The Ian Langham Memorial Lecture – Miranda Johnson – The University of Otago
Title: Indigenous knowledge between the global and the planetary
Abstract: Indigenous knowledge is a burgeoning area of inquiry as well as an object of considerable contestation. In this lecture in honour of Professor Ian Langham, I take up the challenge of examining the political, social, and economic implications of the classification and institutionalization of Indigenous knowledge in recent decades. I will talk primarily about the case of ‘mātauranga Māori’ (Māori knowledge) in Aotearoa New Zealand. I examine how ‘mātauranga Māori’ emerged as a concept in academia in the 1980s. By the early twenty-first century, it was being re-imagined as valuable for the nation’s ‘knowledge economy’ in an era of neoliberal globalization. In this changing context, ‘mātauranga Māori’ was depicted as commodifiable and practitioners represented as knowledge-workers for the national economy. More recently, scholars who argue we must rethink the human in an age of planetary disaster perceive a different value in Indigenous knowledge. That is, in how it demonstrates relations between humans and nature that ‘moderns’ (in Bruno Latour’s conception) need to re-learn. I examine the tensions and contradictions between these two different depictions of the value of Indigenous knowledge, one the one hand in relation to economic globalization and, on the other, for the project of rethinking the human in planetary terms.
Bio: Miranda is a historian of colonialism and decolonisation, focusing on issues of settler identity, race, indigeneity, citizenship, and the politics of writing history. Her research focuses on Anglophone settler societies of the South Pacific and North America.
Her first book, The Land is Our History: Indigeneity, Law and the Settler State (Oxford University Press, 2016) examined the wide-ranging effects of legal claims of Indigenous peoples in the settler states of New Zealand, Australia, and Canada in the late twentieth century. It won the W. K. Hancock Prize in 2018 from the Australian Historical Association.
She is currently finishing a book provisionally titled: Redeemer Nation: Myth, History and the Politics of Indigeneity in a Southern Settler State. This book examines the fraught imaginary of ‘biculturalism’ in Aotearoa New Zealand, paying particular attention to history-making and changing historical consciousness over the past five decades.
With Associate Professor Paerau Warbrick (Te Tumu) she is collating a collection of Māori petitions to the colonial New Zealand and British imperial governments in the nineteenth century. This is funded by a University of Otago Research Grant.
She has held prestigious fellowships overseas including a postdoctoral fellowhips with the Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan. She was a tenure-track professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney, where she maintains a research affiliation. She is past-president of the New Zealand Historical Association. In 2026, she was awarded the Ian Langham Memorial Prize in History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney, which honours work that speaks to the political, social, and economic implications of scientific change.
Ian Langham (1942-1984) was one of the pioneers of the academic study of HPS in Australia. Ian was an active exponent of the view that historians of science must examine the political, social and economic implications of scientific change, and believed it was essential for science students in particular to have their attention directed to these implications in order more fully to understand their own work and career choices. This Memorial Lecture aims to sustain and encourage this particular form of critical inquiry at the University of Sydney.
Reception starts from 4:00pm with light refreshments.
Talk starts from 5:00pm.