Journalling this PhD journey seems like the most natural way for a writer (well this writer anyway) to metabolise the ebbs and flows at this level of study. As an indigenous researcher I am drawn to how narrative as research paradigm can be a vehicle of decolonisation and transformation. I bring with me a subjective jumble that cannot be divorced from my research. This jumble of disparate threads both enriches and compromises my research at times. However, I try to be a bricoleur. I work with what I have at hand to configure and reconfigure, to test and retest, to interpret through these greenstone tinted glasses.
I am in the beginning stages still. Piecing together a Full Research Proposal, my personal blocks and maybe even some intergenerational trauma is getting in the ways of totally thrusting myself into the work at hand.
I am hopeful though! I have this perhaps irrational radical hope accompanied by a radical searching for a more mindful life in this ever-present journey towards decolonising myself.
Collections of ideas, summaries from literature, videos, inspiration, reflections and images will populate this PhD blogging journey. I hope for this to be an artefact to my thesis which seems to be changing form and texture even as I begin the process of breathing life into it. It will be presented in both te reo Māori and English as my thesis is going to be written in my ancestral language. These writings and images will also examine my flavour of indigeneity coloured by an aesthetic moulded by the sometimes mismatched and clashing parts of myself.
Its a place for me to return back to when I need to and remind myself of who I am and what I am doing.
Mauri Tau, Tuhi Tau 