Meg Parsons

I am an Associate Professor in Environmental Management within the School of Environment at the University of Auckland and teach courses that are part of the Human Geography and Environmental Management Programmes. Previously, I was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Australian National Climate Change Research Facility (NCCARF) based out of Griffith University, and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne. In addition, I worked at the Waitangi Tribunal as a Historian. I completed my PhD ‘Spaces of Disease: The Creation and Management of Aboriginal Health and Disease in Queensland’ at the University of Sydney in 2009.

Growing up in a small predominately Indigenous coastal community in Aotearoa New Zealand as someone of mixed Indigenous and non-Indigenous heritage (what we call whakapapa in the Māori language), I was always aware of the ways in which the impacts of colonisation continued to shape the lives of Indigenous and non-Indigenous individuals, whānau (families), communities and nations, as well as the geographical spaces they occupied. I was aware that there were particular geographies of inclusion and exclusion even in my small town where everyone knew one another as well as their families and as their ancestors (tupuna) as well, and that the environments we lived, walked, played, swam, fished, farmed, and gardened in were becoming increasingly degraded as a consequence of human activities. I also notice that I and many of my family experienced significant medical problems and struggled to get access to health services when we needed them most. Accordingly, I wanted to know more about the drivers of these processes and understand the connections between power relations, privilege, knowledge and authority, and subjectivities, and the connections with environmental changes and the health and wellbeing of marginalised communities. From my early days as an undergraduate student at the University of Waikato I continued to be interested in the relationships between places and people, and how these relationships shift, change, are maintained, and contested over time, and my desire to know more about what this meant in terms of social-ecological changes deepened over my years studying at the University of Sydney and later working at the University of Melbourne, Griffith University and now at the University of Auckland. My research is transdisciplinary in scope and nature and crosses the boundaries between human geography, historical studies, the history and philosophy of science, and environmental management. I am particularly interested in how different values and belief systems are translated into policies and practical actions, how these change over time, and the ways in which discourses influence both the construction and practices of scientific knowledge in colonial/post-colonial contexts. Initially, my work focused on the social history of medicine and historical geographies, but increasingly I am interested in the question of how historical inquiries can enrich discussions of climate change adaptation. Key topics of interest include:
• Social dimensions of climate change adaptation
• Resilience and sustainable transformations
• Environmental histories
• Historical geographies of settler societies
• Social history of medicine for Indigenous societies
Address: School of Environment,
10 Symonds Street,
Auckland 1010
New Zealand