Alison Jones

Alison Jones, who was awarded the Dame Metge Medal in 2014, has worked in the field of sociology of education for 30 years. She began teaching at the University of Auckland in 1986, and has carried out research in a wide range of areas, including feminist theory, an ethnography of Pacific Island girls’ schooling and social anxiety about children’s bodies.

Jones has a fascination with the complexities of Māori and Pākehā educational relationships. She joined Te Puna Wānanga, the School of Māori Education, in 2004 and has studied the earliest educational relationships between Māori and Pākehā. She wrote an award-winning 2011 book on the earliest Māori engagement with handwriting and in 2017 she co-authored Tuai: A Traveller in Two Worlds, which explores the experiences of one of our most prominent pre-Treaty Māori travellers.

Jones is a committed teacher and has won many teaching excellence awards.

This profile is part of the series 150 Women in 150 Words that celebrates women’s contributions to expanding knowledge in New Zealand, running as part of our 150th Anniversary.