She has been President of NZARE the New Zealand Association for Research in Education, a member of the Tertiary Education Advisory Commission, a member of the Health Research Council and Chair of the Maori Health Committee, Chair of the Social Sciences Panel of the Marsden Council and member of the Constitutional Review Panel. Professor Smith has served on a number of New Zealand's national bodies. She has worked with a number of Maori scholars most notably her husband Professor Graham Hingangaroa Smith. Her other publications canvass a wide range of academic disciplines. Her 1998 book Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples has become a seminal text in indigenous studies. She is well known for her publications, public speaking and research leadership. Professor Smith has an academic background in education and research and has a long career as an inter-disciplinary scholar. Professor Smith is Pro Vice-Chancellor Maori with responsibilities for Maori development at the University of Waikato as well as Dean of the School of Maori and Pacific Development and a professor of Education and Maori Development. It brilliantly demonstrates that 'when indigenous peoples become the researchers and not merely the researched, the activity of research is transformed.' In setting an agenda for planning and implementing indigenous research, the author shows how such programmes are part of the wider project of reclaiming control over indigenous ways of knowing and being.Įxploring the broad range of issues which have confronted, and continue to confront, indigenous peoples, in their encounters with western knowledge, this book also sets a standard for truly emancipatory research. The second part of the book meets the urgent need for people who are carrying out their own research projects, for literature which validates their frustrations in dealing with various western paradigms, academic traditions and methodologies, which continue to position the indigenous as 'Other'. Providing a history of knowledge from the Enlightenment to Postcoloniality, she also discusses the fate of concepts such as 'discovery, 'claiming' and 'naming' through which the west has incorporated and continues to incorporate the indigenous world within its own web. Extending the work of Foucault, she explores the intersections of imperialism, knowledge and research, and the different ways in which imperialism is embedded in disciplines of knowledge and methodologies as 'regimes of truth'. In the first, the author critically examines the historical and philosophical base of Western research. Here, an indigenous researcher issues a clarion call for the decolonization of research methods.

From the vantage point of the colonized, the term 'research' is inextricably linked with European colonialism the ways in which scientific research has been implicated in the worst excesses of imperialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world's colonized peoples.

Decolonizing methodologies