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Research Commons is the University of Waikato's open access research repository, housing research publications and theses produced by the University's staff and students.

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Research reciprocity and the ABC's of ABS
(Te Kotahi Research Institute, University of Waikato, 2026) Hudson, Maui; Hutchins, Leke
Attribution, Benefit Sharing, and Capacity Building across the research lifecycle. What is Research Reciprocity? It represents a deep commitment to partnership with communities in research collaborations. It emphasizes the need for both benefit sharing and power sharing in the data life cycle. What is ABS? Access and Benefit Sharing governs how genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge are accessed, and how benefits from their use are shared fairly and equitably. Why it matters: Research and commercialization have often separated biodiversity and knowledge from the peoples who sustain them. ABS addresses unequal returns.
Access and benefit sharing considerations for ancient eDNA and crop genomes
(Te Kotahi Research Institute, University of Waikato, 2026-10-28) Hutchins, Leke
Ancient environmental DNA and crop genomics can reconstruct past environments, trace crop histories, and recover genetic variation relevant to contemporary environmental and agricultural challenges. These possibilities also raise questions about who may authorize access, whose histories and stewardship are represented in genomic data, and how benefits should be shared. This report examines those questions through access and benefit sharing (ABS), Indigenous Data Sovereignty, and Indigenous data governance. The central argument is that responsible research requires governance throughout the full research lifecycle. Initial access agreements and eventual benefit sharing leave a “missing middle” in which samples become sequence data, analyses produce interpretations, and outputs enter repositories, breeding programmes, or commercial applications. Consent, mutually agreed terms, provenance, data governance, attribution, and accountability must remain active through these stages and into subsequent reuse. Neither the age of a sample nor its environmental character removes its relationships to living peoples. Soil, water, permafrost, archaeological materials, and historical specimens may remain connected to Indigenous territories, ancestors, cultural practices, and continuing systems of responsibility. Human genetic bycatch creates additional concerns about privacy and consent. Describing materials as ancient should therefore prompt attention to their histories and relationships rather than presume that they are culturally unclaimed. The discussion of kalo demonstrates why globally circulating crops can retain specific genealogical and cultural significance. A layered approach to benefit sharing distinguishes direct responsibilities to project partners, enduring responsibilities to wider communities of stewardship, and broader responsibilities when genomic value circulates through international research and commercial systems. These layers also inform research on barley, rice, and wheat, whose useful diversity reflects long histories of cultivation, exchange, and farmer innovation. For ancient eDNA and crop genome research, the practical task is to establish continuing community authority, clear conditions for materials and data, and benefits defined with the people whose lands, knowledge, and stewardship make the work possible. Genomic interventions should be assessed in relation to equitable governance, farmer and community autonomy, ecological responsibility, and the restoration of relationships disrupted by extractive research and industrial agriculture.
Introduction - From door to door to digital: The evolving social survey in the making of modern knowledge
(Berghahn Books, 2026) Greenhalgh, Charlotte; Corbould, Clare
The technologies and methods of twentieth-century social surveys are ubiquitous in the early decades of the twenty first century. Today, private companies, political campaigns and news organizations poll, survey, interpret, publicize and monetize the opinions of so-called ordinary people. Notably, people’s opinions drive their engagement with large social media platforms and generate profits for global businesses. And yet, the methods used and people who seek to quantify public opinion are often disconnected from the histories of these practices.
Sporting mega-events, physical activity, and actor network theory: Mapping actants of movement at the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup
(Sage, 2025) Brice, Julie Elizabeth; Thorpe, Holly Aysha
This article explores the potential of Bruno Latour's Actor Network Theory (ANT) for rethinking the relationship between sporting mega-events and physical activity (PA). Engaging with ANT as theory and methodology, we explore how PA is a result of human–nonhuman interactions occurring during and around sporting events. More specifically, based upon a collaborative ethnography of the 2023 FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) Women's World Cup (FWWC23), we focus on humans and nonhumans (football, physical spaces, and seats) as actants (intermediaries and mediators) that enabled and/or constrained PA. In so doing, we provide an alternative to PA initiatives (such as the collaboration between FIFA and the World Health Organization with the BeActive #BringtheMoves campaign at the FWWC23) that focus on human intentionality and view the body as controllable. Instead, in this article we recognize PA as a complex phenomenon dis/re/assembling as objects, humans, and actants interact in (un)expected ways. Simultaneously, we discuss both the affordances and challenges offered by ANT in sporting mega-event literature and for research and policies that link sporting events and PA.
Generics in Go and lambda lifting
(The University of Waikato, 2026) Levy, Tom; Reeves, Steve
This thesis examines the history of generics in the Go programming language, and analyses two specific issues that arise: local type declarations inside generic functions, and embedded type parameters. This work includes a novel algorithm for lambda lifting, a problem closely related to the handling of local types inside generic functions in Go. The correctness of this algorithm is proven with respect to both a specification from the literature and additional specifications. Parts of these proofs are formalised using the Lean 4 theorem prover. For embedded type parameters, this thesis proposes sound member promotion rules for type parameters embedded in struct types in Go. The testing methodology used in this thesis centres around "checking", which strikes a middle ground between formal verification and testing.