Qualitative research is a process of storytelling, but whose story are we telling and from what perspective? We examine Kenneth Pike’s work on emic and etic approaches to qualitative inquiry and explore how, over time, etic has come to refer to settler-colonial research while emic is seen as relating to Othered life-worlds outside academia. Researchers from marginalized communities often struggle to occupy the etic space of the academy and the emic space of their research. Using concepts of edgewalking and edgework, we argue that another space is available at the edge between emic and etic where transformative research can occur.

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<p>Young people are often represented as the leaders of the next generation and much attention is given to the need for them to become more active participants in shaping the nation’s future. Over the years, education policy makers, health officials, government representatives in the criminal justice and welfare systems have sought ways of involving New Zealand’s youth more closely in civic society as they grapple with a daunting range of problems, many of which are likely to significantly worsen in the coming years. Despite these efforts, the views of some of the most economically and politically marginalised indigenous and/or racialized young people continue to be elusive and as a result a less nuanced understanding is available about how young people think about their lives in times ahead.  This study explores the hopes and fears that marginalised urban Māori and Pacific youth hold about the future and how they establish a sometimes fragile sense of belonging in precarious and uncertain times. In this project, Māori and Pacific young people were invited to discuss their aspirations and anxieties about the future and how these ideas are influenced by their everyday local ‘places’ in the present. Two participant groups were involved in the project; one included Māori youth in an urban centre where there were few opportunities for unemployed young people while the other group included Pacific youth living in a city area where many families experience high levels of economic hardship. The research tracks their views about who they are now as young people growing up in a complex and increasingly divided society and who they might become in the years ahead. Taking a place-based approach, focus groups and walk-along interviews were conducted in two New Zealand cities. As the study progressed, the participants began to talk about the significance of hope, and lack of hope, in their everyday lives. Drawing on the work of Paulo Freire, it is argued that informed hope can be a powerful humanizing force in young people’s lives and the study suggests that when youth have a strong foundation of hope and belonging, they are often capable of becoming active agents of social change.</p>

There is a chronic underrepresentation of Māori and Pacific academics in our university sector in Aotearoa New Zealand. Sitting behind the disparity are a range of practices that support some groups in Aotearoa New Zealand to succeed and move more freely through higher education institutions than others. In response to scholarship highlighting this issue, a collective of students and staff at Te Herenga Waka | Victoria University of Wellington came together to organise an action-oriented workshop to draw attention to ways that universities are governed through power relations. Attention was also paid to mitigating power imbalances in the organisation, format, and delivery of the event, and between attendees, presenters, and event facilitators from dominant and non-dominant ethnic and cultural groups. This reflection piece is not so much a recounting of the event itself but rather an opportunity to share with the wider academic world ways in which the collective attempted to hold our university accountable for failing in their responsibilities to the people on whose ancestral lands they exist.