AUT Launches Rainbow Research Portal – A World First

A new e-portal collating decades of Rainbow research will be launched by Auckland University of Technology (AUT) – the first collection of its type in the world.

The e-portal, called Ia, will be unveiled on Wednesday 6 September at a special launch event with guest speaker Ambassador for Gender Equality (Pacific)/Tuia Tāngata, Louisa Wall. Ia will initially house more than 100 Rainbow-specific dissertations and theses, reports, books and queer themed published research journal articles.

The initiative continues AUT’s pioneering commitment to championing Rainbow initiatives: AUT was the first university in New Zealand to develop a Rainbow Staff Network, to achieve the Rainbow Tick and take the Pride Pledge, to appoint a full-time Student Inclusion Manager (Rainbow), and to offer scholarships in partnership with the Rainbow NZ Charitable Trust.

Vice-Chancellor, Professor Damon Salesa, says the e-portal will make the university’s groundbreaking Rainbow research immediately available to students, staff, New Zealand’s Rainbow community and the general public.

“AUT is incredibly proud to be at the forefront of promoting and supporting Rainbow research. Ia is for anyone interested in Rainbow knowledge, from a high school student writing an essay, to an academic researching the nation’s Rainbow history, to media seeking expert knowledge,” Professor Salesa says.

“Ia serves as a living example of visibility and value, demonstrating that AUT is proud of, and acknowledges, the significance and necessity of such research.”

In 2022, AUT established the Rainbow Initiative to give voice to Rainbow knowledge and ensure a strong pathway forward for future Rainbow leaders and researchers. The Ia portal, which is partly funded through the generosity of donor support, is the first project to come out of the Rainbow Initiative and seeks to build a bridge between communities by making Rainbow knowledge and research accessible to all.

This sentiment is woven through the meaning of its name. Ia is an inclusive, genderless Māori pronoun that can also mean current or flow. In that way, it is intended that Rainbow research at AUT flows outward, contributing to the lifeblood of our communities.

Rainbow Initiative spokesperson, Professor Welby Ings, says the e-portal is designed to become a nationally-networked series of repositories that affiliate with Rainbow research from other universities and leading organisations, such as PRIDENZ and the Lesbian and Gay Archives of New Zealand (LAGANZ).

“We identified the need for Ia after unsuccessfully trying to locate precedents internationally. There are research hubs in universities - but nothing that draws decades of one university’s Rainbow research into a single, interdisciplinary, easily-accessed portal. So we just rolled up our sleeves and did something about it,” Professor Ings says.

“We knew it was important because many of us were receiving individual emails from students and communities looking for material that was locked up in expensive, subscription-only journals. Ia is built on the principle of open access and a commitment to research never being shut away in academic journals that people can’t afford to access.”

“However, Ia is about far more than simply being an online library. Rainbow Pride in a university reaches beyond flags and parades – it’s about fulfilling needs with accessible and useful scholarship. It is shaped by dignity and compassion and the need to create a better and fairer society.”

Ia can be accessed here from 11am, Wednesday 6 September: https://ia.aut.ac.nz/

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