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Ms Sarah Tuhoro

Academic Board of Governance master's student representative

Qualifications:
Graduate Certificate in Māori and Indigenous Studies, University of Waikato, NZ, 2023Bachelor of Social Science (Human Services), MBSS, University of South Australia, AUS, 2017
Availability:
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Experience, background and philosophy

Sarah Tuhoro (Ngāi Tūhoe, Ngāti Porou, Rongowhakaata, Pākehā) is a Māori woman living and working on Kaurna Country. She seeks to be a respectful guest on unceded Aboriginal land and brings a commitment to Indigenous solidarity alongside an awareness of her responsibilities as a settler within the Australian context.

Sarah works at the intersection of leadership and management, higher education, and Critical Indigenous Studies, and she centres institutional accountability to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples and Knowledges. Since entering the higher-education sector in 2023, she has contributed to institution-level work embedding Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives into strategy and design; and is now employed as a Senior Project Manager working to establish the new Adelaide University’s Deputy Vice-Chancellor Indigenous Portfolio. Her work is aligned with values of self-determination, courageous accountability and reciprocity, and she brings a decade of experience working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and stakeholders.

Sarah is currently in her third year of NIODA’s Master of Leadership & Management (Organisation Dynamics), and her research brings systems psychodynamics together with sociological insights from Critical Indigenous Studies to examine the unconscious dynamics that enable or constrain non-Aboriginal engagement in decolonial work.

Sarah’s leadership approach is straightforward: build agency and hold accountability. She encourages colleagues to act as transformative agents in anti-racist and decolonial change and prioritises the relational work that makes that possible. She rejects tokenism and optics, and advocates for community-led change, backed by the hard, practical work of transforming systems that perpetuate harm.

Looking ahead, Sarah is preparing for doctoral study to better understand the conditions which lead to decolonial outcomes, with the hope of extending its impact across education and leadership systems.