Rebecca Kiddle began her career working for the New Zealand government. Following the completion of undergraduate degrees in Politics, Women’s and Maori studies, where she worked predominantly as a Housing policy analyst for the Aotearoa/New Zealand government and as Private Secretary Housing for the Associate Minister of Housing in New Zealand’s parliament. During this time she became increasingly aware of the need to link housing research and policy to physical space design more directly. This led her to undertaking an MA and PhD in urban design at the Joint Centre for Urban Design at Oxford Brookes University, throughout which she has focused my research on topics that aim to realise the built environment implications of current policy and practice. For her MA, she explored the spatial implications of policy that encourages mixed income neighbourhoods. For my PhD, she investigated the spatial implications of social constructivist pedagogy on university educational space. Throughout my PhD, she taught on both postgraduate and undergraduate modules at the Joint Centre of Urban Design.
More recently she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Royal Holloway, University of London on a project called Indigeneity in the Contemporary World: Politics, Performance, Belonging funded by the European Research Council. This transnational and interdisciplinary project explores “what indigeneity has come to mean in particular places and at key moments over the last several decades, and what kind of cultural, political, ethical and aesthetic issues are negotiated within its canvass” (www.indigeneity.net). Her fellowship sought to understand how Māori notions of sustainability and Māori identity generally could be used to inform New Zealand’s place identity.
Rebecca then spent 3 years working in China at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University as a Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design before returning home to Aotearoa to work for Victoria University as a Lecturer in Environmental Studies and Geography.