ABSTRACT. This article draws on whakapapa (‘genealogy; kinship’) as a metaphysical and ethical ground to think alongside the plane of immanence understood here through post-Deleuzian feminist and posthuman reframing (Braidotti, 2019; Colebrook, 2002). In doing so, it stages a speculative crossing between Māori philosophy and Continental theory. Writing from a diasporic Indigenous, trans and nursing body that refuses hierarchical logics that render difference as deficit, this article traces how whakapapa – as ontological weave rather than genealogical record – takes kinship, ancestral transmission and elemental relation to be the ground of being. Through this framework, the article examines institutional care as a site of both exhaustion and refusal. It addresses where colonial grammars recode relational obligations into administrative instruments and where nurses, particularly those carrying Indigenous knowledge, navigate the gap between policy and presence. Drawing on Audre Lorde’s (1984) concept of the erotic, Sara Ahmed’s (2017) figure of the institutional wall, Joan Tronto’s (1993) political theory of care and Carl Mika’s (2016) Māori philosophy of worldedness, the article insists that care, like whakapapa, exceeds what can be measured, documented or possessed. The coda refuses resolution, holding the article open as an ongoing negotiation. 

 

Keywords: whakapapa; plane of immanence; Māori philosophy; nursing; Indigenous epistemology

 

How to cite: Kapo, F. V. (2026). Whakapapa and immanence: Towards an ethics of care. Knowledge Cultures, 14(1), 7–18. https://doi.org/10.22381/kc14120261

 

Received July 8, 2025 • Received in revised form February 22, 2026

Accepted February 25, 2026 • Available online April 1, 2026