Diane O'Rourke
Vale Dr Diane O’Rourke
We are sad to inform the University community of the passing of Dr Diane O’Rourke. Diane passed away after a short illness at the Mary Potter Hospice in Wellington on the 29th of June.
Diane earned a BA at Wellesley and an MA and PhD at Washington University in St Louis where she conducted fieldwork on mortuary practices, class, and community decline in Greece, research which she later published in well-known international journals including American Ethnologist, The Journal for the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, and the Journal of Modern Greek Studies.
She joined the Anthropology programme at Victoria University of Wellington in 1988, where she was a popular and engaging lecturer. Dr Corinna Howland, a former ANTH 102 student of Diane’s, recalls her fondly: “Diane always made us feel a welcome and necessary part of university life, which I was especially grateful for as a first-year student. She would occasionally invite us to the old Staff Club for after lecture discussions and make a special effort to take our ideas seriously”. Diane also taught Dr Catherine Trundle during her Honours year: “I remember how inclusive she was in the classroom, at bringing diverse perspectives into discussion. How warm she was in creating a classroom atmosphere. She was passionate about understanding power and its effects. Her class was the first that really challenged me to consider the intersections of inequality in the world around me”.
In her later career Diane developed a passion for the anthropology of policy. She will be remembered especially for her dedicated support of refugee-background students at the University and for her outreach in the refugee community in Wellington at large, for which she won a Public Contribution Award with colleagues in 2013. Professor Sara Kindon remembers her work: “Diane was deeply committed to former refugees and to working to better refugee resettlement in this country. Along with Dr Angela Joe, Dr Mary Roberts and myself, Diane formed the core team of academics leading a new Victoria University of Wellington Network to Support Refugee Background Students from 2007. She was a staunch advocate and stalwart colleague in the Network, establishing a Drop-In Centre for these students and carrying out important research into the impacts of cuts to refugee study grants in 2010. We also worked together on the first national study of refugee-background students' experiences of tertiary education, resulting in a paper being tabled with the Minister of Education arguing for these students to be made an equity group within education policy and practice”. Her research was also published in local journal Kotuitui. Following Diane’s retirement, her commitments in the refugee community took her to Somaliland, where she became an Associate Professor at the University of Hargeysa.
Diane will be missed.