ABSTRACT
For a relatively small country, New Zealand is striking for its successive migrations and complex cultural politics. Following earlier arrivals of Maori, Abel Tasman ‘discovered’ the country in 1642, a fact commemorated by prominent poet Allen Curnow (1974), who in 1942 wrote, ‘Simply by sailing in a new direction/You could enlarge the world’. These words are emblematic of other geographical journeys (Kearns and Nichol 2004), for in the twenty-first century, the lines suggest the expanding and globalized subjectivities of New Zealanders, as well as the increasingly fluid boundaries of scholarship in social and cultural geography. Indeed, ours is a physically isolated country, yet one that is intimately connected to wider (predominantly western) worlds and ideas. For instance, debates concerning globalization have been vigorous here, and have spawned influential commentary (e.g. Larner and Le Heron 2002a, 2002b). Likewise core themes and approaches in social and cultural geography noted in Anglo-American traditions resonate (though varyingly) within the research and teaching in this country (Panelli 2004).
