In this article, we address the limitations of sustainable development as an orienting educational horizon of hope and change, given that mainstream development presumes the possibility of perpetual growth and consumption on a finite planet. Facing these limitations requires us to consider the inherently violent and unsustainable nature of our modern-colonial modes of existence. Thus, we propose a shift from “education for sustainable development” to “education for the end of the world as we know it.” We contend that the predicament (...) we face is not primarily rooted in ignorance and thus solvable with more knowledge, nor primarily rooted in immorality and thus solvable with more normative values; rather, it is rooted in denials that stem from harmful desires for and investments in the continuity of the securities and satisfactions promised by modernity-coloniality. Faced with these denials, we emphasize a collective need to “grow up” so that we might “show up” differently to do the work that is needed as we face unprecedented global challenges. (shrink)

This article addresses the conceptual challenges of articulating the ethical–political limits of ‘higher education as we know it’, and the practical challenges of exploring alternative formations of higher education that are unimaginable from within the dominant imaginary of the higher education field. This article responds to the contemporary conjuncture in which possible futures have been significantly narrowed, and yet these possibilities also appear increasingly unsustainable and unethical. It invites scholars of higher education to rethink the epistemological and ontological frames within (...) which most imaginaries and institutions of higher education are embedded. If we fail to denaturalize these frames, then efforts to pluralize possible higher education futures will risk reproducing existing conceptual limitations and enduring colonial harms. (shrink)

This article takes ‘measurement’ as a will to determine or fix space and time, which allows for a comparison of ontological models of space and time from Western and Māori traditions. The spirit of ‘measurement’ is concomitantly one of fixing meaning, which is suggested as the essence of the growth of the scientific genre of language that has taken place alongside the growth of science itself, since the European Enlightenment. ‘Measurement’ and ‘metaphor’ are posited as an original binary for classifying (...) thinking and language, updating classical educational models of thought by drawing on recent results in brain and cognitive science, and recognising that basic cognitive resources, such as logic and rationality, power all forms of thinking. The article suggests that the notion of ‘cultural worldview’ may involve different balances of left and right brain thinking, embedded in the discourses, lexicons and grammars of each language, and that Western domination of left brain thinking may be a useful viewpoint on the philosophical dead end of the West. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn traditional Maori discourse, the division between metaphysical concepts and everyday life was non-existent. Because of that lack of delineation, the perception of objects was governed by certain beginning assumptions. Due to colonization, however, entities—and the conception of them—threaten to become unmoored from their primordiality. One example of this tendency lies in the current and common translation of the Maori term IRA as “gene.” This static casting of the erstwhile fluid nature of the phenomenon that IRA indicated has consequences not (...) only for how one perceives the world but, additionally, for both the self and the thing itself. In this article I propose a phenomenological approach to the term IRA, another definition for which is the interjectory “look!” I argue for an interpretation of IRA in light of a Maori metaphysics—one that governs the inherent fluidity of things and the concomitant tentative representation of those things. (shrink)

For Māori, a real opportunity exists to flesh out some terms and concepts that Western thinkers have adopted and that precede disciplines but necessarily inform them. In this article, we are intent on describing one of these precursory phenomena—Foucault’s Gaze—within a framework that accords with a Māori philosophical framework. Our discussion is focused on the potential and limits of colonised thinking, which has huge implications for such disciplines as education, among others. We have placed Foucault’s Gaze alongside a Māori metaphysics (...) and have speculated on the Gaze’s surveillant/expectant strategies with some key Māori primordial phenomena in mind, such as ‘te kore’ and ‘āhua’. We posit the Gaze as an entity and thus aim to render it more relevant to Māori, so that it can be addressed appropriately. We also preface that discussion by theorising on some of the challenges that confront us as Māori authors in even referring counter-colonially to the Gaze. Whilst we do not seek to destabilise the Gaze by positing it as a metaphysically based entity, we do hint at the possibility that critical indigenous philosophy may even for a short time bring the Gaze into focus for Māori. By introducing an awareness of an alternative metaphysics, we may have unsettled the self-certainty of the Gaze. (shrink)

The theoretical challenge posed by this paper is to find a conceptualisation of value for entrepreneurship theory grounded in Indigenous knowledge from a Māori perspective capable of guiding entrepreneurs operating for sustainability and wellbeing. We review Western and Māori theories of value, values, and valuation. We argue that Indigenous concepts of value centre on collective wellbeing as opposed to self-interest, and have spiritual and material elements. The paper proposes a tentative Māori theory of value we call manahau, which combines mana (...) (power, authority, and dignity) and hau (vitality of people, places, and objects). We define manahau as an axiological agent Māori entrepreneurs employ to synergistically negotiate cultural and commercial imperatives to achieve multidimensional wellbeing, human potential, and relational balance. We discuss research which illustrates manifestations of manahau in the Māori cultural ethics of utu (reciprocity) in Māori entrepreneurship and tauutuutu (reciprocity and balance) in Māori agribusiness. We argue that an Indigenous Māori theory of value has implications for entrepreneurship theory and practice. (shrink)

The experience of researching as a Māori student within academia will often raise questions about how and whether the student’s research privileges Māori world views and articulates culturally specific epistemologies. This study offers some theorising, from the perspectives of a Maori doctoral student and her Maori supervisor, on the metaphysical nature of research for Maori. It emphasises that there is a space for speculative, creative and responsive thinking as a central method in the student’s doctoral research and describes how access (...) to free thinking has been only partly recognised in currently dominant methods of research. We describe this approach as ‘whakaaro’, and note its relationship to language itself, to the researcher and the interviewee, and in particular to the researcher’s intuitive and largely unknowable response to what an interviewee utters. In that act, the student envisages that she will expansively hint at the deep expression of the profoundly mysterious. Here, our thinking resonates with various Western and indigenous writings about research and adumbrates the potential of the whakaaro method without foreclosing against its various permutations. (shrink)

Providing an indigenous opinion on anything is a difficult task. To be sure, there is a multitude of possible indigenous responses to dominant Western philosophy. My aim in this paper is to assess dominant analytic Western philosophy in light of the general insistence of most indigenous authors that indigenous metaphysics is holistic, and to make some bold claims about both dominant Western philosophy in line with an indigenous metaphysics of holism. There will, of course, be different ways of expressing holism (...) according to the indigenous group, but most of the literature states, as a most basic concern, that a general indigenous philosophy is concerned with the groundedness of an individual as an entity related to and indivisible from the rest of the world.1 The consequences of any assertion about the holistic nature of metaphysics are vast, including for the interpretation of what is often perceived of as the antithesis: Western philosophy. (shrink)

Carl Mika claims in the symposium’s lead essay that we need more myth today. In fact, an “unscientific” attitude can potentially reorient the alienation from the world. For Mika, a philosophical mātauranga Māori incorporates such a way of being in the world. Through it, an unmediated and co-existent relationship with the world can be built up. Some of Mika’s co-symposiasts invite Mika to substantiate aspects about this bold claim. Carwyn Jones nudges Mika to discuss the parallels between tikanga Māori—a system (...) that seeks to incorporate Māori law—and the common-law tradition that is adopted in New Zealand today. W. Julian Korab-Karpowicz agrees with Mika that to understand the world through an indifferent “scientific” investigation is to understand the world only partially, while the Māori scientist Ocean Ripeka Mercier illustrates how she seeks to develop a third space in her work that reconciles the fear of the unknown with the propensity to control the world through knowing. Helen Verran invites Mika to think about whether, and how, his understanding of a philosophical mātauranga Māori can help to facilitate the cultivation of a naturalism that is able to generate a cosmopolitics in New Zealand. (shrink)

In Maori thought, the possibility exists for a sort of lateral thinking that does not necessarily directly respond to another’s utterance or opinion but that considers some of the creative and arbitrary themes that arise. In this article, I employ this counter-colonial speculation, keeping in mind a Maori worldview whilst thinking in the wake of Elizabeth Rata’s “Ethnic Ideologies in New Zealand Education: What’s Wrong with Kaupapa Maori?” The speculative powers that Maori have at our disposal here have undoubtedly been (...) employed in a number of ways throughout Maori history; here, I use them in a way that does not directly respond to a prompt. Although Rata’s true aim is to critique kaupapa Maori, she inadvertently brings my attention to a particular characteristic of her writing—the suffix -ism. The fact that it saturates her writing in this article leads me to consider the broader issues associated with instrumentalist language, and the impact of the -ism on a Maori relationship with things in the world. It emerges that, although Rata may be controversial for Maori in her views, her writing is useful for some unintended reasons, as it prompts some thinking around the appropriateness of the -ism for Maori. (shrink)