From object to subject: hybrid identities of indigenous women in science

• Published in: Cultural studies of science education Vol. 3; no. 4; pp. 959 - 975
• Main Author: McKinley, Elizabeth
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.12.2008; Springer; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Colonialism; Colonization; Critical Theory; Cultural Context; Education; Educational Environment; Educational Philosophy; Females; Foreign Countries; Foreign Policy; Global Approach; Globalization; Indigenous peoples; Indigenous Populations; Native peoples; New Zealand; Politics of Education; Power Structure; Role of Education; Schools; Science Education; Science Instruction; Scientific Enterprise; Scientific Principles; Scientists; Self Actualization; Social Theories; Sociocultural Patterns; Sociology of Education; Women Scientists; Womens studies; New Zealand; Hybrid identity; Indigenous women; Colonialism; Subjectivity
• ISSN: 1871-1502; 1871-1510
• DOI: 10.1007/s11422-008-9128-7

The use of hybridity today suggests a less coherent, unified and directed process than that found in the Enlightenment science’s cultural imperialism, but regardless of this neither concept exists outside power and inequality. Hence, hybridity raises the question of the terms of the mixture and the conditions of mixing. Cultural hybridity produced by colonisation, under the watchful eye of science at the time, and the subsequent life in a modern world since does not obscure the power that was embedded in the moment of colonisation. Indigenous identities are constructed within and by cultural power. While we all live in a global society whose consequences no one can escape, we remain unequal participants and globalisation remains an uneven process. This article argues that power has become a constitutive element in our own hybrid identities in indigenous people’s attempts to participate in science and science education. Using the indigenous peoples of Aotearoa New Zealand (called Māori) as a site of identity construction, I argue that the move from being the object of science to the subject of science, through science education in schools, brings with it traces of an earlier meaning of ‘hybridity’ that constantly erupts into the lives of Māori women scientists.