New Year Honour for Professor Jones

Congratulations to Professor Alison Jones from Te Puna Wānanga who was named a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the New Year Honours list.

Professor Alison Jones (right) with her fellow Ockham New Zealand Book Award-winning author Professor Kuni Kaa Jenkins (left)

The honour was bestowed on Professor Alison Jones for her more than three decades of services to education and sociology research. She now teaches in Te Puna Wānanga, School of Maori and Indigenous Education, at the Faculty of Education and Social Work.

According to the official citation, Professor Jones’s areas of study have included feminist theory, an ethnographic study of Pacific Islands girls’ schooling, social anxiety about touching children, and Māori-Pākehā educational relationships. She has been the author, editor and co-author of many research articles, as well as 12 books including Tuai: A traveller in two worlds which won a prestigious Ockham New Zealand Book Award in 2018, and He kōrero: Words between us – First Māori-Pākehā conversations on paper which received several non-fiction and educational book awards in 2012.

In addition, the citation highlights Professor Jones’s role as a manuscript reviewer for several international journals and publishers. “She has successfully supervised more than 70 postgraduate research projects, including 24 completions at doctoral level.”

Professor Jones has received a number of research and teaching awards during her career and was awarded the Dame Joan Metge Medal from the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2014.