The gown and the korowai: Māori doctoral students and the spatial organisation of academic knowledge

• Published in: Higher education research and development Vol. 29; no. 3; pp. 229 - 243
• Main Authors: Middleton, Sue, McKinley, Elizabeth
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 01.06.2010
• Subjects: Academic Education; Bernstein; Cultural Background; Cultural influences; Cultural interrelationships; Doctoral candidates; Doctoral Dissertations; doctoral education; Doctoral theses; Educational Theories; Epistemology; Ethnic Groups; Graduate Students; indigenous; Indigenous Populations; Intellectual Disciplines; Interviews; Lefebvre; Maori people; Maori students; Māori; New Zealand; Pacific Islanders; place; Postsecondary education; Sociology; Spatial Ability; Student Attitudes; Supervision; Supervisor supervisee relationship; New Zealand
• ISSN: 0729-4360; 1469-8366
• DOI: 10.1080/07294360903510590

This paper draws on 38 student interviews carried out in the course of the team research project 'Teaching and Learning in the Supervision of Māori Doctoral Students'. Māori doctoral thesis work takes place in the intersections between the Māori (tribal) world of identifications and obligations, the organisational and epistemological configurations of academia and the bureaucratic requirements of funding or employing bureaucracies. To explore how students accommodate cultural, academic and bureaucratic demands, we develop analytical tools combining three intellectual traditions: Māori educational theory, Bernstein's sociology of the academy and Lefebvre's conceptual trilogy of perceived, conceived and lived space. The paper falls into six parts. Section 1 is an overview of the research and is followed in Section 2 by identification of intersecting 'locations' in which Māori students' theses are produced. In Section 3, Henri Lefebvre's spatial analysis highlights connections between students' multiple allegiances and affinities. Drawing on Bernstein, Section 4 relates the theses to the organisation of 'Western' academic disciplines. Section 5 addresses students' cultural locations beyond the reach of 'Western' disciplines. We conclude with implications for supervision.