Daniel McKinnon

Daniel Kiwa McKinnon (Ngāti Rangitihi; Puketapu) is a recent PhD graduate of the University of Queensland with a background in secondary education as an English, Film and Humanities teacher. He was born and raised up and down the East Coast of Australia and has worked for over ten years in the Queensland public education system. 

His research interests include Indigenous educational sovereignty and postcolonial sociologies of schooling and education. With a particular focus on the advent of charter schooling, his PhD explored qualitative research methodologies to develop a more complex and nuanced picture of politics and education in Aotearoa, New Zealand. The study emphasises the etymology and meaning of educational sovereignty against Pākehā discourses of publicness, privatisation and autonomy. On the one hand, it celebrates iwi and hapū institutions and aspirations whilst examining the whiteness of progressive sentiment, including publicness and privatisation, as similar forms of exploitation. On the other hand, it is a meditation of sorts on Indigenous literacies of land and landscape that provides non-Indigenous peoples new avenues and orientations in teaching and learning, reading and writing, speaking and listening, educating and schooling, being and belonging. 

Daniel is currently working with CI Susan Beetson in a project that is exploring technology as a networking tool for Ballardong/Whadjuk (urban WA) and Ngemba (very remote NSW) community members on Country and in the diaspora, including the design, build and embedding of community cultural hubs.