This thesis presents an interrogation of curriculum practices and positionings, over time, of a feminist educator and curriculum worker seeking to centre gender and subjugated knowledges in a curriculum framework with the potential for transformative outcomes. The interrogation offers an opportunity to consider discourses in operation, to frame curriculum and pedagogy as sites of discursive struggle around knowledges, gender and power. The thesis, presented as a critical narrative, interweaves theories and theoretical ideas from four key areas: post modernism and post structuralism; feminism/s; education and curriculum, and critical social sciences, including critical theory. Interpretative feminist praxis is employed as the methodological approach. Central to the investigation is a curriculum project undertaken in Papua New Guinea (the Goroka Curriculum Project). This Project which is positioned as a case study, provides text for conceptual and contextual interrogation of a specific site of curriculum work, and a corrective moment in which the limitations of the writer's endeavours and position/s of advantage are acknowledged. Curriculum positionings described as oppositional are challenged as a result of the lack of attention to gender by radical and critical theorists. Further, the disjuncture between such theorising, and the development of curriculum models to inform oppositional work is made overt and problematic. Curriculum models and practices associated with the work of traditional empiricist approaches found to be dominant in Papua New Guinea, reify western intellectual endeavours to the disadvantage of indigenous and women's knowledges and knowledge practices. This naturalisation is framed as an example of a meta narrative in education, whereby the discursive practices associated with traditional / rational curriculum models both colonise the endeavours of curriculum workers, and position learners as colonised subjects. A central outcome of the traditional/rational model is the inherent positioning of such individuals and groups as marginalised, devalued Other. Such curriculum work is framed as a technology of governance, privileging attempts to establish order and homogeneity in an increasingly disorderly and fragmented world. The investigation by the curriculum writer of her theory/practice leads to recognition of oppositional work as a site of power, that also has the potential to 'oppress', extending the colonial project. Following this, the thesis investigates transformative curriculum work as problematic potentiality, questioning what the work of a feminist curriculum writer in a post modern world is to do and to be. While acknowledging there are no innocent discourses of liberation, the potential of the 'courage to know', to attend to pedagogical ethics and ethics of self, and acknowledge the messy, contradictory and deeply political work of curriculum design are posited. An emergent notion of curriculum work as textual practice, within a multi-dimensional framework that conceptualises curriculum as representation is advanced.

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This thesis explores the part gambling plays in an urban setting in Highland Papua New Guinea. Gambling did not exist in (what is now) Goroka Town before European contact, nor Papua New Guinea more broadly, but when I conducted fieldwork in 2009-2010 it was an inescapable part of everyday life. One card game proliferated into a multitude of games for different situations and participants, and was supplemented with slot machines, sports betting, darts, and bingo and lottery games. One could well imagine gambling becoming popular in societies new to it, especially coming on the back of money, wage-work and towns. Yet the popularity of gambling in the region is surprising to social scientists because the peoples now so enamoured by gambling are famous for their love of competitively giving things away, not competing for them. Gambling spread while gifting remained a central part of the way people did transactions. This thesis resists juxtaposing gifting and selfish acquisition. It shows how their opposition is false; that gambling is instead a new analytic technique for manipulating the value of gifts and acquisitions alike, through the medium of money. Too often gambling takes a familiar form in analyses: as the sharp end of capitalism, or the benign, chance-led redistributor of wealth in egalitarian societies. The thesis builds an ethnographic understanding of gambling, and uses it to interrogate theories of gambling, money, and Melanesian anthropology. In so doing, the thesis speaks to a trend in Melanesian anthropology to debate whether monetisation and urbanisation has brought about a radical split in peoples' understandings of the world. Dealing with some of the most starkly ‘modern' material I find a process of inclusive indigenous materialism that consumes the old and the new alike, turning them into a model for action in a dynamic money-led world.