics and students navigate philosophy today.
Tēnā koutou katoa. Greetings to all.
My author name is Georgina Tuari Stewart. I am a member of the Indigenous Māori kin groups (iwi) belonging to the lands of the far north of Aotearoa New Zealand.
I am Professor of Māori Philosophy of Education at Auckland University of Technology in Auckland, New Zealand. I come from a background as a high school teacher of science, mathematics, and Te Reo Māori (the Māori language), and have been researching the relationship between science and Māori knowledge in the school curriculum and beyond for over 20 years. I am the author of Māori philosophy: Indigenous thinking from Aotearoa, the first book with “Māori philosophy” in the title, and which is an easy-to-read introduction to the ideas I have developed about the boundaries between these different systems of knowledge.
I grew up in New Zealand in the 1960s–1980s, early in the era of television, through which my homeland became even more influenced by American culture. In the New Zealand imaginary, the USA is and always has been ‘overseas,’ and this reflection is written from that point of view. Many people in New Zealand, including my maternal grandfather, desired to be in the USA, but I was always grateful not to be there as it was clear that acts of violence, terrorism, or war were far less likely to happen in my small green nation at the bottom of the world.
My specialist topic is the relationship between science and Māori knowledge. This relationship has been discussed sporadically over the years, and the debates have recently been re-animated by the infamous “Listener letter” in which seven senior university professors accused Mātauranga Māori (traditional Māori knowledge) of “subverting” science, despite readily admitting that they knew nothing about Mātauranga Māori, or even what it is. My aim is to educate others about the nature of knowledge systems, and thereby to bring more awareness to the ways in which science and Mātauranga differ and are alike. I aim to bring a different voice into what has become a rigid, antagonistic atmosphere of debate in this country, taking on definite political and racialized hues.
I became interested in science through a lifelong love of nature, and I have also been interested in Māori knowledge for as long as I can remember, since I have always known and embraced my identity as Māori. In favorite childhood books, I read stories of the cosmogenic narratives, which tell of Ranginui (sky father) and Papatūānuku (earth mother), the primal parents and their children, ngā atua (the deities) of the various parts of the taiao (natural world). These narratives structure Māori thought and te ao Māori (the Māori world). As an advanced child reader, I also read the books my grandfather sent us from his newly adopted home in the USA (later Canada), thereby coming into contact with world-leading thought: Silent Spring (Rachel Carson, 1962), The Naked Ape (Desmond Morris, 1967), Supernature (Lyall Watson, 1973), etc. I read as many books on ethology (animal behavior) as I could find through my local library. At the age of 10, with my mother I attended a pupil-parent astronomy course taught by the acclaimed Lionel Warner, at the Auckland Observatory, for homework drawing star maps and labeling them in Māori to prepare my lecturette for the class on Māori astronomy.
My interest in animals and conservation led to enrolling straight from school into a science degree, completing a Master of Science four years later, and going on to work as a Research Technician in the Cancer Research lab in Auckland, followed by a few years in sales and support of instrumentation.
By the end of 1988 I was ready to leave Auckland. I moved north to Matauri Bay, the small rural coastal village my dad came from in the far north, and re-kindled my knowledge of te reo Māori (the Māori language). In 1991 I returned to Auckland to complete a one-year high school teacher training course, and in 1993 I became the inaugural teacher of Pāngarau/Mathematics and Pūtaiao/Science at Te Wharekura o Hoani Waititi Marae, a revolutionary new immersion Māori high school in Auckland. These and other experiences spurred me on to enroll in 2001 in a part-time, distance-learning Doctor of Education degree, while still teaching full-time. I graduated in 2007 and, after a couple of short-term research positions, in 2010 was appointed to my first full-time academic role in the Faculty of Education, University of Auckland, based at the Tai Tokerau (Northland) campus in Whangarei. In mid-2016 I moved to my current job at AUT (Auckland University of Technology) where I am now Professor of Māori Philosophy of Education.
My academic self-identity is a writer, publishing 10+ research outputs per year for the last 10+ years, by combining a personal programme of research and scholarship with an ongoing list of co-authored and collective publications, including commentary and editorial pieces. The collective publishing has been experimental with a sense of fun, testing boundaries and gaming the system. Some of those collective articles have had phenomenal readership, boosting my h-index on Google Scholar as one of the co-authors.
When I started my doctoral studies in education, I was confronted by different meanings for key science ideas such as data, analysis, instrument, and theory. I came to realize that many scholars in education and related fields cling to “scientific” appearance (perhaps better described as “scientistic”) but lack mastery of the true depth and breadth of key concepts of science, hence lacking clarity on what is “scientific” about qualitative research. I found that what are referred to as “theories” in education are more like philosophy than science in its more limited sense. And this returns to the slippage in meaning of the word “science” in particular. In my view, what is most scientific about qualitative research is a logical thread of argument, constructed of reasonable assertions supported by credible sources, from information corralled about the question under examination. Reading Indigenous research methodologies, I find they never prescribe specific methods of data collection that must (or must not) be used. Indigenous research methodology is more concerned with the philosophy and ethics that underpin research practice and guide engagement with the field of inquiry.
I do not use the term “qualitative science” in my work because I am sensitive to the implications of placing modifying adjectival words before “science.” Nevertheless, the regeneration of science may have begun with social science. Using logical arguments supported by credible sources to investigate questions of interest to Māori communities does, however, qualify as “social science” that is based on scholarly diligence, reading, thinking and writing, using the archives of the literature and cultural knowledge holders in addition to the archives of the self. In this way our scholarly writing travels and goes beyond merely reciting what others have already written.
Recently, I have been advocating for greater uptake by Indigenous researchers of autoethnography, because Indigenous researchers often come to their doctoral studies as experts in their research topic. Their own experiences are rich potential sources of data, which can easily be wasted if they absorb the conventional qualitative fixation on the collection of ‘empirical’ data, i.e. information from other people. Autoethnography is the most distinctive tradition in the sphere of post-qualitative inquiry, which attempts to complete the mission of qualitative research by stepping fully out of the shadows cast by science over the human and social sciences, particularly in relation to truth and the production of knowledge.
Laurel Richardson and Elizabeth St Pierre co-authored a key chapter in the classic SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Inquiry, which is titled Writing: A method of inquiry. Inspired by their paper, I adapted it in my own 2021 chapter: Writing as a Māori/Indigenous method of inquiry. Post-qualitative inquiry returns to reading and writing their primacy in thinking, which appears to have been lost from the vocabularies of research. Reading, writing, and thinking are radically qualitative processes; while post-qualitative inquiry refuses method and remains committed to thinking, it still remains beneath the umbrella of qualitative research (such as in the Sage Handbook). This makes sense, because, as with all uses of “post” in philosophy and research, post-qualitative research means “the normalization of” qualitative research. “Post” in this usage is not repudiating but reinforcing what is essential about qualitative research.
Post-qualitative inquiry enables the (re-)entry of narrative modes of writing into qualitative research, aiming to overcome the bifurcation of the world of writing into science and literature, which has led us to where we are today. While post-qualitative inquiries may include data collected through traditional qualitative methods such as interviews, those data are not privileged above what is already or also known about the topic. In these and other ways, a post-qualitative approach to research aligns with the politics inherent in an identity as an Indigenous scholar.
Georgina Tuari Stewart
Georgina Tuari Stewart (ko Whakarārā te maunga, ko Matauri te moana, ko Te Tāpui te marae, ko Ngāti Kura te hapū, ko Ngāpuhi-nui-tonu te iwi) is Professor of Māori Philosophy of Education in Te Ara Poutama, AUT Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. Georgina has an MSc in Chemistry (1981), a DipSecTchg (1991) in Science with senior Chemistry, Mathematics to Year 11 and Te Reo Māori, and a Doctor of Education (2007) on Māori science curriculum. Georgina is Co-Editor-in-Chief of Springer journal New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies/Te Hautaka Mātauranga o Aotearoa, 2018-2023 and Principal Investigator on Marsden-funded research into Māori Learning Spaces (July 2022 – June 2025).
