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Professor Hirini Matunga’s Bio

My research focus is Māori self-determination through planning, design, environmental management and policy analysis and Indigenous people’s experience. Taking the view that ‘being Māori’ or ‘being indigenous’ in a colonial context is a research project in itself, ‘self-analysis, ‘self-reflection’, and theorising the role that Māori/Indigenous planning, design, policy, environmental management might play in decolonising processes has been a primary focus alongside hypothesising what ‘Māori/Indigenous planning, design, and environmental policy might be. This is highly interdisciplinary and ‘praxis heavy’ but ‘theory light’ requiring a considerable amount of theorising to better understand not only the praxis, experiential dimension of ‘Māoriness’, and ‘indigeneity’, but to organise these dimensions and their component parts and concepts into coherent, integrated theoretical approaches. . I have theorised, and published an approach to move beyond artificial constraints of Cultural Impact Assessments to Strategic Indigenous Impact Assessment and am currently writing a theoretical reorientation of urban heritage and landscape management to accommodate indigeneity. Decolonising ‘settler’ planning, architecture, urban design, policy and the environment is my aim; indigenisation of these disciplines to accommodate Māori and Indigenous ontologies, epistemologies and axiologies, is my end goal.