title: Awaiting the proclamation of the Te Aroha goldfield: 1–24 November 1880

authors: Hart, Philip

abstract: Rumours about finds and prospects could not be proved either way until more prospecting could be done, and this had to await the official proclamation of the new goldfield. Despite optimism, no reef, or even a leader, had been discovered, and all the hopes were based on surface stone of uncertain value. Apart from the original prospectors, nobody was doing much development, most waiting to see where others made good finds so that they could peg out adjoining ground. Although increasing numbers continued to arrive, some in organized parties, most of their time was spent hanging around the hotels discussing the latest news and arguing about the value of the local ore, which even some experienced miners misunderstood. 
As officials considered that delaying the opening would create more difficulties, they were not convinced the field would be valuable. They, like some journalists, discouraged exaggerated hopes and men from rushing to Te Aroha. Two canvas settlements were formed, with storekeepers arriving in increasing numbers to service them. As opening day approached, the influx increased, and so did arguments over the new regulations to be applied. On the eve of the day of the proclamation, hundreds were ready to compete for mining claims and for residence and business sites.

text: Awaiting the proclamation of the Te Aroha goldfield: 1–24 November 1880 Rumours about finds and prospects could not be proved either way until more prospecting could be done, and this had to await the official proclamation of the new goldfield. Despite optimism, no reef, or even a leader, had been discovered, and all the hopes were based on surface stone of uncertain value. Apart from the original prospectors, nobody was doing much development, most waiting to see where others made good finds so that they could peg out adjoining ground. Although increasing numbers continued to arrive, some in organized parties, most of their time was spent hanging around the hotels discussing the latest news and arguing about the value of the local ore, which even some experienced miners misunderstood. 
As officials considered that delaying the opening would create more difficulties, they were not convinced the field would be valuable. They, like some journalists, discouraged exaggerated hopes and men from rushing to Te Aroha. Two canvas settlements were formed, with storekeepers arriving in increasing numbers to service them. As opening day approached, the influx increased, and so did arguments over the new regulations to be applied. On the eve of the day of the proclamation, hundreds were ready to compete for mining claims and for residence and business sites.

year: 2016

title: Performative Methodologies: Geographies of Emotion and Affect in Digital Storytelling Workshops

authors: Bliss, Elaine

subjects: digital storytelling

abstract: This thesis advocates digital storytelling as a geographical methodology to understand how emotion and affect are produced. Digital storytelling is a flexible and workshopped methodology that captures experimental, creative and imaginative performances of emotion and affect. Through digital storytelling geographers may build understandings of how emotion and affect are experienced individually and collectively. I use 11 digital storytelling workshops, with more than 100 participants, as the primary sites for my research. The workshops were conducted in the United States and New Zealand and were modelled on the practice established by the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley, California, United States. It is argued that digital storytelling workshops co-create emotion, affect, people and place.
Individual and group interviews, reflexive autobiographical journal writing, and digital storytelling workshop training, participation, and observing are used to access emotion and affect in digital storytelling workshops. A combination of qualitative research methods and critical social theories are used to highlight embodied, emotional and affectual geographies.
Three findings frame my discussion. First, digital storytelling workshops are performative spaces for the staging and circulation of emotion and affect. The concepts of infrastructure, improvisation, and intimacy are critical for understanding the dynamic nature of emotion and affect in digital storytelling workshops. Second, a focus on relationality allows for an examination of psychotherapeutic practice and the transformative capacity of digital storytelling workshops. Workshop spaces are understood as ‘connective mediums’ in which a third position – the gap between the flow of emotions and the representation of that experience - is possible. Third, voice in digital storytelling is a political process of speaking and listening. A focus on voice permits an exploration of the acoustic politics of emotion and affect at individual and collective spatial scales. Digital storytelling workshops facilitate processes of seeing, hearing and experiencing emotion and affect as a way of interpreting the geographical worlds of research participants. 
The Center for Digital Storytelling’s model incorporates a commitment to social justice that honours and values emotional knowledge. As a practice-based research methodology digital storytelling requires researchers to be reflexive and negotiate their multiply layered ethical positionings. As geographers continue to experiment with innovative ways of conducting research, the messiness of digital storytelling can contribute to methodological debates about the ‘doing’ of emotion and affect in geographical research.

text: Performative Methodologies: Geographies of Emotion and Affect in Digital Storytelling Workshops This thesis advocates digital storytelling as a geographical methodology to understand how emotion and affect are produced. Digital storytelling is a flexible and workshopped methodology that captures experimental, creative and imaginative performances of emotion and affect. Through digital storytelling geographers may build understandings of how emotion and affect are experienced individually and collectively. I use 11 digital storytelling workshops, with more than 100 participants, as the primary sites for my research. The workshops were conducted in the United States and New Zealand and were modelled on the practice established by the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley, California, United States. It is argued that digital storytelling workshops co-create emotion, affect, people and place.
Individual and group interviews, reflexive autobiographical journal writing, and digital storytelling workshop training, participation, and observing are used to access emotion and affect in digital storytelling workshops. A combination of qualitative research methods and critical social theories are used to highlight embodied, emotional and affectual geographies.
Three findings frame my discussion. First, digital storytelling workshops are performative spaces for the staging and circulation of emotion and affect. The concepts of infrastructure, improvisation, and intimacy are critical for understanding the dynamic nature of emotion and affect in digital storytelling workshops. Second, a focus on relationality allows for an examination of psychotherapeutic practice and the transformative capacity of digital storytelling workshops. Workshop spaces are understood as ‘connective mediums’ in which a third position – the gap between the flow of emotions and the representation of that experience - is possible. Third, voice in digital storytelling is a political process of speaking and listening. A focus on voice permits an exploration of the acoustic politics of emotion and affect at individual and collective spatial scales. Digital storytelling workshops facilitate processes of seeing, hearing and experiencing emotion and affect as a way of interpreting the geographical worlds of research participants. 
The Center for Digital Storytelling’s model incorporates a commitment to social justice that honours and values emotional knowledge. As a practice-based research methodology digital storytelling requires researchers to be reflexive and negotiate their multiply layered ethical positionings. As geographers continue to experiment with innovative ways of conducting research, the messiness of digital storytelling can contribute to methodological debates about the ‘doing’ of emotion and affect in geographical research.

year: 2015

title: Processes of Pakeha change in response to the Treaty of Waitangi

authors: Huygens, Ingrid Louise Maria

subjects: Pakeha change

abstract: The sense of crisis that marks our times may be seen as a crisis for dominant groups whose once-secure hegemony is being challenged by marginalised others. It is in theorising the reply from the dominant group to the voices of the oppressed that existing Western conceptions of social change fall silent. The dominant Pakeha group in Aotearoa New Zealand has used discourses of benign colonisation and harmonious race relations to resist 165 years of communication from indigenous Māori about their oppression and a dishonoured treaty for settlement. My research documents the appearance of the Treaty of Waitangi into the Pakeha consciousness, and the now 30 year-long response by a Pakeha antiracism movement to educate their own cultural group about its agreements. Targeting government, community and social services organisations, activist educators used Freire's (1975) approach of conscientising dialogue to present a more critical view of colonisation, and to encourage participants to consider the complicity of their organisations in ongoing structural and cultural racism.

Based on my membership of local and national networks of activist educators, I was able to organise and facilitate data gathering from three sources to investigate processes of Pakeha change in: (i) unpublished material describing the antiracism and Treaty movement's historical theorising and strategies over 30 years, (ii) a country-wide process of co-theorising among contemporary Treaty educator groups about their work and perceived influence, and (iii) a collection of organisational accounts of Treaty-focused change. The collected records confirmed that a coherent anti-colonial discourse, which I have termed 'Pakeha honouring the Treaty', was in use to construct institutional and constitutional changes in non-government organisations. My interpretation of key elements in a local theory of transforming action included emotional responses to counter-cultural information, collective work for cultural and institutional change and practising a mutually agreed relationship with Māori. I concluded that these emotional, collective and relationship processes in dominant group change were crucial in helping to construct the new conceptual resources of 'affirming Māori authority' and 'striving towards a right relationship with Māori'. These counter-colonial constructions allowed Pakeha a non-resistant and facilitative response to Māori challenge, and enabled a dialogue with Māori about decolonisation. 

By examining in one research programme the genealogy and interdependencies of a new discourse, my research contributes to theorising about the production of new, counter-hegemonic discourses, and confirms the crucial part played by social movements in developing new, liberatory constructions of the social order.

My research calls for further theory-building on (i) emotional and spiritual aspects of transformational learning, (ii) processes involved in consciously-undertaken cultural change by dominant/coloniser groups, and (iii) practising of mutually agreed relationships with indigenous peoples by dominant/coloniser groups. 

My research has implications for theorising how coloniser and dominant groups generally may participate in liberatory social change and decolonisation work, and  the part played by the Western states in the global struggles by indigenous people for recognition of their world-views and aspirations.  

It remains to be seen whether counter-colonial discourses and organisational changes aimed at 'honouring the Treaty' with indigenous peoples will be sufficiently widely adopted to help transform Western dominating cultures and colonial projects. In the meantime, acknowledging and documenting these counter-colonial discourses and their constructions opens up increasing possibilities for constructing, from a history of colonisation, a different future.

text: Processes of Pakeha change in response to the Treaty of Waitangi The sense of crisis that marks our times may be seen as a crisis for dominant groups whose once-secure hegemony is being challenged by marginalised others. It is in theorising the reply from the dominant group to the voices of the oppressed that existing Western conceptions of social change fall silent. The dominant Pakeha group in Aotearoa New Zealand has used discourses of benign colonisation and harmonious race relations to resist 165 years of communication from indigenous Māori about their oppression and a dishonoured treaty for settlement. My research documents the appearance of the Treaty of Waitangi into the Pakeha consciousness, and the now 30 year-long response by a Pakeha antiracism movement to educate their own cultural group about its agreements. Targeting government, community and social services organisations, activist educators used Freire's (1975) approach of conscientising dialogue to present a more critical view of colonisation, and to encourage participants to consider the complicity of their organisations in ongoing structural and cultural racism.

Based on my membership of local and national networks of activist educators, I was able to organise and facilitate data gathering from three sources to investigate processes of Pakeha change in: (i) unpublished material describing the antiracism and Treaty movement's historical theorising and strategies over 30 years, (ii) a country-wide process of co-theorising among contemporary Treaty educator groups about their work and perceived influence, and (iii) a collection of organisational accounts of Treaty-focused change. The collected records confirmed that a coherent anti-colonial discourse, which I have termed 'Pakeha honouring the Treaty', was in use to construct institutional and constitutional changes in non-government organisations. My interpretation of key elements in a local theory of transforming action included emotional responses to counter-cultural information, collective work for cultural and institutional change and practising a mutually agreed relationship with Māori. I concluded that these emotional, collective and relationship processes in dominant group change were crucial in helping to construct the new conceptual resources of 'affirming Māori authority' and 'striving towards a right relationship with Māori'. These counter-colonial constructions allowed Pakeha a non-resistant and facilitative response to Māori challenge, and enabled a dialogue with Māori about decolonisation. 

By examining in one research programme the genealogy and interdependencies of a new discourse, my research contributes to theorising about the production of new, counter-hegemonic discourses, and confirms the crucial part played by social movements in developing new, liberatory constructions of the social order.

My research calls for further theory-building on (i) emotional and spiritual aspects of transformational learning, (ii) processes involved in consciously-undertaken cultural change by dominant/coloniser groups, and (iii) practising of mutually agreed relationships with indigenous peoples by dominant/coloniser groups. 

My research has implications for theorising how coloniser and dominant groups generally may participate in liberatory social change and decolonisation work, and  the part played by the Western states in the global struggles by indigenous people for recognition of their world-views and aspirations.  

It remains to be seen whether counter-colonial discourses and organisational changes aimed at 'honouring the Treaty' with indigenous peoples will be sufficiently widely adopted to help transform Western dominating cultures and colonial projects. In the meantime, acknowledging and documenting these counter-colonial discourses and their constructions opens up increasing possibilities for constructing, from a history of colonisation, a different future.

year: 2007