Professor Tracey Kathleen Dorothy McIntosh

Biography

Tracey McIntosh, MNZM, is Ngāi Tūhoe and is Professor of Indigenous Studies and Co-Head of Te Wānanga o Waipapa (School of Māori Studies and Pacific Studies) at the University of Auckland. She was the former Co-Director of Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga New Zealand’s Māori Centre of Research Excellence. She previously taught in the sociology and criminology programme at the University of Auckland. She was a Fulbright Visiting Lecturer in New Zealand Studies at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. and lectured at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji. She has sat on a number of assessment panels including PBRF panels ( Māori Knowledge and Development and Social Sciences) Marsden Social Science Panel, Rutherford Discovery, James Cook Fellowship and Health Research Council Panels.

In 2012 she served as the co-chair of the Children’s Commissioner’s Expert Advisory Group on Solutions to Child Poverty.​ In 2018-2019 she was a member of the Welfare Expert Advisory Group (WEAG) which released the report Whakmana Tangata: Restoring Dignity to Social Security in New Zealand (2019) and Te Uepū Hapai i te Ora- The Safe and Effective Justice Advisory Group which released the report He Waka Roimata: Transforming our Criminal Justice System (2019). A second report will be released soon. She sits on a range of advisory groups and boards for government and community organisations. She currently delivers education and creative writing programmes in prisons.​

Her recent research focused on incarceration (particularly of Māori and Indigenous peoples) and issues pertaining to poverty, inequality and social justice. She recognises the significance of working with those that have lived expereince of incarceration and marginalisation and acknowledges them as experts of their own condition. She has a strong interest in the interface between research and policy.

Her earlier work looked at extreme death experience (genocide, war, torture) particularly in the way it relates to what she calls systematic suffering. Her work in this area has focused on the Holocaust and on the Rwandan genocide.

Tracey has a commitment to addressing issues that concern Māori and draws on a critical Indigenous studies framework.

Research | Current

• Incarceration with a focus on Māori and Indigenous incarceration
• Decarceration and prison abolition
• Crime and extreme marginalisation
• Whānau flourishing
• Poverty, child poverty,
• Social harm reduction including a focus on culturally informed violence prevention
• Sociology of death and dying
• Sociology of religion

Teaching | Current

MĀORI 330: Te Ao Hou: Contemporary Māori Issues

Postgraduate supervision

Tracey supervises across a wide range of areas particularly as the pertain to Māori and Indigenous peoples. She supervises in all aspects of incarcerations, decareration policies and social justice issues.