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Areas of expertise: knowledge and equity; education policy; race and anti-racist pedagogy; Indigenous education; teacher education; sociology of education; critical autoethnography; critical qualitative research; discourse analysis
HDR Supervisor accreditation status: Full
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-7722-1771
Phone:+61 02 970 14460
Email: [email protected]
Location: ACU Strathfield Campus
I am interested in how knowledge is produced, whose knowledge is recognised, and what this means for equity in education and social practices more broadly. How do particular ideas come to be accepted as ‘true’, authoritative, or common sense, and whose perspectives are overlooked in the process? My research in the sociology and socio-cultural politics of education examines how power relations, policy, and governance shape these processes, influencing educational practices and opportunities for participation. Using critical policy sociology and critical qualitative inquiry, my early research investigated how global reform agendas are translated into local contexts, and how dominant understandings of educational quality, accountability and success can reproduce inequities.
My current research brings together racism and racial literacy in teacher education, widening access and diversifying the teaching workforce, and Indigenous Pasifika ways of knowing and being. Central to this work is Talanoa, which I approach as an onto-epistemological framework connecting knowledge, being and ethical responsibility. I also explore decolonising time and slow ontology in educational practice, asking how life might be organised around relational presence, collective inquiry and care rather than speed, competition and measurable productivity. These interests inform projects on anti-racist pedagogy and assessment, relational connection in online education, and structurally-informed approaches to teacher education pathways.
In my everyday work, I try to sustain collective research and writing spaces by drawing on collaborative critical autoethnography, critical qualitative research, and writing as inquiry. Here we connect lived experience with wider institutional and social structures, examining how recognition, belonging and authority are negotiated in educational settings. In these collectives, our writing includes collaborative writing on transnational experiences in teacher education, racialised teacher migration, the more-than-human in online spaces, and a slow ontology of anti-racist praxis. Grounded in a feminist Pasifika Indigenous ethics of care, my work seeks to create space for knowledge-making that is relational, critically reflexive, and ethically accountable to the communities it engages.
Visit Website https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Katarina_Tuinamuana