Joanna Kidman
Brown study / braʊn stʌdɪ/ noun. Reverie, state of abstraction,
absorbed in one’s thoughts, reflection, day-dream. (Lost in a brown study).
Joanna Kidman (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Raukawa)
I am a Māori sociologist living and working in Aotearoa, New Zealand. My academic job takes me to indigenous communities in many parts of the world but most of my work is with indigenous Māori youth in provincial towns and rural areas across New Zealand. More recently, I have done research with urban Māori youth living precariously on the economic margins of the city. These young people have a lot of stories to tell. My job is to listen to what they are saying.
The academic profession has always fascinated me and some of my research is about higher education and universities. I am interested in indigenous scholarship and sociology of knowledge. In recent years, this work has taken my co-authors and me deep into the hidden curriculum of university life and into the academic ‘margins’ where we have found scholar-activists ‘speaking back’ to the neoliberal and managerialist ethos of academia.
These are very different kinds of research but like a lot of indigenous scholars, I work across several fields of inquiry. There are so few of us in the academy and we are spread very thinly. In a Brown Study is an online space where I can ‘think aloud’ about the many strands of my academic ‘day-job’ which has spanned 25 years and maybe also tell some of the stories behind the stories that I tell as an academic.
Joanna Kidman (Professor)
Victoria University of Wellington
Aotearoa/ New Zealand
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-5753-8886
Join me on Twitter @JoannaKidman
Disclaimer: The views expressed on this site are my own and do not represent those of my employer, Victoria University of Wellington.
Photographic images: Permission for the use of images on this site has been negotiated with the individuals and groups involved. Research involving photographic images received institutional ethics approval and participation in the project for young people under the age of 16 years was subject to parental/guardian consent.