My interdisciplinary research outputs are distributed across both scholarly and creative fields, while generating new knowledge and a potential for re-conceptualising justice within their intersections. My PhD research was based in Utila, Honduras, and investigated the effects of idealised tourism ephemera locally. I challenged the ongoing binary representations of the island as a paradise and mainland Honduras as violent, to show how Utila’s tropicalisation perpetuated colonial continuities and the violent erasure of particular peoples, places and species.
My current research is funded by a Marsden Fast-Start grant and brings a critical gaze to the privileging of Pākehā-centred narratives in current research on ‘Big Things’ in Aotearoa to attend to the ways in which ‘Big Things’ can be an apparatus of forgetting settler-colonial histories.
Furthermore, I have contributed to a number of cross-disciplinary research projects at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington (VUW) and have a passion for working collaboratively with iwi, community organisations, department colleagues as well as forging connections with other programmes and industry collaborators. My research interests include:
- Effects of tourism development and tropicalised narratives on people, place, and more-than-human geographies
- Filmic geographies and interdisciplinary documentary storytelling
- Transformative, decolonial, and feminist research praxis
- Innovative and creative-based approaches to social and environmental justice
- Media representations of race, gender, class, and sexuality
- Silences, violence, in/visibility, and power
- Critical pedagogy of care and empathy