Kōtare and the Colonial Sensorium

This conceptual paper interrogates the affective politics of educational reform in in Aotearoa, New Zealand, arguing that schooling operates as a somatechnical apparatus of racialised governance. It takes the advent of charter schools as a starting point, revealing how Pākehā (white) critiques that frame them as a neoliberal assault on the “public good”, inadvertently reaffirmed the always-already settler-colonial structure of state schooling itself. The paper theorises neoliberalism not as a rupture therefore but as a continuation of western taxonomy ( Hokowhitu, 2016 ) – a vehicle and expression of enclosure. Presenting a heuristic of te kōtare (the kingfisher) the analysis frames educational policy not as abstract regulatory device but as bodily technē of sorting power ( Foucault, 1980 ). Drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s (2003) critique of the overrepresented genres of “Man”, the paper demonstrates how public institutions like schooling normalise settler modes of being as universal. The white defence of public schooling thus emerges as an anxious reaffirmation of settler privilege, enacting a form of policy prolepsis ( Webb and Gulson, 2012 ) that projects a future in the clutches of imperial (disembodied) reason. Weaving together Critical Indigenous Studies and Black Critical Theory, this paper ultimately theorises a form of refusal and restorative world-building ( Simpson, 2014 ; Campt; 2019 ). It shows how whakaaro Māori (Māori knowledge) not only exceed colonial logics but actively cultivates wildness – haunting and unsettling the colonial sensorium.