HOME: GEA Conference 2026

E ngā iwi o te motu, ngā hau e whā, ngā karangaranga maha, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.

AUT is excited to host you for the 2026 Gender and Education Association international conference in Aotearoa New Zealand.

This conference draws inspiration from the Māori whakataukī (proverb):

Whakarongo ake au ki te tangi a te manu e tui tui mai nei,  

Ka rongo te po, ka rongo te ao 

I listen to the call of the bird signaling that the earth  

hears all, feels all, senses all. 

The birds of Aotearoa--ngā manu--gift us unique inspiration and metaphor. They are ubiquitous characters in whakataukī (Māori proverbs) and pūrākau (Māori narratives) and come to us as both a gift of the whenua (land) and as timeless oracles out of the archives of our kaitiaki (custodians). They are also always in time, if we notice them out of the corner of our eye, flitting from branch to branch like Pīwakawaka, or, like the Kākāpō, making a raucous mess of the rimu fruit, watching the forest through the night with its burrowing sisters, the Roroa and the Tokoeka.

Whakataukī and Pūrākau speak to us in the present, awakening us again to inspiration in the field of Gender and Education. Here birds have the power to draw us into both old/new ways of thinking and old/new gratitude for a world that is always becoming. Birds draw us into dreaming—dreams appearing as they do like mischievous Kererū in the Kōwhai tree, heralding the myriad potentialities ahead, possibilities of healing, chatter, restoration, playfulness, rejuvenation, resistance, transformation in queer and feminist experiences in education and in society.

Perhaps in a beautiful entanglement (Barad, 2007), the whakataukī and pūrākau of the birds meets Hélène Cixous’ dreams of birds, and together they symbolise generative acts of liberation, queering the proper, of belonging, drawing up the creative and unbounded song of the Kōrimako that sings to us of the possibility of an ethics of joy (Braidotti, 2018) in the expectation of difference, buoyed by the curiosity of Tui and the resilience of Kōkako as life giving tenets of a liberating pedagogy (hooks, 2014).

There is an encounter in this, of what is Indigenous, with that far away, a pandemonium of philosophies, feminisms, pedagogies, ecologies, activisms and poetries meeting each other over the motu (island), but also, we find bird-life in the treetops, under fern fronds, nested in gullies and deep in the mountains, all in bird-form soaring, (flightless or in flight).

Haere mai. Welcome.