Cultural Safety in Aotearoa New Zealand: Public lecture

Overview of the lecture

Nāu te rourou, nāku te rourou, ka ora ai te iwi
With your food basket and my food basket, the people will thrive

Speaker: Dr Tania Fleming, Midwife, academic, and researcher, Auckland University of Technology
Discussant: Elsie Gayle, Midwife, educator, and advocate

This whakataukī (proverb) speaks to collaboration, shared responsibility, and the idea that everyone has something valuable to contribute. It provides a fitting starting point for a lecture that explores Cultural Safety as a framework for understanding power, responsibility, and care in contemporary social life.

Cultural Safety and Kawa Whakaruruhau were developed in Aotearoa New Zealand as responses to racism, inequity, and the ongoing impacts of colonisation. They offer practical ways of understanding how power operates in everyday interactions, institutions, research, health, education, and public life — and how those power dynamics can be challenged. Developed through the leadership of the late Dr Irihapeti Ramsden, Cultural Safety represents a shift away from learning about ‘other cultures’ and towards critical self‑reflection, relationship‑building, and shared responsibility. Rather than focusing on what others should change, Cultural Safety asks us to examine our own assumptions, positions of power and privilege, and the systems we are part of.

Grounded in Te Tiriti o Waitangi (a Treaty signed by the Crown & Māori Chiefs), Cultural Safety recognises the responsibility of institutions and individuals to consider how policies, practices and everyday actions can either reinforce inequity or support self-determination. While its origins lie in health, Cultural Safety has since been taken up across education, research, social services, business, and community settings. This lecture focuses not on transferring approaches wholesale, but on adaptation, reflexivity, partnership with communities, and the possibilities for meaningful structural change in diverse contexts.

Participants will be invited to reflect on questions of power, identity, responsibility, and resistance, and to consider how Cultural Safety can support more just, inclusive, and collaborative ways of working. The lecture will be of interest to anyone concerned with social justice, decolonisation, community accountability, and the role of institutions in shaping everyday experiences of care, safety, and belonging.

Why attend this lecture?

Cultural Safety and Kawa Whakaruruhau were developed in Aotearoa New Zealand as responses to racism, inequity, and the ongoing impacts of colonisation. They offer practical ways of understanding how power operates in everyday interactions, institutions, research, health, education, and public life — and how those power dynamics can be challenged.

Open to community members, practitioners and researchers.