Research in the Department
Research is an integral part of Department life with staff members and students spending significant time on research activities. All academic staff have active research programmes covering a wide range of interests.
The department enjoys a strong relationship and supervisory role with graduate students who are undertaking research. Graduate students have the opportunity to carry out self-directed research work through both the MA and the PhD. BA(Hons) and PGDip students enrolled in the 490 papers will also carry out supervised research.
- Staff Research
- Postgraduate Research in Sociology
- Postgraduate Research in Gender
- Postgraduate Research in Social Work
Staff Research
Postgraduate Research in Sociology
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Postgraduate Research in Gender
Profiles
Louise Pearman
is a PhD candidate with an interest in cross-gendered identity, theoretical approaches to gender fluidity, trans-masculinities, and the intersections of sexualities and gender/s. Louise's PhD seeks to place self-narrative, politics and stories of the New Zealand trans community into the international field of research while arguing for a methodology that reflects gender fluidity and self-narrative. Part of this thesis therefore addresses the international field of literature on trans experience as well as forwarding this by reclaiming the theory of medical intervention in terms of Harrway's cyborg theory and post-structuralist ideas of fluidity and contingency and discourse analysis. Louise has completed an MA in Gender Studies on female-to-male cross-gendered identity and behaviour in New Zealand between 1906 and 1950.
Anna McMartin
The effects on New Zealand families of the 1990s social welfare reforms is the topic of Anna McMartin's thesis. Anna looks at the ways in which the philosophy of economic neoliberalism, which drove the reforms, relies on the unpaid work of women, and hence the maintenance of the 'traditional' family. In 1990s New Zealand, welfare policies inspired by economic neoliberalism made non-traditional families difficult to sustain, particularly those headed by solo mothers, and had significant ramifications for the work of women.
Anna Paris
Currently, issues of agency and resistance occupy a central position within feminist debates about how to theorise the ‘production’ of the female subject. These notions are also central to Anna Paris’ PhD thesis: in the first place to determine the extent to which free choice and agency is involved in women’s decisions to transform themselves via the technologies of cosmetic surgery and the practices of exercising and dieting. Second, it is to suggest that agency and docility (in the Foucauldian sense) may actually co-exist and inform each other, and further, causally interact again and again to produce the subject in question.
Christopher Burke
My PhD thesis has the working title ”Literary Lives”: Exploring the Lives and Texts of “Pre-liberation” Homosexual New Zealand Men. It focuses upon several male writers who forged literary and sexual lives prior to the emergence of coherent and publicly avowed homosexual identities, and who spent time elsewhere – in London in particular. The thesis explores the relationships between lives, texts and social and cultural spaces, both national and international, and aims to break new ground by clarifying how queer agents negotiated real and imagined spaces. Rather than subscribe to a singular or wholesale representation of queer experience, this thesis seeks to account for identities which are at once complex, subjective, and multiple.
Gabrielle Hine
is a PhD candidate in the Media, Film and Communication Department with co-supervision in the Gender Studies Programme. Her previous work has looked at gender roles in childhood and the representation of female adolescent sexuality within popular contemporary cinema. Her PhD thesis considers the ways in which pregnancy has come to the forefront culturally within the last decade and how these changes are illustrated within film. In line with feminist scholarship, she argues that the aggressive marketing of the foetal image inevitably influences public perception of the pregnant woman and impacts the social status of the woman and motherhood. This in turn has an impact on the representation of unwanted pregnancy and abortion on-screen. Through detailed examination of several contemporary films and their cultural context, Gabrielle hopes to encourage a more multi-faceted perspective on unwanted pregnancy than that which is routinely offered by both popular and alternative cinemas.
Dianne Smith
is a PhD candidate in the Music Department with co-supervision from Gender Studies. Her PhD thesis, "Deci-belles", explores gendered power relations in sound engineering for popular music. She challenges the concept of personal choice that is typically deployed to explain women's marginal status in the occupation. The choice to become a sound engineer depends on equality of opportunity, but women are discouraged from entering the occupation by subtle and overt forms of gender discrimination, as well as the discursive dissociation of technical skill and femininity. This thesis also investigates notions of individual empowerment and group solidarity in relation to women who harness the means of musical production.
Completed theses supervised by Gender Studies staff
- Aronsen, Rebecca (2007) Televising Transformation: A Close Analysis of Extreme Makeover and The Swan, MA.
- Brady, Anita (2007) Constituting Queer: Performativity and Commodity Culture, PhD.
- Brown, Diana (2006) Between Lab and Kitchen: The Unconventional Career of Dr Muriel Bell, MA.
- Cullen, Lynda (2007) From Wonder Woman to Aeon Flux: Women Heroes, Feminism and Femininity in Post-war New Zealand, MA.
- Finney, Margaret (2002) Rhetorics of Transgression and Compliance in the Autobiographical Writing of Jean Rhys, Anaiis Nin and Gertrude Stein, PhD.
- Pearman, Louise (2008) Men and Masqueraders: Cross-gendered Identity and Behaviour in New Zealand, 1906-1950, MA.
- Webster, Elaine (2005) Similarities and Differences in New Zealand School Uniforms: Issues of Identity, PhD.
Postgraduate Research in Social Work
Our website is currently under development. Please come back for updates.