SAANZ Conference 2024

Chair: Anna Friedlander

Jay Jomar F Quintos
“The Rot that Remains” in the Cinematic Rendering of the Islamised Indigenous Peoples in Mindanao, Philippines

In this presentation, I aim to examine the remaindered lives depicted in the cinema on the Moro – a collective term for the Islamised Indigenous peoples of Mindanao, Philippines – produced after the all-out war of the Philippine government against the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). Three films could be cited to demonstrate this: Marilou Diaz Abaya’s Bagong Buwan (New Moon) (2001), Gutierrez Mangansakan II’s House of the Crescent Moon (2002), and Adjani Arumpac’s Walai (Home) (2006). These films engage with spaces that exhibit what Derek Walcott (1992) considers “the rot that remains” enmeshed in the “elegiac pathos” and “prolonged sadness” where “the melancholy (is) as contagious as the fever of a sunset like the gold fronds of diseased coconut palms.” The perplexed characterization of the remaindered lives of the Moro amidst the wars in Mindanao might be productive to construe as congruent to what Ann Laura Stoler (2016) calls “duress” – the colonial effects that “may sometimes be a trace but more often an enduring fissure, a durable mark” (6). Duress is similar to durabilities as they are both the hardened, intractable, and tenacious qualities of colonialism. These forces penetrate the sinews and sites of the mundane and monumental seen in waste, surplus, trash, rubbles, and decays. Such presence of the remaindered lives trying to escape the duress and durabilities are astutely calibrated in how the Indigenous peoples of Mindanao, particularly the Moro, endure the constraints and confinements of the historical, political, and economic conditions brought by colonialism and other imperial forces and dangers. The Indigenous peoples of Mindanao – with what remained to them outside the value-laden lives imposed by the viruses of civilisation – wrestle with the durable effects and marks of colonial orders and forces that are already ingrained in various lifeways and lifeworlds. 

Sonja Bohn 
Telling the stories of mountains: the social production of value in nature tourism

Storytelling, or “interp” as guides in Piopiotahi Milford Sound call it, is part of the labour that produces economic value for one of Aotearoa’s major export industries – nature tourism. This work forges a connection between tourists and the land on which they’re hosted, but it also draws on and reinforces the idea of wilderness as other to the human world, enhancing the value of ‘wild’ nature. This investment in naturalness often disguises the political and social relations that underlie tourism work.

The tourism industry has recently been subject to critique, resulting in calls for slow travel, regenerative sustainability, and values-based tourism. These aim to reduce environmental and social harms and provide more meaningful tourism experiences, often diversifying toward eco and high-end products. Such offerings fulfil the romantic notions of authenticity-seeking nature tourists and often appear less commercial aesthetically, but they rarely consider labour relations and do not inherently challenge the precepts of capitalism.
On the other hand, engaging with Marxism and anti-colonial theory allows critique to shift away from tourism end-products, to considering the relations that enable their production, including labour relations, Indigenous dispossession, and environmental exploitation. Such a relational focus could lead beyond a reductive authenticity/commodification binary, toward imagining travel in a world where place-host-guest interactions are characterised by whanaungatanga: good relationships.


Steve Matthewman, Luke Goode, Peter Simpson, Raven Cretney, John Reid
The Residential Red Zone (RRZ) as Futures Lab - Placemaking in the Anthropocene: Preliminary Findings

Aotearoa New Zealand has long been considered a global laboratory. It is one of the most urbanised, unequal and disaster-prone countries in the world. Ōtautahi-Christchurch is paradigmatic here. An “extreme city” in terms of its inequalities and environmental hazards, the Canterbury Earthquake Sequence created the biggest urban renewal project in this country’s history. The 2010 earthquake also gave the city’s poorest suburbs the equivalent of half a century to a hundred years of sea-level rise in a single hit. The future has already arrived here. Managed retreat has taken place. The residential red zone (RRZ), 602 hectares of land along the Avon Ōtākaro River Corridor, is arguably the greatest area of managed retreat in an urban setting anywhere in the world.

This presentation shares preliminary findings from our Marsden-funded research on the RRZ. In so doing, it offers insights into the “sociology to come”. Cities are the landscapes of the Anthropocene, and this century’s political ecologies will most sharply manifest in littoral zones such as where Ōtautahi-Christchurch is located. To date, the literature on managed retreat has been monopolised by technocratic concerns of policy, governance and compensation. We offer insights into the complexities of managed retreat at a human scale.

Chair: Simon Clay

Chris Brickell
Who’s Afraid of Performativity?

We don’t know what performativity means any more. There is a lot of talk about ‘performative’ (read: empty) gestures in the context of online and offline activism, while Judith Butler’s formulation from 1990 – which brought together repetitions, social norms, and the constitution of identity – hovers in the background. Butler’s new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, declines to ‘defend or reconsider’ an earlier theory of performativity ‘that clearly now seems questionable in certain ways’ (p. 23). This paper reassesses Butler’s earlier ideas in light of more recent developments, and suggests some creative ways forward.

Karen Nairn and Carisa Showden
Doing gender in activist spaces: Intersectionality and the limits of change Karen.nairn@otago.ac.nz

Social justice activists are always on notice for how they enact their values. Put prosaically: do they practise what they preach? Research with activists in Aotearoa from six groups addressing Indigenous rights, climate justice, feminist and queer rights, and economic inequities, provide the context for analysing how intersectional gender performances and interactions can be sites of change (Deutsch, 2007). A total of ninety participants took part in our study and two-thirds identified as women and/or gender diverse. We undertook interviews and observations of meetings, campaign events and their social media between 2018 and 2021. This was an optimistic moment for social justice activism in Aotearoa and the start of the rising backlash that is more evident now. Understanding what social justice groups can achieve when political conditions are relatively favourable is important for informing how to prepare for the backlash that inevitably follows. In this presentation we demonstrate how social justice activism is a complementary and contradictory eco-system of ‘doing’ and ‘undoing’ normative practices of gender, sexuality and race, and how this eco-system is shaped by changing political conditions.

Chair: Liana MacDonald

Simon Barber
The imperialism of no borders


Neil Vallelly
The Borders of Hospitality

In May 2022, then Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, appeared on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert in the US to announce the re-opening of the New Zealand border in the wake of Covid-19 restrictions. During the discussion, she said: “Welcoming guests to New Zealand is so much a part of who we are. Hospitality is part of our identity; we call it manaakitanga. So, please come back and make us whole again.” A year earlier, Amnesty International released a report titled “Please Take Me to a Safe Place” that outlined the detainment of asylum seekers without charge in New Zealand prisons. How can these two scenes of (in)hospitality co-exist? By drawing on Jacques Derrida’s late work on hospitality, this paper examines the political contradictions at play in the examples above, as well as the challenges of hospitality as a theoretical concept in the context of contemporary border regimes. The paper asks two broad questions. First, where does hospitality begin and end—where are its borders? Second, in what ways do borders facilitate and restrict hospitality? The paper finishes by reconstructing a theory of hospitality in the face of increasingly violent border regimes, one in which manaakitanga is not appropriated for political ends but is instead privileged in an ethics of common care.


Patrick Vakaoti and Tui Rakuita
 A Sociology of ‘Our Sea of Islands’

The late Tongan scholar Professor Epeli Hau’ofa popularised the phrase ‘our seas of islands’. This acknowledged relationality and holism in the Pacific as opposed to ‘islands in the far sea’ connoting the Pacific as small islands dotted across a vast ocean. Historically, the latter view reduces the Pacific as of object of study and it’s underdeveloped people and traditions needing to ‘progress’. Sociology has been complicit in this project.
As sociologists we see the value of the discipline in the Pacific. This paper is our attempt to present a case for a sociology of ‘our sea of islands’; a sociology that is relevant for the Pacific. In doing so we wish to do three things. First, we draw on our sojourns as former students and teachers of sociology at the University of the South Pacific. Second, to identity the parameteres of possibilities that the sociological tradition has for our sea of islands and thirdly admumtrate on a few themes that need to be incoporated into a sociological discourse on and about the Pacific. Our intention is to initiate a sociology for Oceania that reflects our contemporary realities.