Dr Stephen Francis Turner

Biography

Globalism raises questions of colonial Europe and peripheral proxies, other centres and constitutions, including the local challenge in Aotearoa New Zealand posed by First (Indigenous) Law to national governance. The coloniality of the global south is marked by the make-over of Indigenous lands and peoples by media and writing technologies, including ethnographic art, photography, film and television - media that are today equally contestatory.  My critique of settler-indigenism and the bio-security of ‘new’ countries considers the work of geo-media, more broadly, in the organisation of place and peoples. In my teaching, research, art-based activities and activism I try to unpack the on-going settler programme of place-making in view of the long history and dynamic presence of Maori, and, through interrogation of self and origin, to contribute to de-colonisation.

I think of my work on writing, politics and place as a collaboration, informed and influenced by the overlapping projects of many others. My co-construction of writing and artwork has addressed public pedagogy, education design and university architecture. My current interest in the organisational work of writing extends to workplaces, their digitisation and the future of work itself.

Research | Current

Research interests: 

• Global colonialities and settler societies
• Digital society and technocultures
• Public pedagogy and art projects
• Education design, tools and environments
• Geo-media and writing technologies

Book projects:

• Post-settlement in Aotearoa New Zealand 
• With Sean Sturm, The Dissenting University 
• With Sean Sturm, Teaching in Error

Postgraduate supervision

Recently completed PhD:

• Lorenz Poeschl, Public Pedagogy of Identity (co-supervisor Sean Sturm)
• Sabina Rehman, Walls as Transcultural Structures: Space and Place in Anglophone Novels of Lahore, 2016 (co-supervisor, Mark Amsler)
• Robert Sullivan, Mana Moana: Wayfinding and Five Indigenous Poets (2015) (co-supervisor, Selina Tusitala Marsh)
• Tim Corballis, Aesthetics and its Antipodes: Distance, Debt and Perceptible Form, 2014 (co-supervisor, Laurence Simmons)
• John Bevan-Smith, The New Cannibal Club: Deconstructing History in Aotearoa New Zealand, 2014
• Francisc Szekely, The Rise of the Invisible: Microscopes, Keyholes, and Novels, 1665-1765, 2012
• Evija Trofimova, Paul Auster’s Writing Machine: A Thing to Write With, 2012
• Kathy Ooi, Representations: A Critical Study of Chineseness in New Zealand Literature, 2010 (co-supervisor, Hilary Chung)     

Recently completed MA:

• Amy Taylor, Growing Knowledge: Locating our lost savoir-vivre within New Zealand’s Agricultural Industrial Complex (AIC), 2019
• Jane Hargis, Presenting the Thesis-Diagram: A Study in Diagrammatic Dynamics and Making Sense, 2015
• Louisa Chen, Post-leftism: The Political Economy of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, 2012 (co-supervisor, Eluned Summers-Bremner)
• Campbell Birch, Power-Body-Writing: J.M Coetzee, Life and Politics, 2012
• Jessica Holly Bates, Revolting Others: Disgusted Bodies as a Function of Colonial Continuity in Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific, 2011