We have two successful applicants for the first 2026 round of the Kākano Fund. Waikato University’s Johanna Erwardt and Otago University’s Yueke Li are each awarded $300. Johanna will be using this support to attend the International Coral Reef Symposium, which is central to her doctoral research on the knowledge politics of marine science, and Yueke will attend the 2026 Conference for the Social Sciences to present her PhD research on planting and soil practices in food forests.
This fund was generously established by the late, great Dame Joan Metge, and continues to be supported by ASAANZ members. Thank you to supervisors Fiona McCormack and Susan Wardell for championing their supervisees. Thanks also to Barbara for administering the fund’s finances, and Lorena and Jacs for sharing this good news through our website and newsletter respectively.
Dr Courtney Addison, Kākano Fund Chair
Yueke Li
Figuring Development in the Soil: A Study of Planting Food Forest in China and New Zealand
Rooted in a post-development reflection on life, soil, and community, this project investigates food forest practices in South China and Aotearoa New Zealand as patchy formations of the Anthropocene. In China, moral anxieties over food safety and recurring “return to nature” narratives have surfaced across historical moments; in Aotearoa, ancient gardens shaped through Indigenous relations to land stand in sharp contrast to the deeper settler-colonial landscape that surrounds them. Building on studies that understand alternative planting strategies as political and ethical sites of world-making, my research treats gardens as open ontological spaces, where people navigate layered histories and cultivate multispecies relations of care. As a writer, researcher, and eco-community practitioner, I approach soil not as a passive substrate but as an entanglement of relations through which moral, affective, and ecological negotiations unfold. I trace how cultivation practices and soil transformations in China and New Zealand generate new modes of care, ethics, and multiple possible futures.
Johanna Erwardt
Diving Between Worlds: Mātauranga Māori, Western Science, and the Politics of Marine Knowledge in Aotearoa New Zealand
My research examines the politics of knowledge in collaborative marine science in Aotearoa New Zealand, focusing on how governance processes shape power relations, decision-making and inequalities for Indigenous communities in ocean spaces. Using an ethnographic approach, I work alongside marine scientists, hapū, and community partners to examine how collaboration unfolds in practice and how different knowledge systems are negotiated within marine research and management. I analyse how knowledge, authority, and responsibility are produced, interpreted, and mobilised in co-management contexts. This work contributes to broader discussions on Indigenous stewardship, environmental governance, and collaborative approaches to marine management. My research is grounded in fieldwork in Aotearoa and engages with contemporary debates on how marine governance systems shape the production and use of knowledge.
