Georgia Griggs (Masters, Victoria University of Wellington), Storme Davis (Masters, Massey University) and Hina Cheema (PhD, Massey University), were all awarded grants in the May 2023 round of Kākano Fund awards. Their research takes us from a local school, to a freezing works, to the lives of Muslim women in Aotearoa.

Georgia’s thesis title is “Being 'Good' in the Classroom: Whiteness and Moral Liminality in the 2023 Aotearoa New Zealand histories Curriculum”. Her research shows that teachers and students in Year 10 social studies classes, at a college which introduced the ‘Colonisation’ topic in 2022, experienced a broad range of emotions including discomfort, guilt, anger, and indifference. The moral liminality generated by Pākehā and state desires to be ‘good’ and ‘right’ around Aotearoa New Zealand histories and colonisation causes teachers to self-censor their emotional reactions to the histories they teach and model silence to students, producing ‘settler silences’ in the classroom.

It is quite a step from a classroom to a freezing works, but this is a journey taken by Storme, whose title is “Just a Job: Stuckness and security in the lives of women in the freezing works in Aotearoa New Zealand”. Her thesis is based on interviews and autoethnography. Storme develops the women’s own concept of “stuckness” as a framework for understanding their work lives. She explores how the freezing works becomes a sticky job, through analysing how women come to work in the freezing works and end up staying there, how they experience everyday work on the production line, and how this stuckness is embodied. In a world of precarity, getting stuck is a rare instance of achieving security.

Kākano Fund awardees Georgia Griggs (left) and Storme Davis (right).

Hina’s thesis is “Becoming a ‘good’ Muslim Woman: Comparing Habitus and Everyday Lived Religiosity. An Ethnographic Study of Aotearoa NZ Muslim Women”. She found that Muslim women make sense of their lives through engagement with other Muslim women and use comparison as one of the key strategies to make everyday decisions. Her research participants are on journeys to understand Islam more logically, use their agency to actively negotiate situations, and are constantly engaged in finding meaning in their lives. The study suggests the need to understand Muslim women as cultural and social beings who actively negotiate their everyday challenges.

Congratulations to these three scholars and their supervisors. Their work demonstrates social and cultural anthropology’s strengths. We look forward to more of the same and more of the difference in the October 2023 round of the Kākano Fund.

Emeritus Professor Julie Park, Chair of the Kākano Committee