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This thesis explores how Kaupapa Māori paradigms can make important contributions to research topics that may not be of direct or immediate relevance to Māori communities. Insights gained from a Kaupapa Māori investigation of white privilege in Aotearoa New Zealand are discussed. I argue that cultural hegemony is maintained through structured forgetting, silence, and suppression of dissent that has dire consequences for dominant cultural groups as well as marginal. Structural racism and privilege are amenable to analyses utilising similar frameworks albeit from opposite sides that can provide valuable insights to understanding inequity more broadly. I also examine ways in which Kaupapa Māori analyses of white privilege can illuminate pathways of redress that will benefit all New Zealanders and provide more embracing perspectives of nationhood.

This paper argues that stoicism as a central element of whiteness shapes, controls, and ultimately limits the experience and expression of emotion in public space. I explore how this may play out in particular medical settings like hospitals in Aotearoa New Zealand. I argue that working in conjunction with other values of whiteness identified by Myser (2003)—hyper-individualism, a contractual view of relationships, and an emphasis on personal control and autonomy—this makes hospitals emotionally unsafe spaces for Māori and other groups who place high importance in the collective sharing of emotion. Using death and bereavement as an example, I suggest that challenging and addressing stoicism in the structure and performance of whiteness in hospital settings may provide an important point of entry for anti-racism measures and health equity.

This paper discusses experiences of Māori who self-report that they are socially assigned as Pākehā and explores these experiences in relation to Māori identity and colonisation. Utilising Kaupapa Māori theory, methodology and methods, semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 10 participants. Three interrelated themes were identified through a thematic analysis: claims of identity, challenges to identity and reinforcement of identity. The themes informed the conceptualisation of Te Haerenga Tuakiri, which illustrates the complexity of Māori identity and how it is navigated by Māori who are socially assigned as Pākehā in various ways and in various contexts.

Colonial praxis has been imposed on the culture, epistemologies and praxis of indigenous Maori in Aotearoa, entrenching the settler cultural project that ensures the continuation of the colonial state, producing damaging disparities. This article theorises ways in which settler privilege works at multiple levels supporting settler interests, aspirations and sensibilities. In institutions, myriad mundane processes operate through commerce, law, media, education, health services, environment, religion and international relations constituting settler culture, values and norms. Among individuals, settler discursive/ideological frameworks are hegemonic, powerfully influencing interactions with Maori to produce outcomes that routinely suit settlers. In the internalised domain, there is a symbiotic sense of belonging, rightness, entitlement and confidence that the established social hierarchies will serve settler interests. This structure of privilege works together with overt and implicit acts of racism to reproduce a collective sense of superiority. It requires progressive de-mobilising together with anti-racism efforts to enable our society to move toward social justice.

Historical trauma is an important and growing area of research that provides crucial insights into the antecedents of current-day inequities in health and social wellbeing experienced by Indigenous people in colonial settler societies. What is not so readily examined is the flip side of historical trauma experienced by settlers and their descendants, what might be termed 'historical privilege'. These historic acts of privilege for settlers, particularly those emigrating from Britain, provide the antecedents for the current-day realities for their descendants and the structural, institutional and interpersonal levels of advantage that are also a key feature of inequities between Indigenous and settler. This article theorises an explicit link between historical trauma and historical privilege and explores how the latter may be examined with particular reference to Aotearoa New Zealand. Three core elements of historical trauma are posited as a useful framework to apply to historical privilege.

When racism is promulgated on a number of fronts, including the media, it becomes a powerful and pervasive force in society, detrimentally impacting on the lives of those who are its object. This paper analyses Mäori focus group interviews that traversed a wide range of sites where racism occurred, including print and broadcast media. We utilised a framework for understanding racism that is in line with key racism theorists and identifies four primary levels through which it operates: internal, interpersonal, institutional and societal. The core themes to emerge in the findings reinforce this framework and have been grouped accordingly: Internalised Racism, Interpersonal Racism, Institutional Racism and Societal Racism. Negative effects on health and wellbeing were articulated by participants as was the call for transformative, counter hegemonic representations of Mäori.

Kaupapa Māori methodologies in Aotearoa New Zealand have often been applied to content of immediate and direct relevance to Māori communities. Some of these include research about aspects of cultural revitalisation or examinations of the position Māori occupy within broader ethnic disparities, particularly in health and social outcomes. This article seeks to expand the application of Kaupapa Māori paradigms to research topics outside 'te ao Māori' (the Māori world). We argue that the Kaupapa Māori theorising of a Māori visual arts and culture scholar can provide crucial insights on white privilege in Aotearoa New Zealand with a view to addressing disparities and creating more embracing and equitable perspectives of belonging, citizenship and nationhood.

This article explores affect, colonial privilege, and the cultural politics of national commemoration in Aotearoa New Zealand. Based on focus‐group interviews around two major national days, we examine means through which feelings and emotions are deployed in ways that enable the reproduction of social advantage. Situating affect within patterns of relationship, four interrelated affective‐discursive practices are explored. In relation to Waitangi Day, agents tend to work under the rubric of anger and confusion. For Anzac Day, being grateful and moved shapes the interaction, although participants often indicate preferences towards "having a day off." Given the colonial context in which these practices circulate, analysis observes the associated freedom and ease by which affective‐discursive privilege is (re)produced. Often incongruent and rarely challenged, privilege allows associated actors to do what they want, when they want, however they want. This affective climate authorizes the ongoing reproduction of, and justification for, membership to a higher‐status ethnic group of which unearned opportunities and entitlements remain its everyday, expected currency.

A television news bulletin tells us, in effect, what we should think about and the preferred way in which we should think about it. Analyses of New Zealand media have consistently shown that news about Māori is both relatively rare and that it prioritises violence and criminality. Researchers conclude this encourages New Zealanders to see Māori as threatening the social order and burdening our society. We examined the few Māori stories broadcast in a large representative sample of English-language television news bulletins and found the same negativity. As our sample included Māori-language news bulletins from the same days we know there were other Māori news stories available, so we conclude that the prioritising of negative stories about Māori in English-language media is a matter of choice. Focus groups with Māori and non-Māori media consumers demonstrate the impact of the relentlessly negative portrayals of Māori in New Zealand media.

Negative mass media representations of Maori are of major concern, impacting on Maori/Pakeha relations, how Maori see themselves, on collective health and wellbeing, and ultimately undermining the fundamentals of equity and justice in our society. In this article, we outline a number of important patterns that constitute the contextual discursive resources of such depictions identified in representative media samples and other sources and provide a set of alternative framings for each pattern. Our purpose is to challenge what Deuze (2004) has referred to as an 'occupational ideology' of journalism and ultimately to change Pakeha newsmaking practices that routinely undermine efforts to approach and attain social justice in the field of Maori/Pakeha relations in Aotearoa.

A content analysis of editorial items about Māori issues and the Treaty of Waitangi in 14 Suburban Newspaper publications in Auckland and Northland found a low proportion of articles about these issues, despite high proportions of Māori resident in several areas served by these publications. Stories included a higher proportion of apparent news releases compared to a national sample of non-daily papers. Māori perspectives came largely from sources representing pan-Māori non-government organisations; Suburban Newspapers used a low proportion of iwi and hapū sources compared with other community papers. Use of te reo Māori was low, and there were no signs of attempts to support readers in learning or increasing their understanding of te reo Māori. This article concludes that Māori and non-Māori readers are poorly served by the poverty of Suburban Newspapers’ reporting of Treaty and Māori issues.

The association of Māori and crime was prominent in a large representative sample of newspaper items gathered in Aotearoa New Zealand between November 2007 and April 2008. We used content, thematic/discursive analyses as well as focus group insights to analyse the data-base and found that Māori were frequently labelled as possible or actual perpetrators of crime on superficial judgements, often by victims. This practice associates Māori with all accounts of crime and embeds crime as a background for all other items about Māori. In contrast, newspaper coverage of Pākehā perpetrators of crime against a Māori organisation worked to valorise the convicted thieves. The embedding of crime as a background to other stories about Māori, the pervasive but unacknowledged norms, and media positioning of Māori as a threat in non-crime stories, is central to hegemonic discourses of Māori-Pākehā relations. Focus group participants indicated that these discourses support realworld marginalisation and discrimination against Māori.

Objective: An initial exploration of the available conceptualizations of privilege in Aotearoa/New Zealand with the goal of developing a more in-depth qualitative study, incorporating kaupapa Maori and public health framings. Design: Interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of key informants that span the academic, community development, health service provision, and activist sectors. Participants were selected from multiple networks for their expressed interest and insight into the concept of privilege and its importance to analyses of social justice. Results: Six key themes emerged that include the invisibility of privilege; the weighting of different variables; individual vs group privilege; class; the active aspects of privilege; and links between privilege and Pakeha culture. Conclusion: Participants' constructions of privilege emphasize the multifaceted complexity and discursive ambiguities of the ways in which the concept is utilized within our political economy to account for disparity and covertly reproduce the status quo of Pakeha advantage.