University Of Waikato Bookshop

At the University of Waikato we pride ourselves on teaching and research, and academic staff are benchmarked against the best in the world. Each year many of our academics contribute to or write books on their areas of expertise; this page is designed to highlight their achievements. These books are an extension of the academic excellence on offer at Waikato.



Indigenous Courts, Self-Determination and Criminal Justice

By Dr Valmaine Toki

Published by Routledge

Dr Valmaine Toki Associate Professor in Law has released her new book “Indigenous Courts, Self-Determination and Criminal Justice”.

Professor Toki was the First New Zealander appointed as an Expert Member of the United Nations Permanent Forum on indigenous Issues .

With New Zealand as its focus, this book explores how Indigenous peoples this book explores how Indigenous peoples are more likely than any other ethnic group to be apprehended, arrested, prosecuted, convicted andincarcerated, and how this might be alleviated.

It makes the case for an Indigenous court founded on Indigenous conceptions of proper conduct, punishment, and behavior and draws on contemporary notions of ‘therapeutic jurisprudence’ and ‘restorative justice’ in order to argue that such a court would offer an effective way to change and address the disproportionate incarceration of Indigenous peoples.

Visit Routledge for more information or to order a copy

Software Literacy: Education and Beyond

By Elaine Khoo, Craig Hight, Rob Torrens and Bronwen Cowie

This book explores the notion of software literacy, a key part of digital literacy which all contemporary students and citizens need to understand. Software literacy involves a critical understanding of how the affordances and conceptual approaches of everything from operating systems, creative apps and media editors, to software-based platforms and infrastructures work to inform and shape the ways we think and act. As a cultural artefact, programing code plays a role in reproducing, reinforcing, and augmenting existing cultural practices, as well as generating completely new coded practices. A proposed three-tier framework for software literacy is the focus for a two-year empirical investigation into how tertiary students become more literate about the nature and implications of software they encounter as part of their tertiary studies. Two case studies of software learning and use in university-level engineering and screen & media studies courses are presented, investigating the mapping of students’ trajectory of the learning of desktop applications against this framework for software literacy.



Though the book’s focus is primarily educational, its content also has implications for any field that makes use of software and information & communication technology systems and applications. As such, the book will be of interest to all readers whose work involves the challenges and opportunities presented by software-based teaching and learning; and to those interested in how software impacts the workplace and leisure activities that make up our day-to-day lives.

New Books from previous years



Listings of new books from previous years are available for: