ABSTRACT. Māori research is keenly aware of the need to solve problems, which has created a tendency to favour qualitative research methods. In this article, we suggest another way. This ‘way,’ which we call whakaaro, draws on the invisible agency of things in the world, permitting a certain openness to thought and to the literature that the Māori scholar encounters. But more than this, whakaaro can allow for gaps in ‘knowing,’ which perhaps have the greatest affordance in allowing things in the world to present themselves. There is a danger when any interpretative stance becomes dominant. In the current era, the dominant empirico-rational orientation towards the world results in the undermining of obscurity, uncertainty and unknowability in Māori research. But it is not clear that certainty was ever the concern of Māori philosophical inquiry. We draw on a Māori term, ‘whakaaro,’ to articulate both a dangerous place in scholarship and an ‘epistemic wilderness’ through which one can escape those demands of the academy such as clarity, certainty and banality. In an era when thought is taken to be ‘indecent,’ we argue that whakaaro takes thought to its more radical activity of destabiliser.

Keywords: kaupapa Māori; whakaaro; Māori metaphysics; research; rangahau

How to cite: Maclean, J. N., & Mika, C. (2025). Joyfully defiant: Contradistinction and whakaaro in Māori research. Knowledge Cultures, 13(3), 74–84. https://doi.org/10.22381/kc13320256

Received November 10, 2025 • Received in revised form November 26, 2025
Accepted November 26, 2025 • Available online December 1, 2025