- Title
- Kaupapa Maaori and the construction of Maaori Pasifika NRL players in The Daily Telegraph
- Creator
- Stobbs, Ngaio Martha
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2024
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- This study set out to find out to what extent Kaupapa Maaori principles could be applied to the interpretation of newspaper articles from The Daily Telegraph which were focused on Maaori-Pasifika NRL players. It examined what kinds of ideologies and world views determined the journalistic decisions identified in the construction of Maaori-Pasifika NRL players and if any agency for these players could be identified in these newspaper articles. In this case the study required a cultural framework that was amenable to the examination of The Daily Telegraph and that would also reconcile the epistemological and ontological divide between the socialist perspectives of Maaori-Pasifika peoples and the conservative neo-liberal leaning of the Sydney tabloid. The framework’s principles needed to guide the analytical process and ensure that Cook Island Maaori, Fiji, Samoa, and Tonga could be included in this. To accomplish this the literature review provided an epistemological orientation which tracks, firstly, the development of deterministic object and structuralist oriented ideas through Marxist consciousness dialectics, Althusserian structuralism and Gramscian ideology. Alongside this the study, secondly, explored the voluntaristic and subject focused orientation of Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. These two seemingly separate streams of thought found their way into the complementarity of the Bourdieusian object-subject amalgam of habitus, field, and cultural capital which reconciled agency and supposed deterministic structures. This development of thinking has contributed to a rigorous philosophical framework that helped situate Kaupapa Maaori theory in this study as an amalgam of the subject-object dichotomy and resulted in a complementary approach which reconciled the human decisions being made (agency) with nature, land, kinship systems and world views (structures) perceived as pertinent to both Western and Maaori and/or Pasifika ways of thinking. This reconciliation of thinking systems provided three things; a conceptual framework, a rigorous philosophical frame which supported the adaptation of Kaupapa Maaori theory in relation to Australian sport and its media contexts as well as a way to establish the analytical working tool. Methodologically, the study used an analytical process which helped understand the construction of Maaori-Pasifika rugby league players as they were portrayed in The Daily Telegraph and at the same time, allowed for an examination of what can be elicited about the NRL from the newspaper content itself. This methodological section set out the conceptual framework, the study’s purpose, its assumptions, research questions, sample, and a review of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and content analysis (CA) both of which constitute the principal methods for the analysis. It presents the analytical working tools comprising genre, framing, presupposition, and representation and finishes with an overview of data collection, data organisation, trustworthiness, limitations, and ethics. The analysis then applied the adapted Kaupapa Maaori research principles to cast a cultural lens across the data set. It provided analysis and discussion of the extent to which the cultural framework can assist the interpretation of newspaper stories, looked at word relationships and intertextual contexts of discourse types that can be taken as common presuppositions by journalists and others. It also responded to ways representations were built, through examining who was being represented, the impressions the images gave, and how the ideal subject was positioned in the article. The analysis also highlighted the extent of journalistic decision-making in the construction of the study’s group of interest, and finally connected these and the artificial intelligence algorithms used to predict game outcomes and player performance built on the notion of ‘star’ players. It argued that team selection indicated player choices that ensured inclusion into club or representative squads and connected this to player agency. The study concludes that the adapted Kaupapa Maaori principles positioned the study well to examine the conservative neo-liberal settings of the Sydney tabloid The Daily Telegraph while acknowledging that further developments are needed to properly address cultural perspectives not only of Maaori-Pasifika but of various indigenous research frameworks that the study sees as having the potential to benefit from this approach.
- Subject
- Kaupapa Maaori principles; Australasian Maaori Pasifika superstructure; modes and means of production; ideology; hegemony; habitus; field; capital
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1511451
- Identifier
- uon:56499
- Rights
- Copyright 2024 Ngaio Martha Stobbs
- Language
- eng
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 11 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 223 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |