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In Norton Juster’s novel The Phantom Tollbooth, the author describes a city in which residents realise they can get to where they are going faster if they keep their heads down and hurry. The consequence, however, is that their city becomes totally invisible.
My goal in teaching and research is to make visible the ordinary and reveal relationships within and between places that might otherwise remain obscure. I see a number of formative experiences pointing towards my current interests. For instance, I came to Aotearoa as a four-year-old migrant and thus saw this land through fresh eyes. Then, as teenager, I lived in the Deep South of the U.S. for a year as a Rotary exchange student. Such experiences contributed to a passion for piecing together how the world works and what makes place.
My academic path took me through this Department, then to Canada and back. As an M.A. student at The University of Auckland at the beginning of the 1980s, I researched community politics and land use change associated with irrigated horticulture. A move to McMaster University in Canada immersed me in a Department with strengths in political economy and quantitative analysis. While absorbing those influences, I retained an earlier interest in humanistic geography and developed a doctoral thesis on community life for psychiatric patients. I then returned to Auckland for two years of postdoctoral work supported by the Medical Research Council. A connecting thread in all this was a concern for structure as well as agency and an enduring interest in urban as well as rural processes. Over the decade since I took up a lectureship at Auckland, I have developed two other teaching and research interests: working within the so-called new cultural geography (e.g., interpreting landscapes); and considering research design and ethics in geography.
I summarise my current research interests under four headings:
i) The relationships between health and place.
Philosophically and ethically, I am strongly of the view that health involves a good deal more than health care. This view is reflected in my attempts to recast the focus of medical geography towards interest in health and place. With my starting point of social geography, I have been less interested in the medical and more in the experiential, and the links to other aspects of daily life such as housing and social support. My personal and political concerns for social justice have intersected with academic interests when recently I have been involved in community-based action-research projects on topics such as child pedestrian injury prevention and locating a new clinic for disadvantaged populations. I am interested not only in distributive justice, but also with the issues of justice implied by identity politics -- the rights of 'others' to define their needs, to have a 'place' in society, and (consequently) to experience well-being.
ii) The 'in-place' human experience of economic and service sector restructuring.
In part prompted by my involvements in the two 'Changing Places in New Zealand' books (1992, 1996), I have become increasingly interested in the ways in which restructuring not only takes place in places but also in the lives of individuals, and collectively in households and communities. A concern with this theme has led me to adopt various research approaches, locations and collaborations: from the 'ground-level' experience of health clinic interactions in the Hokianga to the more document-based analysis of recent housing and health reforms. I believe that we cannot understand local experience without understanding the policy context, and vice versa. While most of my work has emphasised housing and health (and relationships between them), studies of particular communities (e.g. Hokianga, Tokanui, Maungatapere) have invariably drawn me into assessing a broader range of human needs and services.
iii) New cultural geographies and local landscapes.
Although my research has, at times, employed highly quantitative techniques, I come from a strongly humanities tradition (e.g., having studied New Zealand literature to Masterate level). Over the last two years I have been Acting Coordinator of the MA New Zealand Studies Programme, and this has prompted me to re-think geography’s engagement with the humanities. I have sought to (re)interpret the landscape and better understand the narratives and texts that we are immersed in. On this theme, I am interested in issues ranging from graffiti to place names and the symbolic landscapes of health care. I am presently analysing how interpretations of such phenomena are cross-cut by dimensions of 'race', with a recent paper analysing the way identity politics are inscribed into the landscape of One Tree Hill/Maungakiekie in Auckland. This concern for landscape also informs work I am conducting on Auckland supported by a Marsden grant with Larry Murphy and Ward Friesen.
iv) The relations of research.
A fourth area of interest involves why and how we conduct our research as human geographers. Too easily ethical concerns can be left to ethics committees! I have recently explored the geographical application of ideas of cultural safety current, as well as considering the politics of authorship. Most of my research is collaborative and this, for me, this raises questions concerning not only relations with those we are researching and writing about, but also relations with those whom we are researching. On this theme I am currently working on the ethics and practice of observation as a research approach.
Having studied in Canada and having Canadian family, many of my research links are with people in that country. The bulk of my forthcoming Research and Study Leave will be spent in Ontario, and over the years I have had a number of study awards from the International Council of Canadian Studies. In the most recent of these, I am examining comparative discourses of population health in British Columbia and New Zealand with Drs Michael Hayes and Jim Dunn, from UBC and Simon Fraser Universities respectively.
My teaching centres on three areas: general social/cultural geography, geographies of health and health care, and research design and ethics in human geography. I currently address this material across the Department’s teaching programme – from Stage 2 to Masters courses. I enjoy graduate supervision and am currently am supervising four PhD and three masters students. I believe enthusiasm is a key to teaching and attempt to achieve a close integration between research and teaching endeavours.
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