SAANZ Conference 2024

Chair: Marcelle Dawson

Jessica Gray 
Sociology in Action: Shaping Cities, Communities, and Humanity Beyond the Academy
 
Sociology extends far beyond the confines of academia, playing a crucial role in shaping the world today and preparing for the future. Academic rigour in sociology must be adaptable, applying lessons from the past to address present-day challenges such as urbanization, social cohesion, and human development. This paper draws on the author's work as an applied sociologist with a background in psychology and investigative journalism, focusing on the intersection of sociology with everyday life. Drawing from research on people, place, and identity, as well as experiences in the Eastern Bay of Plenty and advocacy for international conflict resolution, the presentation highlights the practical impact of sociology in diverse settings. By examining these real-world examples, the author demonstrates that sociology is not merely an abstract academic discipline but a vital tool for designing future cities, shaping communities, and addressing global issues. This argument challenges the notion that sociology is a “nice to have”; rather, it asserts that sociology is essential for crafting human-centric, resilient spaces. The presentation envisions possible futures for sociology beyond the academy, advocating for a discipline deeply connected to real-world applications, grounded in both theory and practice.


Mike Grimshaw 
LinkedIn sociology?  Annotative sociology as daily practice for the digital era.

What does it mean to undertake sociological thought and commentary on a public platform like LinkedIn?
Over the past couple of years, I have undertaken an experiment of – drawing from the notion of practice from art school – posting at least twice a day, 7 days a week, sociologically-informed annotative commentary to articles from a variety of sources, on LinkedIn.

I have quickly assembled (currently) 824 connections (that is those who my posts and comments get alerted to and who follow me in some way) and I average somewhere between 12000-15000 impressions (views/reads) of my posts a week. Some individual posts receive up to 7000 views a week alone. My posts often get reposted to new audiences. On top of this I write sociological commentary pieces for the website Plain Sight that also get re-posted on the Point of Order blog. I am – from within the academy – undertaking and crafting a practice of public sociology to an expanding public audience.
This paper discusses the possibilities of public-facing digital era sociology that can provide commentary and subversive engagement with where people are.


Lynda Hills
Could we be wrong?

While coming off life support after overdosing and jumping off a bridge, I remember thinking “they were wrong” – they being the institutions of Psychiatry and the Church. Fifteen years later, and now I’m wondering “could we (sociology) be wrong?”. In my presentation, I will argue that the reason sociology is failing to make an impact outside of the academy is that it is disconnected from the very people it should be serving. Valuable sociological knowledge is unable to be accessed by someone experiencing akathisia as I was. Akathisia is the devastating side effect of psychotropics that can lead to suicide. By sharing how indigenous approaches to mental distress are grounded in the taiao (natural environment), I will challenge us, as sociologists, to consider where we are disconnected from the very people who could most benefit from our work. I will contrast our disconnection with the work of indigenous kaiārahi who ground their work in the taiao. Using my story, I will compare the ‘mental health patient’ to an ika (marine animal) and society to the awa (body of water) and show how when the river ‘sick’ the ika becomes the victim. Ka rere te awa, ka ora ai te iwi.

Chair: Bruce Cohen

Kevin Dew (presenter)
Non-presenting authors: Kerry Chamberlain, Richard Egan, Liz Dennett, Chris Cunningham

“This archaic medical system we currently live in, needs to stop living in a tunnel”: Challenges of cancer survivorship in Aotearoa New Zealand

Long term cancer survival is increasingly prevalent, and this raises survivorship issues, not just about the quantity of time but also the quality of life. In this paper we consider a range of survivorship issues in what can be an unwelcoming environment for survivors. From 2020 to 2022, 81 interviews were conducted with Māori and non-Māori throughout Aotearoa New Zealand identified as exceptional cancer survivors, living with a diagnosis of cancer from four to 37 years. This presentation will cover concerns about unnecessary delays in diagnosis, arbitrary levels of assistance, differential treatments, private and public healthcare, and the incommensurability of worlds. Findings raise concerns about the potential for the healthcare system to foster iniquitous outcomes and marginalise those who explore alternative understandings of cancer and its treatment. To better support survivorship the healthcare system needs to both be more expansive in its approach, improve its performance in the capacity to detect cancer signals particularly in patients with a prior history of disease, and take a more tailored approach to cancer survivorship.

Ian Dashfield
Pain, the brain, and the radical possibilities of the embodied-constructive turn

Healthcare is haunted by a tension between the private nature of pain and the universalist assumptions underpinning standardisation and regulation. These ‘traditional biomedical’ distinctions drawn between mental and physical health are being challenged by the increasing authority of neuroscience. One dramatic example is in chronic pain management, where the neuroscientific view is that pain is a cognitively complex representation of expected danger, rather than a direct perception of bodily damage. This view suggests psycho-social trauma and inequality are not circuitously correlated with higher rates of chronic pain, and instead directly ‘train the brain’ to expect a painful world. Combined with concerns regarding the validity and social harm of surgical and pharmaceutical interventions, this has led to pedagogy and psychology being integrated into ‘best practice’ pain management.
In Aotearoa — where 21% of adults experience persistent pain — this ‘truly bio-psycho-social’ approach has been endorsed by a 2022 report commissioned by Te Whatu Ora, as they (then) aimed to introduce a new model of chronic pain management. This talk charts the current case and possible trajectory of this neuro-constructive turn, through which sensation, affect, and socio-epistemic history, context, and norms are understood as entangled loops of co-construction.

Chair: Simon Barber

Bonnie-Estelle K. Trotter-Simons
Disrupting a Settler-Colonial Gendered Culture through Intersectionality: Towards Collective Liberation and Constitutional Transformation in Aotearoa

As a tangata Tiriti feminist seeking to engage in constitutional transformation in Aotearoa, I open discussion by thinking with the whakataukī: ‘kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua’ (‘I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past’). In this paper, I argue for an intersectional frame through which to critically understand how a hetero- and cis-normative gendered culture is integral to ongoing white settler colonial processes and legacies imposed upon Aotearoa. I begin by bringing into conversation a body of dynamic and radical work rooted in sociology, Mana Wahine scholarship, feminism, and critical race theory. Dialogue across these areas of scholarship reveal the interconnection of race, gender, class and sexuality with colonialism in Aotearoa and elsewhere. Through engagement with critical literature and activism alike, I explore potential possibilities of taking an intersectional approach to understanding and resisting settler colonial gendered processes. These involve strengthening collective praxis and fostering relationships of solidarity across difference which honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi and realise constitutional transformation. Finally, I explore how this approach resonates for several Aotearoa-based musicians who develop intersectional praxis through their music in ways that disrupt a settler colonial gendered culture and enact new ways of being together beyond it.


Richard Jackson
State Terrorism and the Settler Colonial Project in Israel

The issue of terrorism in the Israel-Palestine ‘conflict’ has almost entirely been reserved as a label for Palestinian resistance. The reasons for this lie in the deliberate campaign of the ‘terrorisation’ of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, as documented by Ilan Pappe, as well as powerful discursive intimidation by pro-Israeli supporters against any application of the term to Israel’s actions. However, recent events have reduced the suppressive impact of pro-Israel propaganda, providing an opening for an in-depth analysis of the history and nature of Israeli state terrorism. This paper provides a brief overview of the extent and nature of Israeli state terrorism, and examines how it has been used as a tool for both coercive diplomacy against external opponents, and a form of terror governance for occupied Palestinian populations. Drawing parallels with other settler colonial projects, such as South Africa, Kenya, Algeria, and others, the paper argues that state terrorism is one of the primary tools employed in the settler colonial project, being used for the purposes of ethnically cleansing land to make way for settlers, suppressing national self-determination movements by indigenous populations, and pacifying captive populations. This finding of the centrality of state terrorism to the settler state-building and state-maintenance project has major implications for our understanding of states, power and contemporary IR, as well as criminology and state crime. In disciplinary terms, it suggests that terrorism studies as a field (alongside criminology) has a myopic and distorted analytical focus which needs to be turned towards the much more significant issue of state terrorism.


Liana MacDonald
Title: Deconstructing the Settler Colonial Crypt

Anti-Māori sentiment oozes from the coalition government, as evidenced by legislative attacks on the Treaty and local Māori representation, and a 2024 Budget intent on squashing Māori aspirations. How can we explain such rigid ignorance of colonial history and lived Māori realities as contributing factors of long-standing and persistent racism in Aotearoa New Zealand today?

In this presentation, I introduce the settler-colonial crypt as analogy for considering the role that collective memory and remembering play in upholding state sovereignty and whiteness in settler societies. Drawing from Indigenous philosophy and sociology, I deconstruct different components of the crypt (the exterior, the walls, the interior) through a storytelling methodology that shows how everyday spaces and places accommodate a ‘settler fantasy’; an embodied narrative about how good ol’ New Zealand Kiwis come to belong in the nation state. I argue that a settler fantasy trumps rational thought to ensure that economic and social privileges remain in the hands of Pākehā settlers.
Then, we will consider what an Indigenous approach to collective remembering can offer towards dismantling the crypt structure. Indigenous remembering is a relational and grounded view of society that can bring past grievances and the structuring force of colonisation into public view, to transform popular thinking about race relations.

Chair: Sonja Bohn

Barney Connolly
Generative AI at Otago University - A Critical Appraisal

This research is conscious of the increasing capabilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI) globally, and seeks to ascertain what constitutes the ethical usage of generative AI, in the higher education sphere. Firstly, an anonymous survey of students enrolled at the University of Otago was undertaken. Secondly, formal interviews with academic staff. Thirdly, informal, ‘participant observation’ type discussions with fellow postgraduates. Finally, an evaluation of the embodied use of generative AI in social science research by the author. The collection of these opinions allows for a broad consideration of perspectives, which are then synthesized with relevant social theorists in order to provide as holistic and comprehensive analysis as possible. The issue of academic integrity is an especially salient one, given that we may soon be experiencing a future in which the value of the organizational and critical thinking skills taught at the university is threatened by students who outsource their thought to a biased machine intelligence that can convincingly create a simulacrum of academic scholarship. This field of study is crucial in ensuring the systems of higher education evolve accordingly in order to provide a service that prepares students effectively for life after graduation. This is a fiduciary responsibility of educators worldwide.


Rike Stotten
What are the ‘Values‘ in Alternative Food Systems? A Systematic Review

A growing body of agri-food literature explores the underlying values that shape various forms of alternative food systems. Yet, the understandings of what constitutes ‘values’ and processes of valuation generally, both in general and specifically in alternative food systems, vary widely or remain ambiguous across studies. This contribution, drawing from a systematic literature review and a ‘snowball’ literature search, seeks to clarify and categorize the multiple interpretations of ‘values’ within agri-food literature, aiming to enhance the understanding of their role in alternative food systems.

Through an in-depth analysis, the contribution organizes these diverse findings by mapping them onto four key dimensions: of social, spatial, natural, and economic embeddedness. As a result, the review provides a comprehensive and theoretically sound perspective on values in agri-food studies.


Peter J. Howland
Russian Jack – from vagabond to wine brand

In wine advertising and promotion, winegrowers frequently seek to claim the uniqueness of their wines via a number of intersecting and collusive registers. These include the literally grounded, demarcated, and thus wholly irreplicable, appellation and terroir claims (Jacquet, 2022) and the personality and lifestyle biographization of winemakers (Howland, 2019). A third prominent trope, are claims of historical depth or longevity of production – together with distinct temporal ‘journeys’ – that speak to the authenticity, durability and quality of one’s wines.

In the Old Word historical links and associations are not only often centuries old, but are widely regarded as ‘objective’ and authoritative. However, in New World winegrowing – in Aotearoa New Zealand and the United Kingdom for example – ‘objective’ genealogical winegrowing links are conspicuously missing and in their stead, tenuous, ‘stretched’, or even fabricated historical semblances are frequently advanced. This form of fetishised promotion seeks to exploit the desire of consumers for good wines and a ‘better world’. Consumers are not necessarily dupes in this, though neither are they stand up critics. Rather ensnared and jaded by living in a world of lies, wine consumers – like winegrowers and promoters – often seek to ‘accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative’.

Chair: Charlotte Bruce-Kells

Kirsty Lennox
I don’t know you, random man: The role of safety-work during female encounters with the police.

Worldwide, governing systemic structures are being questioned, and police are being called to account for their actions both at an institutional and individual level. During a time of what some have deemed a ‘legitimacy crisis’, the well-established concept of procedural justice has been found to help increase legitimacy, a crucial underpinning of the Peelian Principle of policing by consent (Cook, 2015; Sunshine & Tyler, 2003; Tyler, 1990). However, very little research has examined female experiences of procedural justice during police contact. To ascertain whether procedural justice is occurring during police contact with women, it is critical to understand what women’s encounters with the police look like. Reflecting on 40 semi-structured interviews with women aged between 16-39 throughout Aotearoa, this study explores whether the gendered safety strategies that women are conditioned to employ, impact their encounters with the police as unknown men.

Kirsten Gibson
‘Women and their experiences after release from prison’: The State as an alibi

In this paper, I share findings from my recently published doctoral research, which explored women’s post-prison experiences in Aotearoa. The extant research on women’s experiences in prison is limited and even more so for women’s post-prison experiences. Discourses about post-prison that overly focus on desistance and pathologise women’s behaviour tend to minimise the impact that structural conditions play in women’s lives. Examining women’s experiences, while acknowledging the structural constraints on their lives, can provide a deeper and more meaningful understanding of the structural barriers they encounter and navigate.

The current context of increased punitive policies and decreased social support across Aotearoa demonstrates how the State “punishes the poor”. The State enacts punishment of the poor through a withdrawal of social support, and increased monitoring and criminalisation. This punishment impacts distinct — such as Māori, poor, and previously victimised — groups of women disproportionately. I detail women’s descriptions of their experiences of gender responsive programmes, and post-prison services. Challenging some dominant notions in post-prison literature, I share how the women described their ideas of post-prison ‘success’. I explore how the State utilises gender responsivity programmes and frameworks, and desistance discourses to distract and shift the responsibility of addressing structural harm against criminalised women.

Bryndl Hohmann-Marriott
Reproductive justice and data justice: An interconnected relational approach

Reproductive justice and data justice can be interconnected and expanded to encompass a relational approach. I discuss a model of relational reproductive data justice, using the example of period-tracking apps. These types of reproductive data can be understood as relational, offering a point of connection between models of reproductive justice and data justice. The expanded model considers more-than-human assemblages, harms and benefits, and data imaginaries.

Chair: Donna Baines

Liz Beddoe, Eileen Joy, Laura Chubb and George Guild
Delusions of neutrality: “Abortion should be illegal (but I am) non-judgemental despite disagreeing with the decision”

Social workers represent diverse identities, values, and beliefs, playing a critical role in helping service users to obtain information and resources needed to make important life decisions including those pertaining to abortion. Abortion is considered by many to be a controversial issue however social work scholarship in recent years has focused on positioning abortion rights as essential to reducing health inequalities.
In Aotearoa, New Zealand abortion has been decriminalised and our study sought to explore social workers’ knowledge and beliefs about the legislative change and how they manage their responses when supporting people who are considering terminating a pregnancy.

This presentation will draw on a qualitative survey that explored the thoughts, beliefs, and the meaning-making that social workers engage in when they consider abortion in their professional practice, following changes to the abortion law in Aotearoa New Zealand. The survey was completed by 122 participants with 14,000 words in open responses related to abortion. These data were explored within a reproductive justice theoretical framework using thematic analysis. While reported views varied from strongly anti-abortion to strongly pro-choice many social workers noted a clash between personal and professional values in relation to abortion. Generally, regardless of their stated personal positions participants called on professional ethical principles such as self-determination, neutrality and being non-judgemental to reconcile any tensions. Our findings suggest that social workers would benefit from more learning opportunities focused on the development of a more nuanced understanding of reproductive justice in order to be able to position abortion as health care.


Eileen Joy and Suzette Jackson
Patriarchal motherhood discourses in social worker talk about mothers who use substances

Patriarchal motherhood discourses affect all women (even those who choose not to mother) by comparing them to an often impossible and idealised version of mothering. Patriarchal motherhood discourses represent an essentialised version of mothering, one which is deeply gendered and perpetuates inequality..

The presentation draws from a doctoral study that included interviews with child protection social workers (n=24) in Aotearoa. Critical discourse analysis was used to see how social workers upheld and/or resisted notions of patriarchal motherhood when talking about their work with mothers who use substances – mothers who are considered by many to be among the most deviant. Findings suggest that social workers predominantly used patriarchal discourses to position their practice as child-centric while leaving the mother with little support. Some practitioners resisted these discourses by articulating narratives including a more structural and intersectional analysis. These findings suggest that social workers need to think differently about motherhood and mothering through adopting a matricentric, intersectional and decolonised approach to their work with all mothers. This work includes recognising broader family networks and intergenerational oppressions in the lives of mothers who use substances.


Natalie Femia
Social justice as sustainability: A post-structural critique of 'burnout' in social work.

In the current context of biomedical neoliberalism, to be a social worker in the mental health field is to be constrained by paradigms of individualism, hyper-managerialism, professionalism, pathologisation, and structural inequities. Inability to be complicit with these constraints can be pathologised as ‘burnout’. Drawing on preliminary findings from qualitative interviews and arts-based body-mapping, this research critically explores the concept of ‘burnout’ in this work, and suggests a complex relationship between perceptions and experiences of ‘burnout’ and the aforementioned constraints. These findings further suggest that this relationship is mediated by close or distant social work values and ethics, and whether people (‘clients’) are positioned through relationality or othering. This research demonstrates hopeful possibilities for strengthening values and ethics of social justice in particular as a method for resisting current constraints, sustaining social workers, and prioritising relationality and solidarity with people (‘clients’).

Chair: Jordan Dougherty

Jasper Wei Yuan Tan
Progress or Panopticon? How Singapore's smart city drives state surveillance

This project examines how Singapore’s smart city framework facilitates biometric surveillance, raising concerns about privacy, autonomy, and state control. While smart cities are often seen as enhancing efficiency and security, they also enable state and corporate monitoring of citizens. Current research highlights the technological benefits of smart cities but tends to overlook how such frameworks contribute to the growth and normalisation of surveillance, particularly in highly state-managed environments like Singapore. Singapore was chosen to address this gap, particularly because it was an early pioneer in adopting digital technologies, such as the Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) system, and the ongoing development of its Smart Nation initiative, which contributes to expanding the country’s surveillance apparatus. This analysis involves a qualitative investigation of government policies, news media articles, and public data sources relating to Singapore’s surveillance and digitalisation efforts, aligning significantly with the smart city framework. State policies and surveillance technologies intensify state control, normalising the trade-off between security and individual privacy in pursuing technological progress and a safer society. Despite their promise of innovation and efficiency, this research provides a critical lens of how smart city frameworks function as tools for enhancing state surveillance, with profound implications for privacy and civil liberties.

Save Dunedin Live Music: Dave Bennett, Fairleigh Gilmour and Hugh Harlow
Sound and the city: a discussion of class by activists who #planfornoise

In this presentation, Save Dunedin Live Music will explore why examination of class needs to be central to activism around noise and space in the city. Drawing from Shane Homan’s work on pub rock in Australia, and our own experiences as activists here in Ōtepoti Dunedin, we will outline why class is fundamental to understanding people, space and the future of our city – in terms of access, regulation and decision-making around ‘noise’.

Chair: Simon Clay

Madiha Ehsan
Exploring Relational Autonomy in the context of Pakistani Muslim migrants envisioning their End-of-Life Phase in New Zealand

The increase in international migration in the era of globalization has resulted in changing social and global conditions, which have implications for migrants' end-of-life choices. Over the years, there has been a noticeable growth in international migrants in New Zealand. In 2024, New Zealand has experienced significant international migration. As of May 2024, there were an estimated 221,400 migrant arrivals, marking a 13 percent increase compared to the previous year. End-of-life care in line with the culture of the migrants is a challenging task for medical professionals in New Zealand and around the world. The social science approach to end-of-life care places a strong emphasis on the value of considering the social environment of dying and death. This perspective highlights that end-of-life care is not a universal, unproblematic concept but a multifaceted issue influenced by cultural, social, and individual factors. It highlights that end-of-life care, in addition to the medical aspect, also contains social, cultural, and existential components. This broader view recognizes that death is not merely a physical event but also a complex interplay of human relationships, existential concerns, social support, and cultural beliefs. The thesis will explore the interplay between individual experiences, societal norms, and institutional practices concerning end-of-life planning within the Pakistani Muslim migrant population in New Zealand.

The study seeks to develop a deeper understanding of how cultural and religious beliefs may influence attitudes toward death and dying within the first-generation Pakistani Muslim migrant community in New Zealand. In medicine, health sciences and sociology, relational autonomy in end-of-life care is a theoretical approach that has gained wide attention. It underlines how crucial it is to view autonomy as the result of connections and teamwork rather than an autonomous quality. Relational autonomy is especially applicable in advance care planning, shared decision-making, and palliative care, where relationships are critical to decision-making. The thesis examines the theoretical concept of relational autonomy in end-of-life care. It applies a constructive lens to in-depth interviews with first-generation Pakistani migrants in New Zealand's end-of-life hopes, beliefs, and expectations. Bringing together an analysis of relational autonomy and how Pakistani migrants in New Zealand envisage end-of-life is taken as a means to address those intricacies in the context of intersectional challenges.

Chloe Coombe
End of Life Concerns during the HIV and AIDS Epidemic in Aotearoa, 1980-1999

This paper presents the preliminary findings of my PhD research into the intersection of sexuality, public health and end-of-life concerns during the HIV and AIDS epidemic in Aotearoa. In an era before effective treatments, many people were confronted with the reality of premature death, while their friends and families faced the difficulties of grieving in a social climate marked by silence, stigma and often hostility. Drawing on a combination of archival research and initial interviews with survivors, caregivers, and community leaders, in this paper I will address the ways in which personal end-of-life needs were understood and managed during the epidemic. My broader project also examines the development of commemorative practices, and I will also offer early insights into the sorts of innovations that emerged to navigate the collective experience of grief and mourning during the epidemic.

Jessica Young, Antonia Lyons, Kevin Dew,  Richard Egan
Constructing the right time: Patients, families and providers’ experiences of assisted dying decision-making.

For terminally ill people who are approved for assisted dying (AD), they will need to select a time and date for their death. We recruited triads of patients, relatives, and AD doctors. We longitudinally interviewed seven people with cancer applying for AD, ten relatives, and six AD doctors pertaining to ten assisted deaths in 44 interviews. We conducted a thematic analysis of the interview transcripts.
We identified four phases in participants’ experiences of picking and anticipating a date for AD: deciding how and when to draw a line in the sand; the final countdown; a date with death; and the right time. Picking a date was an embodied, relational, situational decision that is made to balance situations, people, and regulatory systems.
Existentially, socially, and clinically difficult decisions about a date for death are made (and re-made) by patients to balance time left and the quality of that time. Time is a silent crucial factor in AD decision-making. The social structures and meanings of time influence the anticipation of the date of death. Having to choose a date contrives the notion of ‘the right time’ for death. Time is reoriented from clock time to include embodied and event time.

Chair: Karen Nairn

Bruce Curtis
The impossible Predator Free 2050: A balance of cruelty, a post-colonialism

This presentation explores how a hierarchy of animal species normalizes the eradication of feral animals (Clark 1999; Curtis 2002, 2018; Major 2024), and the sanctification of native animals in Aotearoa New Zealand. The result is a balance of cruelty wherein tens of thousands of feral animals, mainly mammals, with a high capacity for suffering (Singer 1976, 1979, 1985) are exterminated in the putative interests of dozens of native animals, mainly birds and frogs, with a low capacity for suffering. Predator Free 2050 codifies this balance of cruelty. It anticipates the extermination of introduced mammals, designated feral (rats, ferrets, stoats, weasels, and possums and, if public opinion can be thwarted, cats). In practice, Predator Free 2050 is an impossibility: undermined in the short-term by cost constraints and socio-technical limitations; undermined in the long-term by climate-change and the likely influx of new invasive species. As a result Predator Free 2050 is best understood as an eco-nationalism (Ginn 2008) or as a post-colonialism which chastens its colonial past.



Shinya Uekusa, Tyrone Barnard, Steve Matthewman, Christine Stephens, Fiona Alpass
The intersection of rural inequalities and resilience: The experiences of rural informal caregivers during the pandemic in Aotearoa New Zealand

This study explores the intersection of rural inequalities and resilience experienced by older informal caregivers in Aotearoa New Zealand during the COVID-19 pandemic. Informal caregivers in rural areas, who provide care for family members, friends and neighbors, faced heightened challenges during the pandemic. These challenges were driven by increased care demands coupled with reduced access to essential health and social services, further exacerbating pre-existing rural inequalities. However, despite these hurdles, many participants demonstrated remarkable resilience, with relatively positive experiences emerging from the study. Our findings highlight that rural informal caregivers – many of whom are accustomed to managing everyday vulnerabilities – exhibited a form of “earned strength” in the face of the pandemic. This resilience, observed amidst significant structural and systemic disadvantages, aligns with broader disaster research, which suggests that rural populations, through their ongoing navigation of routine hardships, may develop a unique preparedness for crisis. This paper will seek to deepen our understanding of how rural inequalities shape, and at times strengthen, resilience among informal caregivers. By focusing on the adaptive strategies and social networks that enables caregivers to persist, we aim to contribute to discussions on rural health disparities, caregiving challenges and community resilience in times of social disruptions.

Chair: Shayne Walker

Donna Baines and Bindi Bennett
Rankings, Ruling and Reproducing Inequities: Critiquing the Knowledge Production of Social Work’s “Top 100 Scholars”

Reflecting on an article authored by Hodge and Turner (2022) that ranks the “top” 100 social work scholars, this paper presents a multi-layered critique of the tradition of using bibliometrics to generate “knowledge” and competitive global rankings of individual social work faculty members, departments and universities. We raise concerns regarding the transformation of neoliberal metrics into social work research questions and projects, and then solidified into competitive, martketised knowledge about social work and its scholars. We argue that through this process, inequity and neoliberalism are normalized and legitimized and we are further distanced from social justice, decolonisation, and equity. Drawing on the literature, we show that racism, colonialism, classism, sexism and geographic inequity are reproduced by the article and the pursuit of these kinds of competitive rankings. The paper concludes by suggesting alternative assessments grounded in community participation and social justice, and aimed at expanding equity and social justice.

Emily Keddell, Shayne Walker, Andrew Rudolph
Protecting whakapapa: collaboration, power and prevention in initial child protection decision-making.

Acknowledgement: We acknowledge Tai Timu, Tai Pari as joint partners in this project, particularly William Kaipo, Jonette Chapman, Jude Hughes, Dave Ashby and Karen Hale.

Within report-investigate child protection institutional structures, decisions are made by state child protection workers about reports that are made to them by other professionals and citizens. Initial decisions have significant consequences, as they can result in protection for children and increased coordination of support services, as well as intrusive, stressful and harmful interventions. They are also the entry point for the start of inequities within the system most notably for Māori. The harm of unwarranted removals, as part of colonial impositions and assimilationist processes are well documented. One consequence of the institutionalisation of statutory child protection systems in colonised countries is that power, decision-making, processes and what is considered relevant knowledge have traditionally been defined and controlled by the state. De-centralising decision-making, a key aim of both statutory and Māori agencies in the reforms of 2019 – 2023 in Aotearoa New Zealand, aims to help address inequities for Maori, reduce care entry, and improve prevention service access. This talk describes an evaluation research project of a de-centralised decision-making triage
process, which operates collaboratively between Oranga Tamariki (state child protection) and community-based social workers from a range of Māori organisations led by Tai Timu, Tai Pari. The aims of the research are to understand the barriers and enablers of this new form of decision -making according to key participants. Of particular interest is its e]ects on power dynamics, the co-construction of risk, and access to supports. This talk will describe the process of building a research partnership between university and community organisations, the methods used, and emerging findings.


Shayne Walker, Lashana Lewis, Natalie Paki Paki, Paula Toko King, Hunia Te Urukaitia Mackay
He aha te korero o to puku!

What wells up from your belly, how do you ‘go with your knowing’ in the child protection process with tamariki, rangatahi and whānau Māori. This presentation is the result of a three year research project with Te Hou Ora Whānau Support Services Otepoti (THO) that examined the key practice elements in indigenous led child protection processes with tamariki, rangatahi and whānau. The outcomes are five pou – the “foundational underpinnings of both good practice and good partnerships” and seven takepū - the “preferred ways, fashioned by Māori thinking and rationale, of engaging with others” (Pohatu, 2013, p. 13). Kaimahi, various community and NGO stakeholders, rangatahi and whanau provided thier stories, dreams and pūkōrero (well-informed, speaking with authority, articulate) regarding ‘what worked’ and ‘what doesen’t’ work for them. These ways of thinking, behaving and acting form the core of practice in THO a kaupapa Maori organisation that has been operating for over 40years. Their aim is to have transformative relationships that result in tangible and real rangatiratanga for those they work with. They can do what they like with 7AA in Wellington but the waka has already sailed Māori and their allies know and can evidence what works!

Jathan Sadowski: A Ruthless Criticism of AI and Technology

In 2021, science fiction Ted Chiang writer observed that, “Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us.” The sudden boom of interest in artificial intelligence—driven by torrents of cash and threats to transform society from top to bottom—has clarified this relationship between technology and capitalism even further. People are more aware than ever of the power dynamics that drive systems like AI. It is now common to see skeptical inquiry about how technologies are made, who decides their purpose, who uses them, and who are they used against? The impacts of AI are no longer merely abstract or distant concerns. The ecological, economic, and human costs are increasingly material and immediate. By expanding on Chiang’s sharp remarks about our anxieties of how capital forges technologies to then wield against us, this talk outlines three key concepts that are crucial for a political economic analysis—and a ruthless criticism—of AI and capitalism. First is innovation realism. Second is cheap data. Third is the perpetual value machine.

Chair: Chamsy el-Ojeili

Lara Greaves
“Where do I enrol for my special treatment?” The effects of public backlash on an online Māori Electoral roll survey project

The online environment is becoming increasingly hostile to social science researchers both globally and in Aotearoa New Zealand. This research explores the issues confronted by a group of (mainly) Māori scholars in trying to conduct an online survey in the public domain about Māori electoral roll choices. Here, we describe the experience of conducting a survey online though three effects: (1) effects on the project administration, (2) effects on the researchers, and (3) the effects on the data. To supplement this discussion, we present an analysis of some of the online comments on the publicly available Facebook advertisements for the survey (n=157). Given the content of the comments, we created codes based on Moewaka Barnes and colleagues’ (2012) 14 Anti-Māori Themes and added supplementary codes. We describe the effects on the researchers and our efforts around a safety plan. We also present analysis of participant data in the survey (n=1,958) compared to the nationally representative New Zealand Election Study (n=747 of Māori descent), which, encouragingly, shows no discernible effect on the data collection. The research note illustrates pitfalls in the online environment for a Māori political science project and highlights potential issues for Aotearoa New Zealand.


Diwakar Khanal
Perspectives and Experiences of Migrant Care Workers in New Zealand's Aged Residential Care

Abstract: Migrant care workers (MCWs) from the Global South frequently migrate to meet the growing demand for labour in aged care sectors in countries such as Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Japan, the UK, and the USA. In New Zealand, the aged care sector increasingly relies on MCWs, yet their experiences often remain marginalized and underexplored. Research highlights that Asian MCWs, particularly women, encounter systemic challenges, including racism, gender oppression, exploitation, low wages, and social marginalization. These issues are further exacerbated by cultural differences, language barriers, and unfamiliarity with local care practices, underscoring the precariousness of their roles despite their critical contributions. Existing research in New Zealand, reveal that MCWs endure emotionally and physically demanding work, providing "affective care" while managing long hours that contribute to burnout and fatigue. This study will explore the perspectives and experiences of MCWs in New Zealand’s aged care industry, with aims to address workforce sustainability, inclusivity, and equity. The study seeks to contribute to the development of a more sustainable and equitable aged care sector by deepening the understanding of MCWs' experiences, ultimately contributing to the existing body of literature on migrant labour in aged care through qualitative research using critical migration perspective.


Ritu Parna Roy and Francis L. Collins
Exploring the production and maintenance of racialised burden in New Zealand’s immigration system

This paper explores how racialised burdens are constructed within New Zealand’s immigration system. Racialised burdens are the mechanisms of state power and administrative practices that limit the citizenship rights of racially marginalised groups and perpetuate patterns of inequality. Within immigration systems, ostensibly neutral policies and administrative directives such as skills assessment and selection criteria are often used as a policy instrument for ‘risk’ management or as filtering devices for selecting desirable immigrants. The framing of immigration in these ways claims outward neutrality and deters the scrutiny of the deliberate political choices that shape these instruments and their unequal effects. Drawing on the scholarship of racialised organisation theory, public administration and social policy, we developed a protocol to examine different migration and labour mobility categories and related policies to understand the production and maintenance of racialised burdens within the immigration system. Through analysis of the immigration policy measures in New Zealand, we identify the existence and implications of racialised burdens and the ways in which they unevenly affect white and non-white migrant groups while maintaining the pretention of a fair immigration system.

Chair: Jordan Dougherty

Rebecca Stringer
Barbie, Feminism and the Politics of Recuperative Détournement

Much of the emerging wealth of feminist criticism addressing Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (Warner Bros 2023) persuasively frames this film as recuperative, reading Barbie as a media text that visibly mobilises feminist ideas, but does so in a way that reshapes those ideas around the values of neoliberal capitalism, discarding intersectional feminist challenges to structural oppressions and producing instead a depoliticised, commodified version of feminism that delivers cinematic pleasures but is “always available to be recuperated by the market” (McNeill 2024). This paper builds upon this feminist criticism of Barbie as recuperative by focusing on the ways in which the film and its associated marketing anticipate this criticism: ‘If you hate Barbie, this film is for you.’ Reading Barbie with reference to Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, I argue that its anticipatory elements mark a form of what McKenzie Wark calls ‘recuperative détournement’, whereby corporate messages appear to detour ‘off-brand’, to enhance their ‘on-brand’ impact. Mindful that the spectacle diverts our attention both toward and away, I argue that by foregrounding the fraught feminism of Barbie, the film’s makers and marketers divert attention from irredeemably ‘off-brand’ terrain: the appalling conditions in Mattel factories, and Mattel’s environmental crimes. As McKenzie Wark observes, “Capital draws the line at the détournement of its own means of production”.


Yuki Watanabe
Exploring Queer Identities in Popular Media: The Discourse of Homosexuality in Contemporary Japan

In the 21st century, the term 'queer' has emerged as a significant identity marker, celebrated for its inclusivity and defiance of normative labels. Yet, queer individuals still encounter pervasive stigma, including discrimination, harassment, and violence, highlighting the persistent complexities and contradictions surrounding queer identities. This paper explores these tensions, situating them within specific cultural and historical contexts that shape the understanding of sexual orientations and identities.

When compared to the construction of queer identities in the West, the significance (or absence) of particular terminologies in different cultures plays a critical role in shaping queer identities. In Japan, the concept of nonke (literally meaning ‘no feeling’), frequently used in popular media genres such as Boys’ Love (BL), refers to heterosexual individuals among BL fans and within the broader gay community. Through a discourse analysis of Japanese popular media texts, this paper investigates how nonke functions to both normalize and destabilize gay subjectivity, particularly in contrast to how its English equivalent operates in Western contexts. Using queer theory as a lens, I argue that this term illustrates how sexuality is constructed and communicated as fluid and relational, rather than fixed or essential, highlighting the historically and culturally contingent nature of sexual identities.


Simon Clay
Trans Futures, Drug Utopias, and Gender Euphoria

We are in a watershed moment when it comes to gender. The trans and non-binary community has never been so visible and continues to gain unprecedented social and political freedoms. However, ‘gender-critical feminists’ and the political right have been moderately successful (particularly in the US) with their scare campaign on the dangerous ‘gender ideology’ that ‘trans activists’ are inflicting upon society. Gender-based violence and institutional discrimination against trans people continue to soar, and the lack of inclusive healthcare provision has resulted in a dismal level of well-being among members of this community. In this paper, I discuss the community-based gender-affirming care practices trans and non-binary people have created due to the inaccessibility of gender-affirming medical care. I describe the queer ways these individuals use illicit substances in community settings to gain a sense of gender euphoria, community intimacy, and self-acceptance. These gender-affirming drug practices not only allow trans and non-binary people to circumvent the discrimination and gate-keeping within the healthcare system, they also allow for yet-unimagined expressions of gender-sexuality to emerge. It is through the creation and embodiment of alternative gender-sexualities that radical emancipatory trans futures can be realised.

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: Tamika Ashbrook

Ben Laksana
Weaponizing Precarity: Governmental Precarisation and the Struggles of Indonesian Tertiary Student Activists

Drawing from an ethnographic study of 11 student activists in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, this research examines how the Indonesian state weaponizes precarity to control and subjugate vulnerable populations. Using Isabell Lorey’s (2015) concept of governmental precarisation, I argue that neoliberal state policies deliberately sustain precarity by intensifying financial hardships and limiting access to essential resources for university students. Despite higher education’s portrayal as a path out of poverty, many students face uncertain job prospects, low wages, and an oversaturated market. This normalization of precariousness traps students between the promise of education as a means of social mobility and the harsh realities of neoliberal governance. As a result, these precarious conditions force tertiary students engaging in activism to reassess their activists roles. I argue that this often leads to disengagement from activism as precarious living conditions erode their capacity to resist. Thus this self-perpetuating cycle of precarisation not only normalizes insecurity but further reinforces state control. This study sheds light on how neoliberal policies shape the experiences of tertiary students and their activism in Indonesia, revealing the underlying power structures that maintain these precarious conditions and limit possibilities for resistance and social change.


Joseph Elkington-Potter
Institutional Whispers: Academic Bullying in NZ

Sociology often critiques power structures and inequalities in society, but the discipline often fails to turn the lens inward, reflecting on our practices and institutions. Internationally, failures to adequately respond to and support those experiencing bullying, particularly academic bullying within universities, have raised significant concerns (Mahmoudi, 2019; Moss & Mahmoudi, 2021; Twale & DeLuca, 2008). However, in Aotearoa New Zealand, there has been limited exploration into the prevalence, lived experiences, specific conditions, and disciplinary factors that foster academic bullying within universities. This paper seeks to facilitate a discussion on what this issue might look like in the context of Aotearoa NZ, particularly for postgraduate and/or early-career Māori scholars. This research is part of a broader PhD project exploring the experiences of complaints across NZ universities, focusing on how institutional responses—or the lack thereof—perpetuate harm.


Sultan Ahmed
Towards decolonizing disaster risk communication and resilience building; Indigenous knowledge insights from High Mountain Asia

This research examines disaster risk communication (DRC) and resilience-building in HighMountain Asia (HMA) through the lens of Indigenous Knowledge (IK) of the Wakhi people, who span the borders of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and China. Preliminary findings reveal a nuanced dynamic: while elders emphasize the value of IK—rooted in centuries of evolution—youth increasingly favor scientific methods as more relevant to contemporary challenges. This contrast highlights a gap in DRC, as government-led initiatives prioritize scientific knowledge and operate in an autocratic, supply-driven manner, whereas NGOs employ participatory approaches, though their reach and effectiveness remain limited.
Indigenous practices such as resilient construction, communal storage, land planning, and ritual offerings reflect a profound relationship with the environment, grounded in both practical adaptations and spiritual traditions. These practices embody a spiritual bond with nature, where rituals and offerings seek harmony with natural and supernatural forces, reinforcing both community resilience and individual confidence in facing disasters. Yet, formal systems often marginalize these practices.

This study advocates for a decolonized approach that respects both scientific and Indigenous epistemologies, recognizing the unique resilience strategies of cross-border communities. By bridging these knowledge systems, this research aims to foster inclusive, context-sensitive frameworks for DRC in HMA.

Chair: Emily Keddell

Szu-Hsien Lu
Retaining custody as a practice of social justice: What community child protection social workers can do to support parents with intellectual disabilities in Taiwan

Each year, around 80 to 100 parents with intellectual disabilities (PID) are involved with child protection services in Taiwan, and roughly 20 to 25 percent of them face child removal. Several determinants shape these separations, for example, parents’ insufficient parenting ability and cognition, low levels of social support, poverty, and inadequate and inaccessible parenting support. To help PID retain custody or have their children returned from foster care, social workers could explore working more collaboratively with parents and addressing these challenges to improve parenting capacity. In Taiwan, community child protection social workers (CSW) are essential in assisting PID to fulfill this aim because of their long-term and frequent involvement, as the preexisting research suggests that these parents require sustainable and intensive support. This presentation is based on a preliminary analysis of my doctoral research data from twenty-three semi-structured interviews with Taiwanese child protection social workers, three of whom are CSW. I will focus on one CSW's work to demonstrate what supports a parent to retain custody. The presentation will illustrate how CSW can contribute to social justice for PID by reconciling parenting rights and the children's best interests in their practice, as these rights are usually considered contradictory.


Tian Tian
An Exploration of Social Work Intervention in cases of Child Sexual Abuse in a Multidisciplinary Context in New Zealand

The multidisciplinary approach is key to child protection systems globally, with social workers playing a central role in supporting victims and their families. Puawaitahi, established in 2002, was created to strengthen collaboration and streamline child protection investigations and treatment. However, research on multidisciplinary collaboration in New Zealand’s child protection system, particularly from a social work perspective, is limited. This study examines the practical and conceptual challenges of such collaboration at Puawaitahi and explores how collaboration shapes the role of social workers in child sexual abuse interventions. The research included in-depth interviews and focus groups with social workers, police, health, and other professionals at Puawaitahi, alongside observation of 31 multidisciplinary team meetings. Data was analysed using thematic analysis to explore key themes like collaboration processes, communication, working relationships, disciplinary differences, and power dynamics.

This study found that Puawaitahi demonstrated strong multidisciplinary collaboration, featuring an efficient management structure, transparent case-handling procedures, and good information sharing. However, the collaboration was influenced by hierarchical dynamics, with medical professionals leading the process and police and Oranga Tamariki (OT) holding statutory authority at the policy level. Differences in how professionals viewed collaboration, particularly regarding whether the child or the whānau should be prioritized, created tensions. Both statutory and health social workers faced challenges due to their perceived weak professional capital in these collaborations, often adopting passive roles, highlighting disputes over professional knowledge claims. These power imbalances ultimately hindered the effectiveness of the collaboration. This study highlights the structural tensions in New Zealand’s multidisciplinary child protection system, focusing on how power dynamics, professional knowledge, and procedural challenges affect social workers' roles in collaboration. The findings have significant implications for practice, education, policy, and research, with recommendations to align collaborative ideals with real-world practices.

Chair: Charlotte Bruce Kells

Anna Friedlander
Hormones and data in the digital menstrual tracking entanglement
An agential realist analysis of apps and menstruating bodies

Period tracking apps - digital applications that people use to track their menstrual cycles - are among the top-downloaded apps by adult and adolescent women in health categories, with hundreds of millions of downloads worldwide. There is a growing body of international sociological research into digital menstrual and fertility tracking, but with a few notable exceptions (Hohmann-Marriott; Riley), there is little sociological work into menstrual and fertility tracking in Aotearoa.
Within this context I perform an agential realist investigation of the sociotechnical entanglement of apps, app users, tracking practices, app development, gender, and bodies in Aotearoa, with a particular focus on the emergence of two phenomena – hormones and data. How are hormones and data enacted in, with and through tracking apps, and what are the implications? What role does power play, and how do the various elements of the menstrual tracking entanglement shape each other? In this presentation I present early results from my research into digital menstrual tracking entanglements in Aotearoa.


Yunyi Zhang
Shaping Mothering Ideas: How 1.5 and 2nd-Generation Chinese New Zealand Mothers Engage with Chinese and Western Discourses

Despite the significant presence of Chinese migrant families in countries like New Zealand, the experiences of 1.5 and 2nd-generation Chinese New Zealand mothers remain underexplored. Situated between their Chinese heritage and New Zealand’s sociocultural context, these mothers encounter diverse and sometimes conflicting discourses on motherhood and gender norms. This paper delves into the mothering ideas, perceptions, and expectations shaping 1.5 and 2nd-generation Chinese New Zealand mothers who navigate a complex interplay of Chinese and Western cultural norms, values, and institutional structures.

Drawing on John Gillis’s concepts of ‘the families we live by’ and ‘the families we live with,’ the paper unpacks how these mothers interpret and position themselves within diverse motherhood ideals or discourses. The analysis also considers the impact of broader cultural expectations, family dynamics, and educational values within the Chinese New Zealand community. By teasing out the layered discourses of what it means to be a Chinese New Zealand mother, this paper illuminates how these mothers traverse the nuanced cultural spectrum and engage with diverse ideas to shape their maternal beliefs in a culturally diverse society.

This research contributes to the Gender and Sexuality stream, shedding light on the cultural negotiation processes of immigrant mothers in a multicultural society.

Chair: Steve Matthewman

Sneha Singh
Understanding Identity and Belonging Amongst Indian Diaspora in Aotearoa

This paper is a part of my larger doctoral project titled Understanding (Digital) Citizenship Practices of Women in Indian Diasporic Communities. In this paper, I discuss the issues of identity, belonging and citizenship based on the narratives and experiences of my research participants. My analysis draws on the semi-structured interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, and social media data of 25 research participants. Having various national, ethnic, linguistic, and religious affiliations, the processes of identity construction is complex and multi-faceted for the Indian diaspora in Aotearoa. I discuss how my participants (who come from very diverse backgrounds) navigate through their identity and belonging in relation to Aotearoa New Zealand, India, and/or other countries of origin. Based on semi-structured interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, I classify their belonging into four types- transnational, regional, religious/linguistic and political belonging. By constructing multiple ways of belonging (four, stated above), my research participants challenged the formal citizenship discourses (in terms of legal status of citizenship) by claiming citizenship and belonging to India, New Zealand and other countries of their origin. As such, this paper contributes to the literature on diaspora, migration and citizenship studies.


Janepicha Cheva-Isarakul
Temporalities and staggered legal inclusion: the legal production of “statelessness” in Thailand

In the public campaigns to end statelessness, citizenship and statelessness tend to be positioned as legal opposites—the former as a normative legal status guaranteeing total inclusion and the latter as a legal deviance with abject rightlessness. This static dichotomy fails to capture the nuances of the 21st century regime of statelessness, which often oscillates between inclusion and exclusion and expresses itself in quasi-legal categories. This presentation examines governance and the legal production of contemporary statelessness in northern Thailand, a region with a large semi-legal “alien” population. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research and the lens of institutional, biographic and everyday temporalities (Robertson 2019), I highlight the dynamism within the ways the Thai state “sees” (Scott 1998) and manages its “alien” population in the last three decades. I argue that these aspects of temporalities embedded in a complex system of categorisations and identification lead to staggered inclusion and a hierarchy of statelessness among people who otherwise share similar backgrounds. The regime renders each stateless person stateless in their own way, and each generation a specific set of legal limitations and hurdles. Statelessness in contemporary Thailand is therefore best understood not as complete rightlessness but a hierarchy of hope dictated by temporalities.


Ruchika Ranwa and Suruchi Thapar-Bjorkert
Genealogies of Dispossession and Marginalisation: Case of Kalbeliyas of Rajasthan, India.

Drawing on Anibal Quijano’s concept of “coloniality of power” and Maria Lugones’s concept of “coloniality of gender”, this paper analyses the historical genealogies of marginalization experienced by Kalbeliya women dancers of Rajasthan and its ongoing manifestations in structuring power relations, social hierarchies and “unfreedoms” in post-independent India. Despite being recognized as heritage bearers by UNESCO in 2010, Kalbeliya dancers continue to face social stigma. This stigma is historically rooted in dominant colonial discourses of morality and respectability concerning women in the 20th century, reflecting Indian upper caste and class anxieties about moral transgressions. Paralleled with colonial notions of the 'excessive' sexuality of low caste women, dancers, in particular, were constructed as “common” women (Thapar, 1993), who transgressed normative regulations of sexuality, marriage and domesticity. These forms of marginalisation have re-configured in the post-heritage recognition phase for Kalbeliya dancers as they are encountered with new forms of exploitative economic relations and unequal power dynamics, which reflect conditions akin to “modern slavery”. Despite UNESCO’s emphasis on improving local heritage bearers' participation in safeguarding their heritage, the dominance of Indian state institutions in these processes has led to a) dispossession of Kalbeliya dancers of their rights and responsibilities as heritage bearers and b) commercialization and extraction of Kalbeliyas’ heritage through private sector led tourism (Ranwa, 2021) This puts their heritage at the risk of erosion and exacerbates their vulnerability to exploitation. The paper draws on ethnographic field work conducted by the first author between 2018- 2024 in Jodhpur, Jaipur and Jaisalmer, cities in Rajasthan.

Chair: Karen Nairn

Kyle Matthews
Free Speech, Hate Speech, and the Free Speech Union

Recommendation 40 of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Christchurch Shooting called for the repeal of New Zealand’s ineffective hate speech laws and the creation of a new Crimes Act offence of inciting racial or religious disharmony. After a public backlash the Labour-led government delegated this work to the Law Commission in 2022. In March 2024 the new Minister of Justice Paul Goldsmith halted this work, ending hopes for effective hate speech laws in Aotearoa.

In this paper I analyse the media statements, letters, and twitter feed of the Free Speech Union (FSU), which advocates for absolutist free speech rights, to interrogate their arguments and influence in these debates. I argue that the FSU understands free speech in a simplistic way, prioritises free speech rights over rights to be free from harm, emphasises global symbolism rather than evidence grounded in Aotearoa, is only absolutist when it serves them, and privileges already dominant voices while ignoring the racialised communities that hate speech targets. I suggest instead that tikanga Māori could guide us through the challenges of balancing free speech rights with rights to be free from harmful speech.

Fairleigh Evelyn Gilmour
Violence against women and the Dangerous Speech Framework: Exploring the tensions

In this presentation, I explore the tensions between feminist articulations of allegations of violence against women – in particular the calls to believe victims and to punish perpetrators – and the historical use of the threat of violence against women and girls as a justification for and precursor to genocide as documented in the Dangerous Speech framework. I explore the use of hashtags in the aftermath of October 7th, in particular the reworkings of the #believewomen and #metoo hashtags. The purpose of this presentation is to examine the foundations of feminist arguments in relation to the concept of belief and to challenge the ways in which these ideas have been re-appropriated in the context of violent conflict between militarized groups.

Kyle Matthews & Kayli Taylor
Rethinking Security & Radicalisation: A principled response to insecurity and violent extremism

We argue that the search for security in an insecure world drives approaches to radicalisation and violent extremism. These approaches target ‘radicals’ and securitise ‘at risk’ communities and are entangled with race, colonisation, xenophobia, and white supremacy.

We propose that the state should turn from targeted practices focused on radicalisation and securitisation towards principled responses which address the structural drivers of insecurity. We argue for ten principles to guide that work including enacting te Tiriti o Waitangi, human rights and global justice, non-violence, transparency and democratic accountability, and structural responses to the marginalisation and othering of communities.
We use these principles to interrogate ‘Know the Signs’, a guide produced by the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service which encourages the public to recognise and report individuals at risk of engaging in violent extremism. While this guide upholds some human rights and uses evidence on violent extremism, it misuses that evidence, neglects te Tiriti and global justice issues, overlooks structural drivers of violent extremism, and is not accountable to affected communities or the wider population. We conclude that a principled approach to violent extremism offers a critical utopian way of thinking about the challenges of security in an insecure world.

Chair: Liz Beddoe

Ian Hyslop
Abolition, social work and social science

Social work is located in regimes of power and occupies a (more or less) contradictory position within neoliberal western capitalist states like Aotearoa. The concept that there is no exterior to this sociological totality condemns resistant discourse to the realms of complicity with an oppressive socio-economic regime. Abolition perspectives potentially offer way out of this bind by rejecting the status quo and its underpinning logics of carcerality and epistemic hierarchical classification – the ubiquitous ghost of Descartes. The analysis which abolitionist thinking makes available allows for a reimaging and rebuilding of resistant ideas and practices which challenge the place of social work and social science within dominant regimes of truth. It offers a way forward to a world worth winning.


Neil Ballantyne
Emancipatory social science and anti-oppressive social work: The legacy of Erik Olin Wright.

The global definition of social work, as articulated by the International Federation of Social Workers, states that social work is a practice-based profession and an academic discipline that, amongst other things, promotes the empowerment and liberation of people. The knowledge base for social work has a rich history of different theoretical perspectives, frameworks and practice models, some of which directly address aspects of human oppression, discrimination and marginalisation. These approaches can be grouped under the umbrella term of anti-oppressive practice, including anti-discriminatory practice, anti-racist practice, feminist, green and Marxist perspectives. This presentation draws on the work of the US analytical Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright to consider how his concept of emancipatory social science might be applied in the context of anti-oppressive social work. The presentation will focus primarily on a close reading of two of Wright’s publications – Envisioning Real Utopias and How to Be an Anticapitalist in the 21st Century – exploring their implications for anti-oppressive practice. I will argue that Wright’s emancipatory social science framework complements existing anti-oppressive social work practice. Its open, flexible, and adaptable nature is inclusive of different political traditions and cultural contexts, including Indigenous perspectives. In these challenging times, emancipatory social science provides a rallying point, a tūrangawaewae (common ground) on which diverse social groups can connect and work collectively to craft real utopias.


Olivia LaMontagne
Macro Social Work Practice in Aotearoa

Despite the ethical and professional obligations for social workers to contribute to social change, macro social work practice in Aotearoa is marginalised by managerial approaches in social services under a neoliberal context. Social change and social justice are often discussed as ideals in social work, but the practical aspects of macro social work are less known. Drawing on survey results from one hundred and twenty-three social workers, this presentation identifies the types of macro social work tasks that social workers do, as well as the opportunities and barriers for macro social work in a variety of practice settings. By identifying how and why social workers practice macro social work, implications will be explored as to how to meet the challenges of macro social work in practice settings and beyond.

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: Bruce Cohen

Ella Hurdley

Medical sociologists have found that dominant institutions (i.e.government agencies, mass media, medical professions) have a tendency to obscure how chemical pollution contributes to disease. Examples include framings of breast cancer, leukaemia, and depression. However, a similar analysis has yet to be conducted on the portrayal of infertility. Infertility is an important case because environmental scholars have found strong associations between infertility and exposure to PCBs; pesticides; heavy metals; and radiation. To address this gap, I analyse the infertility information provided by three
dominant institutions: 1) online publisher (healthline.com); 2) a government agency (healthdirect.au); and 3) a charitable trust endorsed by the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners (healthify.nz). The New Zealand institution is particularly important to analyse because of the country’s high infertility rates (up to 26% of the population) and decreasing birth rates (lowest in 20 years). In carrying out a content analysis, I found that all three sites framed
infertility in reductionist terms, especially the NZ website. These findings suggest dominant institutions downplay the relationship between environmental pollution and in/fertility. The NZ case is troubling when we consider the country’s high use of pesticides, herbicides, and chemicals in food and timber production. Another concern is that the social determinants of health in Aotearoa disproportionately impact Māori, and in this case, populations more heavily exposed to pollution.


Mary Silcock
‘Inside the Ministry of Health: critical opportunities to do sociology’

The Ministry of Health science advisory functions are multi-disciplinary but are heavily skewed to biomedical, health and public health approaches. While sociology overlaps and compliments these disciplines, the machinery of government and traditional hierarchies of knowledge create a condition where there is a constant power imbalance in the practices of producing evidence for decision-making. There is currently limited multi-disciplinary capacity to support science advice that includes critical and diverse knowledge. This knowledge is arguably what is most needed to address the complexity facing our health systems, healthcare practice and disparities in health outcomes in the population. As an action to address this imbalance and bolster the strength of sociology knowledge, the Office of the Chief Science Advisor hosted a sociology honours student from Victoria University of Wellington throughout 2024. The impact of having a greater physical presence, more formal linkages to academia and the increased capacity to provide subject matter expertise from the Office of the Chief Science Advisor will be presented. Practising sociology outside the academy and practical suggestions for increasing the influence of sociology in Government settings will be provided.


Chris McMillan
Flights of Fantasy: The (non) communication of air transportation emissions by international sporting organisations

Facing a potentially existential threat from the climate crisis as well as criticism of their own environmental impacts, sporting entities have increasingly sought to develop and communicate environmental sustainability strategies. In particular, major international governing bodies such as the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and World Rugby have publicised significant commitments to reducing their environmental impact. While promising transformational changes, these strategies have predominantly focused on localised issues such as energy generation and use, waste management and construction materials, as well as making adaptative adjustments in response to the changing climate. Conversely, despite making up the majority of carbon emissions from commercial sporting activity, especially mega-events, air transportation has an uneasy presence in these strategies. In particular, although these organisations' own calculations of their carbon footprint highlight the significant role of flights, they receive limited attention in their environmental strategies. In this presentation, I explore this tension within the environmental communication of major international sporting organisations, highlighting the disavowal and displacement of responsibility for transportation emissions. In doing so, I ask how sociologists can most effectively represent and critique these points of tension within environmental communication.

Chair: Neil Vallelly

Lydia Le Gros and Sebastiaan Bierema
Housing, Financialisation, and Utopia in Ursula Le Guin’s ‘the Dispossesed’

Building on our previous research on housing-market financialisation, this paper explores the place of housing in Ursula Le Guin’s utopian novel the Dispossessed as a way of understanding and reimagining social housing provision in Aotearoa. The role of the built environment in constraining and shaping possibilities for action is a prominent theme in the Dispossessed. Images of walls as ambiguous boundaries are particularly noteworthy—functioning both to delineate and to bind together inside/outside and inclusion/exclusion. Just as walls translate social facts into concrete realities and stabilise social norms, housing also shapes individual and societal behaviours.
We draw this link using Ruth Levitas’ Utopia as Method, for whom images of utopia contain both an interpretative (archaeological) and an imaginative (architectural) function. In its archaeological form, the Dispossessed highlight the contingency of a housing system designed around private property rights. This allows us to reframe the function of individual homeownership in Aotearoa as a conservative technology, and to emphasise the relationship between housing and environmental abundance/destruction. As an architectural moment, Le Guin does not so much posit a utopian blueprint as create a space for imagining alternative ways of thinking about housing provision in Aotearoa.


Jessica Terruhn and Francis L. Collins
Finding the best tenants available: Discretion and discrimination in tenant selection in New Zealand’s private rental sector

Scholarship on housing inequalities has consistently documented that rental housing discrimination significantly contributes to housing precarities for minoritised households. This body of research has highlighted the intersectionality of discrimination, its complexities with respect to where, when and how it occurs, and that contemporary discrimination can be subtle and difficult to detect. An important aspect of this work, and one we contribute to with this presentation, is scholarship that has initiated debate about the very definition of discrimination in the context of discretionary tenant selection practices in competitive private rental housing markets. Our central argument is that the definition of discrimination must be widened to recognise and address the inherently discriminatory outcomes of discretionary tenant selection processes. We base our argument on two empirical research projects on housing inequalities in Aotearoa/New Zealand. We juxtapose survey findings that demonstrate home seekers’ widespread experiences of discrimination and data from interviews with property managers that illuminate the ways in which home seekers’ experiences of discrimination are dismissed as unfounded. Property managers plausibly deny discrimination in tenant selection with reference to the Human Rights Act while normalising discretion in identifying the best tenants available. Such discourses not only deprecate home seekers’ experiences as erroneous perceptions but normalise inequalities in access to the private rental sector as the product of personal shortcomings in the context of competition rather than structural disadvantages in the context of rental housing commodification.


Francis L. Collins and Jessica Terruhn 
‘Landlords are just ordinary people’: rental housing precarity and discourses of worthiness in Aotearoa New Zealand
It is widely recognised that there is significant and growing precarity in rental housing in Aotearoa New Zealand, characterised by insecure tenure, unaffordability, poor quality housing, constant residential mobility and risks of homelessness. As has been observed internationally, this housing precarity is significantly linked to financialisation and the entrenching of private landlordism as an ideal form of investment and housing provision. In this presentation we examine the normalisation of housing precarity in Aotearoa New Zealand through discourses that differentially construct the societal worthiness of landlords and tenants. Our paper draws on interviews with property managers and the specific ways in which they articulated security of tenure, suitability for housing, rights of tenants and landlords and questions of dignity in relation to housing. Persistent through these interviews were countervailing discourses that differentially framed the worthiness of tenants and landlords. Tenants, especially people on low incomes and implicitly racialised minorities, were frequently dehumanised by interviewees in a manner that normalised permanent temporariness in housing tenure and framed housing as a privilege to be earned, and one that some people would never be worthy of. In contrast, the figure of the landlord was the focus of moral recuperation, characterised as ordinary people just seeking to get by and providing an important societal service. Our analysis of these discourses aims to extend insights into the linkages between housing precarity and landlordism, and the urgency of transformative responses that establish secure housing as a fundamental right.

Chair: Fairleigh Gilmour

Richard Jackson, Rula Talahma, Alex Miller and Vivienne Anderson
The responsibility of the social scientist in a time of genocidal settler colonial violence

This panel will discuss academic responsibility and the role of social science in a time of escalating genocidal violence by the Israeli settler colonial state. Among a wide range of issues, it will consider whether the argument for institutional neutrality is valid in the current context of Israeli violence, whether the university’s commitment to Te Tiriti necessitates a similar commitment to the decolonisation of Palestine, and whether there are compelling arguments against the adoption of the Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, particularly in relation to boycotting Israeli academic institutions.

Chair: Liz Beddoe

Binhua Chen
Raising Critical Consciousness in Social Work through Theatre of the Oppressed

Since the rise of radical and critical social work, social workers have been expected to critically analyse and act in response to structural problems challenging service users. Over the years, the concept of critical consciousness, developed by the popular educator Freire, has gained the attention of social work scholars. However, current research has focussed more on its aspect of critical reflection, and there is still a gap in how to cultivate critical action. Influenced by Freire, Augusto Boal developed the Theatre of the Oppressed (TO), an approach which he called a ‘rehearsal of the revolution’. The TO may be instructive in how we can move beyond the cognitive level of critical consciousness in the process of consciousness-raising. Based on my experience facilitating TO workshops with practitioners and service users over the last five years in China, this paper will present TO’s potential for developing critical consciousness and action in social work.


Lauren Devine
“Processing People”

The state’s role and purpose in categorising individual vulnerabilities is opaque. Vulnerability has many causal factors, from intrinsic (e.g. ageing, disability, illness, race, culture, diversity) to extrinsic (e.g. abuse, neglect, discrimination, injury, poverty). Hyper-managerialist approaches to health and social care provision rely on categorisation to ration and deliver restricted services, failing to acknowledge categorisation historically served to ration and restrict rights. As a function of categorisation, the phenomenon of “labelling” is entrenched across social work, medicine, psychology, psychiatry, and criminology. The labels perform a heuristic function enabling agencies to assess and deliver appropriate services, but also enable state agencies to assess and restrict individual autonomy and freedoms. The research presented in this paper uses Rose’s historical lens technique “using history rather than grand theory as a way of taking apart the self-evidence of the present.” (1987). This illustrates the opaqueness in the space between formalised categorisation and coercion.


Natasha Mariette
Reforming Adult Protection in BC: The Imperative for Social Work Leadership

This paper examines the adult protection framework in British Columbia (BC), Canada and argues that social work engagement is imperative at all levels of policy and practice to achieve a human rights and socially just approach to adult protection. Adult abuse, neglect, and self-neglect is a social justice issue with devastating consequences including loss of dignity, physical and psychological harm, premature admission to facility care, financial loss, and even death. Responses to adult abuse, neglect, and self-neglect vary across jurisdictions internationally and nationally. Within Canada, each province and territory are responsible for determining its own model of adult safeguarding. In BC, the Adult Guardianship Act (AGA) designates seven agencies to respond to reports of adult abuse, neglect, and self-neglect and are unable to seek support and assistance on their own. Despite the existence of adult protection legislation, the current model in BC experiences significant challenges in protecting vulnerable adults. These challenges stem from a disconnect between macro, mezzo, and micro levels of adult protection work. Effective adult safeguarding requires collaboration and coordination across all levels. Social workers' expertise in direct service provision, understanding the complex bio-psycho-social-spiritual factors that create and perpetuate vulnerability to abuse, neglect, and self-neglect, and commitment to creating systemic change makes social work leadership crucial in transforming adult protection work in BC. Active social work engagement and leadership across macro, mezzo, and micro levels of adult protection is needed to ensure a socially just approach to adult protection in BC.

Jordan Dougherty and Melanie Beres
Interventions in Sexual Violence: Student-led interventions

This stream is based on the Gender Studies paper offered at Otago, GEND311 – Interventions in Sexual Violence, which offers students the opportunity to explore what makes an effective sexual violence prevention project. Across the semester, our students worked within groups to develop their own intervention, which they presented to their tutorial streams under the guise of a funding pitch. Students employed the knowledge gained throughout the course and creatively fulfilled an intervention brief. They carried out a needs assessment, highlighted their goals and objectives, provided a methodology and broke down their intended evaluation methods.
In this session, we will first go over the framework for sexual violence prevention the students were presented with at the beginning of semester, before handing over to the students themselves present their interventions. We will also reflect on the joys and struggles of teaching this paper and discuss some of the student projects that could not present themselves.


Presentation One: Beyond the Binary: Teaching Inclusive Sex Ed
Authors: Alfie Smeele, Sophie Green, Morgan Alcock, Nicki Graham

In Aotearoa, our relationships and sexuality curriculum is not being taught to a high standard, especially regarding queer sexuality, consent and relationships. This discrepancy in relationships and sexuality education for queer students is harmful and is a contributing factor to the higher rates of sexual harm queer people experience. Our intervention is a professional development course for teachers that would aim to educate teachers on teaching relationships and sexuality curriculum inclusively. It would do this by challenging harmful cis/hetero norms about sex consent and relationships, including queer understandings and experiences of relationships, sex, and consent, using a model of consent that emphasizes empathy rather than gendered power dynamics.


Presentation Two: Spark a Shift
Authors: Anna Harris, Beth Dunphy, Maleah Abbott-Newland, Oliva Shaw

Spark a Shift is a tertiary workshop intervention programme that aims to reduce ongoing victimisation following sexual violence within relationships for University of Otago students. The five workshops will target the gender norms and rape myths that entrench sexual passivity and feelings of self-blame in women and AFAB people. They will teach context specific rape resistance strategies to empower participants and help participants to reclaim their sexual desire by understanding what they do want to in order to know what they don't want. Overall, Spark a Shift wishes to deliver a programme that targets the underlying causes of sexual violence and provide ways for participants to feel confident in their ability to defend themselves.

Chair: Anna Friedlander

Talisa Pelser
Power, Representation, and Attitudes in TikTok's Online Sex Work Discourse Post-COVID-19.

This research is centred around contemporary attitudes and perceptions of online sex work on TikTok post COVID-19. The arrival of COVID-19 in 2020 propagated communications and socialisations to become primarily digital, inducing a global sense of social and physical isolation. This shift to the virtual spaces gave rise to the short-form social media app; TikTok, a platform that has revolutionised content creation, consumerist culture, digital engagement, and cultural narratives. Concurrently, COVID-19 enabled a pivotal moment in the adult entertainment industry, increasing global pornographic consumption and catalysing online sex work into mainstream markets and media. The emergence of online sex work follows a period of feminist sex work literature that houses prolific debates surrounding its presence, usage, and
consumption, often entangling dynamics of power, agency, and commodification in its discourse. Sex work remains a topic that is embedded in heavily contested ideologies surrounding its moral and ethical implications, concerns of exploitation, and its validity as job under patriarchal capitalism. The perceptions and consumptions of such work and its content is often polarised, ranging in feminist and non-feminist critiques alike. The purpose of this research is to analyse
what narratives exist surrounding online sex work on TikTok; a platform that continues to have a profound and extensive impact on global cultures and disseminations of new, recurring, distinct, and evolving ideologies. My research uses a typology and feminist critical discourse analysis to profile what narratives exist and deconstruct how present narratives are created and sustained through language and broader discourses. Utilising this digital ethnography and critical
examination, my research profiles contemporary narratives within digital spaces and through global perspectives, highlighting narratives that both parallel and diverge from key feminist sex work ideologies. Through this analysis I address key questions of (a) what dominant narratives circulate around online sex work on TikTok, (b) how prevailing narratives operate through regulations within TikTok, and (c) how narratives are sustained and reproduced through
discourse


Lorraine Smith, Sophie Lewis, Karen Willis, Marika Franklin, Maja Moensted
Title: People’s Experiences Of Chronic Illness And Loneliness: How Well Does Australian Healthcare Policy And Systems Deliver Good Care And Support?

Healthcare policy and practice positions chronic disease as requiring personal control and individual self-management. This positioning is problematic for people who are lonely and living with chronic illness. Loneliness isolates people from services, peers, and community. Active participation in social life is hampered by ill-health, problems with mobility, access to services, geographic location, and reduced emotional and psychological resources. Policy statements regarding chronic condition self-management acknowledge the influence of social determinants, but the emphasis remains on personal choice and ignores the multi-layered social problem that is loneliness. In this presentation we examine the complex and sometimes confusing Australian healthcare system, and the government policies and strategic frameworks that over the last 20 years have shaped chronic disease healthcare services offered to Australians. We explore the extent to which these services provide meaningful support to those living with chronic illness and loneliness, providing examples from our research examining the social consequences and people’s capacities for living well with chronic illness. Our learnings presents us with an opportunity to recognise and act on the critical importance of social connection and its impact on health, both short- and long-term, so that more targeted and effective interventions can be developed.

Linda Madden, Penelope Carroll, Karen Witten
States of dis/ability - looking at the past to imagine a new future of dis/ability.

Through Aotearoa’s history, the embodied ‘state of being disabled’ has hinged around the ‘State’ as the primary driver by which the concept of disability is reproduced. Narratives about what disablement means have typically been constructed through legislative ‘state-ments’ (government acts, policies etc.) that define disabled bodies and mediate how dis/ability is understood. As a result, ableist attitudes – largely unseen – permeate most spheres of everyday life in Aotearoa and often remain potent regardless of rhetoric espousing empowerment and inclusion. This paper explores the historical origins and impacts of disability legislation, and implications for community and citizenship. We also address what a new sociology of disability could look like in terms of both resistance to the past and a reclaiming of disabled identities. Finally, we propose that the sociologies of the future shift the onus for change from within the disabled community and employ methodologies designed explicitly to encourage reflection and conscientization among non-disabled individuals who might otherwise be reluctant to change their ableist attitudes.

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.

Chair: Peter Howland

Penelope Carroll, Linda Madden, Karen Witten
Ableism: a potent force impeding full citizenship?

Ableism – largely unseen and unquestioned – plays a significant role in the structure and functioning of society in Aotearoa, as elsewhere. People whose bodies fit an ‘ablebodied’ norm are situated as ideal (and are thus privileged) while ‘disabled’ bodies are deemed deviant (and problematised and marginalised). This has a significant effect on participation parity across all life domains, denying many disabled New Zealanders full citizenship. As more than one-in-five New Zealanders are categorised as ‘disabled’, ableism’s reach in cementing socio-cultural and economic inequalities is vast.

Despite decades of rights-based rhetoric, accessibility legislation and inclusionary frameworks, disabled people continue to be marginalised. A clear and critical focus is required to surface ableist attitudes and practices and avoid reproducing exclusionary ableist systems and structures. Two current research projects – one Health Research Council-funded, the other Marsden-funded – are surfacing ableist beliefs in the physical activity, health, employment and culture sectors; provoking self-reflection within the sectors; and employing creative strategies to tackle ableism and help ensure a non-ableist future for Aotearoa.

In this presentation, we discuss deep-seated ableist attitudes and practices revealed in research with participants from across all sectors and our creative dissemination of these findings to date.


Conor Lorigan
Outside the university is outside the modern self.

1. Rangi as resonance (Carl Mika) operates from a different subjectivity to the modern (Pākehā) self (Denise Ferreira Da Silva).
2. What is rangi as resonance? (Carl Mika, Maori Marsden, Symon Palmer, Madi Williams, Edouard Glissant)
3. What is the modern self? (Denise Ferreira Da Silva, Mark Fisher, Achille Mbembe, Simon Barber)
4. Rangi as resonance as surreal – returning Pākehā to an image unrecognisable from before (Viveiros Da Castro, Mark Fisher).

From this outline I will attempt to raise questions of what we mean by outside the university. The outside is going on regardless of us (inside) so then we can ask why or how we think we could be removed from the outside and how this then structures our thought of in/outside the university.

Chair: Charlotte Bruce Kells

Emily Beck
Critical Insights into Aotearoa Youth Justice Residences through Qualitative Interviews with Youth Residents and Staff

Though youth crime has more than halved in the past decade in Aotearoa (Ministry of Justice, 2024), community outcry over offenses like ‘ram raids’ has caused the government to enforce a more punitive approach to youth offending, promoting an increased use of youth justice residences (YJR) and the reopening of military-style boot camps. This heightened tough-on-crime approach disproportionately affects rangatahi Māori, who make up the majority of youth in custody (Francis & Vlaanderen, 2023). Despite this increased attention on youth offending, academic scholarship on Aotearoa YJR remains lacking. This is a presentation of master’s research that explores whether the ongoing piecemeal reform of YJR, geared towards restorative justice and cultural sensitivity, is a feasible solution to youth offending when situated within a western justice system, operating in a neocolonial context. This presentation reflects on seven semi-structured interviews with youth justice residents and staff members and describes the reflexive thematic analysis that was conducted. Critical race theory and counter-colonial criminology are used as framework to identify structural and systemic barriers that make YJR a not only ineffective, but harmful intervention for youth. This presentation closes with a discussion on how transformative justice can offer an alternative direction for youth justice reform.


Grace Gordon
Beyond bars and bootcamps: Reimagining safety in Aotearoa New Zealand

Carceral safety logic positions justice institutions as a primary source of safety, and this logic dominates internationally and in Aotearoa New Zealand. Recent political change in Aotearoa New Zealand has seen government commitments to the introduction of wide-reaching anti-gang legislation, ineffective youth justice policies such as ‘bootcamps’, and amendments to sentencing legislation that would result in a burgeoning prison population, all in the name of ‘public safety’. Concerningly, the promotion of these punitive policies occurs in tandem with the systematic neglect of marginalised communities, what Ruth Wilson Gilmore terms ‘organized abandonment’. The trauma experienced by these communities, whose lives are marked by precarity and oppression, is then weaponised against them through criminalisation and carceral safety logic. Using the case studies of the Waikeria prison expansion and the ‘Military Style Academy Pilot’ for youth, this paper problematises Aotearoa New Zealand’s reliance on carceral safety logic and argues that this logic perpetuates harm, particularly among already marginalised communities. It promotes early developments of a reimagining of safety through sustainable, care-based approaches that provide an overdue antidote to harm and violence in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Carceral safety logic positions justice institutions as a primary source of safety, and this logic dominates internationally and in Aotearoa New Zealand. Recent political change in Aotearoa New Zealand has seen government commitments to the introduction of wide-reaching anti-gang legislation, ineffective youth justice policies such as ‘bootcamps’, and amendments to sentencing legislation that would result in a burgeoning prison population, all in the name of ‘public safety’. Concerningly, the promotion of these punitive policies occurs in tandem with the systematic neglect of marginalised communities, what Ruth Wilson Gilmore terms ‘organized abandonment’. The trauma experienced by these communities, whose lives are marked by precarity and oppression, is then weaponised against them through criminalisation and carceral safety logic. Using the case studies of the Waikeria prison expansion and the ‘Military Style Academy Pilot’ for youth, this paper problematises Aotearoa New Zealand’s reliance on carceral safety logic and argues that this logic perpetuates harm, particularly among already marginalised communities. It promotes early developments of a reimagining of safety through sustainable, care-based approaches that provide an overdue antidote to harm and violence in Aotearoa New Zealand.


Claudia Murdoch
Restorative practice in New Zealand schools: The challenges and successes.

This presentation outlines the findings of a Master of Arts in Criminology project on the challenges and successes of restorative practice in New Zealand schools. The work is situated within a political context of rising tough-on-crime rhetoric and zero-tolerance responses to young people’s misbehaviour. Restorative practice, by contrast, prioritises the mana, accountability, emotional capacity and harm-repair capability of the young people who experience it. As a result, it is a mechanism for decreasing exclusionary punishment use. The current literature suggests that the reduced rates of suspensions, stand-downs, exclusions and expulsions that result from effective restorative practice are important in disrupting the school-to-prison-pipeline.

This project aims to increase understanding of the factors preventing or enabling effective restorative practice. 11 semi-structured, qualitative interviews with teachers, school counsellors and restorative practice experts investigated their experiences enacting restorative practice in both a proactive and reactive capacity. It asked them about their experiences working with young people and the issues and opportunities they face within their schools. These issues and opportunities will be analysed in the presentation, alongside their implications on alternatives to punishment in the criminal justice system more broadly.

Chair: Ian Hyslop

Bindi Bennett and Donna Baines
Emancipatory Decoloniality as Leadership in Social Service Organisations: Insights from Indigenous and Anti-Oppressive Yarnings and Approaches

Around the globe, there is a growing demand for leadership in resolving longstanding social injustices experienced by Indigenous peoples. As part of a larger, international study, this article draws on early findings from yarnings/qualitative interviews to contribute to theorising Indigenous leadership in social service organisations. Within our research design, the team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers consciously centre Indigenous ways of being, knowing and doing in order to build emancipatory, decolonising theory and practice. The analysis in this article identifies Indigenous social justice leadership in a number of overlapping forms including: Indigenous-centered/cultural centered ways of being, knowing and doing; intersectional identities; partnerships; and envisioning for all. The article concludes with further early theorising and calls for future research to delve more deeply into Indigenous leadership as it develops in resistance to new conditions, including the far-right push-back against human rights and equity, and the constraints of neoliberalism.

Katheryn Margaret Pascoe
Examining the potential for employing a Delphi Panel for social work research in competitive and constrained contexts

Supervised student placements are central to social work education and there is substantial literature outlining the important role of practice educators in work integrated learning, including the need for training. This presentation reports on the use of a Delphi Panel to answer “What are the potential opportunities and limitations for delivering a national training program for social workers supervising student placements (Practice educators) in Aotearoa New Zealand?”

A Delphi panel provides a systematic process for engaging a varied group of experts and professionals in a structured, iterative research design. Best suited for exploratory research, Delphi panels are used to commonly used in policy and educational research to gain insight through a series of sequential questionnaires accompanied by response summaries. The presentation will provide a critical discussion of the methodological decisions and how Delphi panels may be harnessed in social work, policy and welfare research. A Delphi panel provides the opportunity for dialogue amongst a range of stakeholders where panellists can share without apprehension of revealing their identity to other participants. This method can help facilitate fair and equitable communication by reducing the risk of an individual dominating discussion or voices going unheard as can happen in focus groups. This is particularly relevant for contentious topics or competitive contexts. Limitations include inhibited ability to follow-up on nuances and restricting discussion to a linear process which can exclude full participation from individuals and cultures which value transparent, dynamic and cyclical dialogue. Additionally, conceptualising consensus is questioned in knowledge production and what is considered expertise for participation.


Neil Ballantyne
A practice-oriented approach to doing lively document analysis: Analysing documents on the datafied border in Fortress Europe.

Document analysis is a taken-for-granted aspect of many research projects where documents are considered textual repositories of content and investigated for their insights into human discourse, organisational behaviours or policy priorities. During analysis key, recurring concepts and categories are abstracted from a corpus of documents and subjected to quantitative content analysis – sometimes using text mining – or, more commonly in social work research, qualitative thematic or discourse analysis. Recently, Kristin Asdal, Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Oslo, advocated for a practice-oriented approach to document analysis. This strategy resonates well with actor-network theory and adopts a material-semiotic perspective on document analysis. In this context, documents are considered textual or semiotic in the sense that they convey meaning, but also as material artifacts in two senses. They are material objects in and of themselves. They are doubly material to the extent that social and natural phenomena are brought into documents to work on them: turning objects into issues or acting to quieten controversies. The interplay between the material and semiotic reveals documents to be lively players in forming or closing issues. In this presentation, I will illustrate the value of a practice-oriented approach to document analysis by discussing its application to a case study of the work of the Data Justice Lab at the University of Cardiff. I focus on some research outputs by the Lab highlighting the impact of data-driven systems and artificial intelligence on refugees and asylum seekers at the European border.


Xiaohang Yang
A Comparative Research of Value Conflicts in Social Work Education for Chinese Mainland Students in China and New Zealand

Social work is a crucial global profession, but its education and practice are heavily shaped by national contexts. Social work programmes have to balance integrating international standards with adapting to local cultural contexts. This can lead to value conflicts for students who are adjusting to different educational systems.
My PhD research aims to investigate the value conflicts experienced by Chinese Mainland students in social work education in China and New Zealand. A review of literature reveals that in Aotearoa New Zealand, Te Tiriti o Waitangi and a commitment to human rights and social justice form the basis of bicultural social work education. However, Chinese Mainland students often find it challenging to understand these Māori concepts and Western social work values. Social work education in Mainland China is based on Western social work models that emphasise individualism and social justice, which can conflict with traditional Confucian values of familism and collectivism.
This presentation outlines the value conflicts experienced by Chinese Mainland students in social work education and highlights the challenges of globalisation and indigenisation within social work education. It can encourage dialogue between social work education systems in China and New Zealand.

Chair: Neil Vallelly

Java Grant
Contradiction in the Neoliberal Academy: A Critical Case Study of The University of Auckland Administration

The premise of higher education in Aotearoa is of education, research and service to the community. However, NZ universities have been captured by capitalist demand for skills training and have retreated from their democratic purpose–to be critical. Administrations reduce staff to labour, students to customers, and “individual gain is prized over any public good” (Harward, 2016, p. 7). This research examined the discursive artefacts from the rupturing contradiction between capitalist imperatives and performative identity of the University of Auckland (UoA) during the 2022 university staff strikes. The strikes permissed participants to challenge the narrative of universities sustained by neoliberal administrations as suddenly “functions and mal-functions, actions and in-actions [were] all on open display” (Matthewman, 2015, p. 15). A constructivist framing enabled comparison between competing narratives of the Academic Capitalist administration. Narratives were identified through a multimodal discourse analysis of strike and university-related media. The UoA administration is identified as creating and distributing misleading symbolic structures that maintain hegemonic power structures. This work frees academic labour from negotiating with bad faith administrations, empowered instead to “seek alternative, and/or radically transformed forms of the university” (Stein, 2020, para. 3 and participate as “part of the ‘grit’ [preventing the] neo-liberal world system functioning smoothly” (Clarke, 2004, p. 44).

Brian S. Roper
Neoliberalism’s War on New Zealand’s Universities: A Critical Analysis and Evaluation of Tertiary Educational Policy-Making from 2017 to 2024.

The Tertiary Education Union estimates that the cumulative underfunding of universities by the Key-English National Government amounted to $3.7 billion from 2009 to 2018. University staff and students hoped that the Sixth Labour-led Government would be better, but apart from making the first-year fees free, it was even worse with respect to underfunding our universities. In Budget 2023 the tuition funding component (SAC) was increased in nominal terms by 5% which Chris Hipkins repeatedly claimed was “the biggest funding increase for tertiary education in 20 years.” The truth is the complete opposite. Hipkins neglected to acknowledge that the SAC funding component only makes up around 41% of the total revenue streams for most NZ universities and also that inflation was then the highest it had been for 20 years. Allowing for inflation, and the maximum fee rise caps set at 1.7% for domestic students in 2022 and 2.75% for 2023, Labour presided over deep cuts to funding of New Zealand universities. Chronic cumulative government underfunding and large funding short-falls from 2020-2023, combined with the loss of international student tuition fee income, pushed six of eight NZ universities into various states of financial crisis. Senior management responded by attempting to drive through cuts to scholarships, degrees and staff. This provoked resistance by staff, students, and their unions. In Budget 2024, the Sixth National-led Government increased total nominal funding for tertiary education from $4.934 billion in 2024 to $5.151 billion in 2025, but Treasury’s estimates suggest it will then cut funding in real terms from 2026 to 2028. Most likely, it will allow substantial tuition fee rises to offset declining government funding per student during this period. This paper describes and critically analyses the imposition of fiscal austerity on tertiary education by Labour and National governments from 2017 to 2024, and considers the best options for successful resistance.


Kate Jack
Cruel Optimism: Queer Students & Queer Futures in New Zealand’s Neoliberal Universities

Universities appear as spaces of promise for queer and LGBTQ+ people, rare sites where we expect the ability to safely exist, explore our history and knowledge, and build a secure life. Despite this appearance, largely brought about by ever-intensifying institutional DEI discourse, decades of research have established that queer and LGBTQ+ students continually report discrimination, harassment, and non-belonging whilst at university, alongside poor post-study outcomes. And, despite their apparent failure, the same solutions are continually proposed: more diversity policy, equity programmes, inclusion initiatives. I suggest that to move us beyond this cycle, researchers must seriously interrogate the university as an institution. Taking New Zealand as a case study and grounded by queer methodology, I use unstructured interviews, poetic transcription, and queer vandalism to explore the dis/connect between what the university promised students and their actual experience, contextualised by a critical exploration of the colonial origins and neoliberal restructuring of higher education. Recognising universities as core institutions for neoliberal reproduction, I argue that the neoliberal government of students serves a normalising function that works to regulate queerness through the creation of homonormative, marketised subjects. Here, a relation of cruel optimism emerges—despite their promises, universities as we know them necessarily prevent queer flourishing. How might we move beyond this condition?

Chair: Tamika Ashbrook

Warwick Tie
Translation as an antidote to decolonisation by fetish.

This presentation begins from an observation by Glen Coulthard that processes of institutional decolonisation routinely result in recolonization. I explore how the work of translation might intervene with this. It identifies one of the mechanisms of recolonization as a fetishisation of one or other key elements of a given decolonisation programme. In the case of my own university, this occurs as the fetishisation of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, in which the idea of Te Tiriti circulates as a signifier without referent. Fetishisation is enabled by an organisational construction of a subject amenable to fetishisation, along with practices of disavowal to manage anxiety generated by the ‘terrible certainty’ with which a fetish needs be held. Translation provides a way for decolonisation to be redirected in non-fetishistic ways. The presentation explores how this might occur, using a case study again from my university. This focuses on a relation between ‘untranslatable’ elements of te reo Māori and the instrumentalist ‘mode of intention’ of contemporary English language-use. In brief, the ‘historicity of thought’ in Māori confronts the ‘loss of temporality’ of administrative English under late capitalism.


Hine Funaki-Cole
Ghosts of kinship and ghosts of foe: Māori doctoral student belonging in Aotearoa universities.

Hauntings are often misconstrued as strange and often scary supernatural experiences that blur the lines between what is real and what is not. Yet, Indigenous hauntings can not only be confronting, but they can also be comforting and support place belonging. This paper offers a Māori philosophical way of theorising hauntology and its relation to time, space, place, and belonging by privileging a whakapapa perspective. Whakapapa acknowledges not only kinship relations for people, but all things and their relationship to them, from the sky to the lands, and the spiritual connections in between. Employing a whakapapa korero theoretical framework, I draw on Māori constructs of time and place through Wā, Wānanga (Māori stories both told and untold), and Te Wāhi Ngaro to offer some insights from my doctoral thesis where Māori PhD students shared their everyday experiences in their institutions. With a backdrop of settler-colonial structures, norms, and daily interactions, I argue that hauntings are an everyday familiar occurrence in Te Ao Māori which play a major role in the way Māori doctoral students establish and maintain a sense of belonging in their universities.


Alex Ker and Jennifer de Saxe
Theories of whiteness and race as anchors for action 

How do we connect with and actualise theory in our practices of social change? We situate this talk in critical theories of race and whiteness broadly, to demonstrate how educators might foster students’ relationship with theory as liberatory and transformative (hooks, 1994), and to embrace cognitive dissonance. We reflect on an assignment in an undergraduate sociology course where we asked students to apply theories as a framework, lens and tool to analyse an experience in their lives relating to race or ethnicity – and in turn, to better understand the theories they used as an anchor from which to continue lifelong learning. We then discuss the implications and our hopes of such a reflective practice on students’ solidarity and co-conspiratorial (Garza, 2020) work beyond their time at university.

Chair: Peter Howland

Sean Lennon
Queer Youth Suicide in Aotearoa: A Non-Pathogising Theoretical Approach to Suicide

Suicide has traditionally been understood as a mental health issue. As a subfield, suicide literature focused on queer people has investigated a wider range of factors that contribute to suicide. However, these factors are often interpreted using the minority stress model, which continues to pathologise queer experiences. Queer youth face higher levels of suicide ideation, along with homo/bi/transphobia, discrimination, and stigma. Queer youth face great challenges in their interpersonal relationships, at school or accessing healthcare as a result of engaging with the world as a queer person, all of which can increase the distress they experience. I am in the preliminary stages of doctoral research, and this presentation outlines the theoretical framework I will use to explore queer youth experiences of suicide in Aotearoa without relying on a pathologising framework. A critical suicidology framework will be used to examine the causes and impacts of social inequalities on suicide and how to disrupt them. Intersectionality will be applied to ensure that different groups of the community are represented and their experiences are understood in the context of their intersecting identities. Te Whare Tapa Whā framework will help ensure that the research is inclusive of te ao Māori (Māori worldview).


Bruce M. Z. Cohen
‘Deviant Consumptions: A Marxist Theory of Addiction’

Despite the increase in psychiatric, media, and public discourse regarding the prevalence and growing number of addictions in Western society in the twenty-first century, sociological analyses of such conspicuous behaviour has remained relatively thin on the ground. This is perhaps surprising given the mental health system’s continued inability to adequately identify and define what exactly ‘addiction’ is, or to provide effective treatments for those who have been labelled as (for example) drug, alcohol, gambling, food, social media, shopping, gaming, or sex ‘addicts’. In advance of the publication of Addiction and the Medicalisation of Conspicuous Behaviour: New Critical Perspectives (a sociological volume from Jo Reichertz, Martin Harbusch and myself, due out in 2025), this presentation performs a Marxist analysis of addiction to assess the key historical dynamics and current drivers for this form of medicalisation, including consideration of both the economic and ideological motives for pathologizing various forms of deviant consumption in capitalist society. From consideration of the early moral entrepreneurs who first named certain behaviours as addictions in the late nineteenth century, through changes to the American Psychiatric Association’s third edition of their Diagnostical and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980, to the latest tests for efficacy, this talk will also offer some useful pathways for future critical sociological research in the area.


Rachael McMahon
“The Magic Pill”

Psychiatric knowledge exists as a cultural artefact of this hegemonic Western biopolitical neoliberalist society. Psychiatry, its science, its reason, its values, its perceived validating measurements, its treatment can be understood as cultural artefacts. In this paper I will examine psychiatry and unpack some of its foundations, by exploring the apparent magical abilities of psychiatry, providing a lens of lived/living experience to its understanding. In exploring the magic of psychiatric science, I will also consider the “magic” of psychiatric measurement, technology, diagnosis, and treatment. I will use the method of the “sacred” narrative (Hendry 2009) to understand the magic of psychiatry, demonstrated by a discussion of psychiatry’s cultural artefacts.

Chair: Jordan Dougherty

Hannah Thompson
Stories of Resistance; an exploratory study of intersectionality in sex work in Aotearoa New Zealand

With the passing of the Prostitution Reform Act 2003, Aotearoa New Zealand recognised that sex workers’ rights are human rights. Research over the last twenty years has highlighted the increased safety for sex workers; however, it has also outlined the persistence of discrimination. This is experienced through Section 19 excluding non-resident migrants from legal sex work, exposing them to exploitation, sexual violence, criminalisation, and deportation. Discrimination is also experienced by sex workers already marginalised by their personal characteristics, namely, ethnicity, gender, Indigeneity, and migrant status. While there is a complaints pathway available to sex workers via the Human Rights Commission, research has highlighted few successful cases. This is due to a sense that this is not a viable and available option because while sex work is legal, it is not necessarily considered to be legitimate. In short, while research on decriminalisation has outlined increased safety for sex workers, not all sex workers experience this safety equally. This paper focuses on this intersectionality of risk and safety in sex work under decriminalisation. It seeks to do this through reflecting on the early stages of conducting narrative and arts-based research, which will capture the experiences of migrant and gender-expansive sex workers.


Kit Cohen
Neurodiversity and Sex Work in Aotearoa New Zealand

In Aotearoa New Zealand, sex work has been decriminalised for citizens and permanent residents since the passing of the Prostitution Reform Act 2003. While decriminalisation provides sex workers with legal pathways to assert their rights and seek safer, more supportive work environments, challenges persist in the extent to which sex workers feel able to enforce these rights (Hayden, 2023). There are also gaps in understanding how specific groups of sex workers experience their working conditions. Specifically, little academic attention has been given to the intersection of neurodiversity and sex work.

Addressing this important gap in the literature, this paper examines at the experiences of neurodiverse sex workers in Aotearoa New Zealand, with the aim of exploring the benefits and challenges they face in the workplace. Drawing on in-depth interviews with neurodiverse sex workers in New Zealand, this paper sheds light on how this population experience sex work and their working conditions. In doing so, the paper highlights the flexibility and autonomy that sex work afforded participants, while outlining tensions and challenges in this context.


Madi Hodgkinson
‘Does that mean we have to be disempowered for the rest of our [lives]? No, it doesn’t.’: Survivors’ Perceptions of Sex Work in Relation to Past Experiences of Sexual Trauma.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with nine sex workers who are survivors of sexual violence in their personal lives, this paper explores how participants experienced and perceived their work in relation to their past experiences of trauma. Sex work is a subject that is shrouded with misinformation, and the intersection between sex work and past experience of interpersonal trauma is a particularly fraught area. Specifically, it has been argued by some researchers and anti sex work campaigners that entry into sex work is frequently a consequence of sexual trauma. However, the voices of sex workers have been largely absent in literature on the intersection between interpersonal trauma and involvement in sex work, and thus very little is known about their perspectives.

In this paper, I foreground the voices of sex workers who have experienced sexual violence in their personal lives and argue that for several participants engagement in sex work was experienced as a form of healing. These accounts challenge stereotypes and harmful assumptions about sex workers who are survivors and provide insights that can support trauma informed, rights-based practice for those supporting survivors who are working in the sex industry.

Chair: Neil Ballantyne

Emily Keddell, Sarah Colhoun, Pauline Norris, Esther Willing, Donna Cormack  
Where do big data come from? The social production of child protection ‘reports of concern’.

The rise of big data creates opportunities for research in child protection, particularly through the use of linked datasets. These sets can be used to track patterns of system contact, and construct relational and predictive models. Ethical concerns with algorithmic prediction decision aids are well known, but there has been less consideration of the social processes that contribute to the production of key data points within linked datasets. This talk presents findings from a study of child protection reporting decisions that become ‘reports of concern’ data. Through interviews and focus groups with school, NGO and police staff, and whānau who had been reported, we found a wide range of sources of variability within the social processes leading to reports. Sources of variability include the effects of policy change over time, different policy interpretations, personal values, responses to the high threshold for acceptance, (some make more reports, some fewer), interpretations of what abuse consists of, access to alternatives to reporting, and differences relating to role type and experience. Families and whānau noted that false reports can be made that cannot be expunged, and significant diversity within the family situations leading to reports. Thresholds for reporting are highly influenced by the acceptance threshold, which itself reflects wider debates about the role of the child protection system,
prevention policy orientations, and inequities for Māori. Tracing the social pathways of data provenance highlight that reports data are not neutral, cannot be considered internally coherent data points, and do not reflect either abuse incidence, nor a uniform level of community concern. The implications for inequities and predictive models will be discussed.

Stephen Parker
Technological risks for the sociology to come

The use of technology in social work promotes conservatism because technological “solutions” are “trained” using data drawn from “what has gone before”, not “what is to come”. The state-of-the-art in social work is increasingly drawn from “evidence-based studies”, a defensive model relied on in medicine, partly because it is a defence to litigation. Whilst individual social workers can be dynamic and creative in attempts to deliver social justice, trained AI models are not able to identify structural biases, or to be reflexive. Their true value is thus more restrictive than bureaucratic social work models acknowledge. Regardless, technology is used in many modern social work models, from predictive technologies identifying “risky” families, to tracking devices via smart technology, and staff monitoring devices. Flagging risks based on these technologies still requires human input and human input, in a predictive sense, must work on theoretical knowledge rather than empirical evidence. Although theory presented as established knowledge has its own risks, the risks of drawing conclusions from risks flagged by technology has flagged bias, coercion, and disempowerment of vulnerable groups.

Dr Emma Tseris: The proliferation of trauma across the human services: Unpacking a ‘progressive’ concept.  

Trauma-informed practices are proliferating in social work, and across the human services more broadly. Such practices are usually positioned as unproblematically positive and progressive, and they have been commended for offering a shift away from pathologising approaches. However, there is growing critical scholarship highlighting the limitations of trauma-informed practices in enacting social justice, instead illuminating the symptom-oriented and individual-focused discourses that permeate trauma-informed practices, and an increasingly amorphous understanding of the meaning of trauma-informed practice. This sits alongside a limited critical interrogation of the rise of neuro-centric perspectives that seek to predict the impacts of violence across the lifecourse. In this paper, I will argue that trauma-informed practices have become a popular approach to demonstrating a rhetorical engagement with ‘social justice’, while reinstating the professional power and expertise of psy-professionals. This is achieved by constructing victim-survivors of violence as ‘risky’ and ‘dysfunctional’, which justifies a range of oppressive practices, including paternalism, surveillance, and diverse forms of coercion. Such practices are wrapped up in notions of benevolence, leaving little room for critique. Consequently, there is an urgent need to consider whether the feminist and activist roots of the trauma paradigm can be re-discovered, or whether it is necessary to take a different direction in addressing and preventing interpersonal, institutional, and structural violence.

Chair: Fairleigh GIlmour

Peyton Bond
Social reproduction, abolition, and the family

This paper adds to feminist demands to centre social transformation on the epistemological foundation and practice of abolition. I focus in this paper on the feminist call for abolition of the family. Drawing from feminist demands from the 1970s and the present, this paper grounds itself in social reproduction theory and abolitionist feminism to centre the family as a key site of labour exploitation, gender-making, and the settler colonial project. The urgency of this moment, in which sociopolitical rhetoric draws on panics of a declining white nuclear family to produce intensified border control, law enforcement, and welfare degradation, requires a reinvigoration of the ‘most infamous feminist proposal’: abolish the family. Despite the feminist family abolitionism of the 1970s, the next decades witnessed a feminist walk-back and a move instead towards family reform. This paper examines the political, legal, and social borders of the nuclear family from a feminist abolitionist perspective alongside insights from social reproduction theory. Drawing from key feminist texts since the 1970s, alongside more recent iterations of family abolition arguments (such as Lewis 2022, O’Brien 2020, Weeks 2023, and Lethabo King 2018), this paper outlines the nuclear family as not only a significant form of enclosure, atomisation, and exclusion, but further as a site from which we may (re)examine radical forms of collective and anti-capitalist care – even if, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore articulates, we must change everything.


Spark Vulpa (Sang Myung Park)
Get the Credit You Deserve: the Evolution of ‘Deserving’ Parents through Aotearoa New Zealand’s Family Policies

Parents shape children's futures, making them both perpetuators and potential remedies to generational problems. However, how are the parents shaped though government policies?

This research examines the ways family policy has shaped understandings of ‘deserving’ parents in Aotearoa New Zealand over time, focusing on the advent of ‘Working for Families’. The ‘Working for Families’ package is an integral income assistance scheme that was introduced as part of Budget 2004, and its aims have been to mitigate child poverty, as well as incentivise workforce participation for parents.

Previous scholarship addressed the history and socio-political impacts of ‘Working for Families’ on Aotearoa families, exploring who was included and excluded from its accompanying benefits. However, no one has examined how family policies impacted parents’ understandings of ‘deservingness’. To address the gap, this project analyses how the construction of ‘Working for Families’ and its associated meanings have framed (or privileged) parents who adhere to specific policy aims. Drawing on Carol Bacchi’s ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be?’ framework, this research utilises sociological, political and historical studies on the progression of family policies in Aotearoa to trace the evolution and construction of ‘deserving’ families, and identify the extent to which the neoliberal state has been able to maintain agenda-oriented definitions.


Charlotte Bruce Kells
Becoming a Mother: First-time mothers navigating pregnancy, birth & postpartum in Aotearoa New Zealand

Since second-wave feminism, becoming a mother has been singled out as the key site of women's oppression by many key feminist thinkers. In 1976, Adrianne Rich wrote in Of Women Born that “the words are being spoken now, are being written down; the taboos are being broken, the masks of motherhood are cracking through”. Almost 40 years on, it’s hard not to feel despondent about how much of the mask of motherhood remains intact for parents in 2025. This paper explores 10 first-time mothers' experiences of becoming mothers using serial interviews to follow the participants through their pregnancy, birth, and postpartum. The data from the 30 interviews identified 3 key themes: The constructed experience of becoming a mother; the structural experience of becoming a mother; and the subjective experience of
becoming a mother. By understanding these three key experiences of new motherhood, this research aims to provide a better understanding of how to address motherhood as a key site of women’s oppression through a feminist lens.

Chair: Simon Clay

Aaron Hu and John Wei
Behind the façade: Chinese Gay and Lesbian People’s Experiences in Heterosexual Marriage

Although many previous studies have demonstrated that an increasing number of Chinese gay and lesbian people entered heterosexual marriages under pressure from their parents and unfavourite attitudes toward homosexuality from society, limited research has explored their post-marital lives in heterosexual marriages. This qualitative study investigates the post-marital experiences of Chinese gay and lesbian people in heterosexual marriages, with a focus on how they navigate societal and familial expectations. Through online in-depth interviews with 20 participants from March to May of 2023, the findings based on thematic analysis reveal they "perform" authenticity in their marriages to align with traditional family values, often encountering challenges in managing relationships with children, parents, and in-laws. Financial arrangements and living situations also emerge as sources of tension as participants strive to meet external expectations while negotiating their sexual identities. The study sheds light on the complex interplay between personal identity, social norms, and familial obligations in Chinese gay and lesbian people's marital lives, providing important insights for understanding the psychological and social struggles they face.

John Wei
The End of the Beginning: Ten Years of Researching (and Reflecting on) Queer Kinship

At the crossroad to actively (re)imagine the sociology to come by reflecting on the past and making sense of the present, this paper offers an intentionally self-reflective and boldly forward-looking intervention into gender and sexuality research through my own experiences of (re)searching and (re)thinking about the nature and the boundaries of family and kinship through a queer lens in a global context.

More specifically, this paper starts with a critical reflection on the beginning of my fieldwork to research queer kinship in China ten years ago in 2013 and 2014, which has then led to a decade-long and still ongoing fascination with the deeply and increasingly diverse practices and understandings of various forms of family, community, intimate relationship, and how these ontological and theoretical concepts become intimately intertwined with gender and sexuality in general, and with queer people’s lived experiences and life stories in particular.

By tracing back my journey both in the research field and in the conceptual and intellectual development of the notion of ‘stretched kinship’, which has taken on its own life (so to speak) and become a useful metaphor and practical framework for the analysis of queer life in both Asia and Aotearoa New Zealand, this paper continues to investigate and shed critical light on such issues as family, identity, intimacy, sexuality, and (above all) ‘futurity’ to break away from the limits of the past and the problematic present to actively construct a possible queer future – whatever form it may take and no matter where it may reside and manifest.

By connecting the past and the future, Asia and Aotearoa, and queer and kinship, I hope this paper can serve as a timely reflection of personal and collective memories, a reminder of the current issues and problems at hand, and a forward-looking and forward-thinking intervention into what the future may hold, both for me as a queer kinship researcher and for the sociology of family and sexuality as an ever-changing field of critical inquiry.

Chair: Niall Campbell

Erin Silver
Abolition Sociology

This paper calls forth ‘abolition sociology’ as a framework to guide the wanderings of our sociological imaginations, and to in/form a sociology to come.
It traces abolitionist histories of movements like those to end slavery, prisons, schools, and work, to suggest abolition as a paradigm that includes ontologies of expansive space, time, and being; epistemologies of collective study, imagination, and storytelling; methods of mutual aid, refusal and fugitive creation; and grammars of possibility and critical hope.
In encompassing ontology, epistemology, method, and grammar, abolition provides a substantial structure for sociological inquiry grounded in an ethic of transformation and restoration. In specifically drawing out abolition sociology, this paper offers a framework that can be applied in studies across our discipline.


Noel Packard
Max Weber's Social Order Concept Applied to U.S. Miltary/Pre-Commercial Internet History

Talcott Parsons canonized Max Weber as a sociologist in the 1930s. Today Weber's theories regarding 'ideal types', bureaucracy, sociology, economy and history are global. Weber's "The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism" has never gone out of print. Here Weber's social order concept, from, "Class, Status and Party", frames history of military networks that were forerunners to the Internet. Weber's social order helps recount what Cold War military networks were made to perform, thus green lighting them into mission service with the Pentagon and later the Internet. Weber's social order concept divides society into a: Political Party realm (with decision making power); Market realm (with power over production) and a Social Honor realm (with power over lifestyle, and consumption of rare goods). In overlaying Weber's social order concepts on network history, I also recount how sociologists C. Wright Mills and Hans Gerth plagiarized sociologist and C.I.A. agent Edward Shill's translation of "Class, Status and Party" in their 1946 book From Max Weber Essays in Sociology, causing a rift between the sociologists. In the 1960s, C. Wright Mills coined the term "New Left" when military networks were tested to spy on people of the New Left - including C. Wright Mills.

Noel Packard is a multidisciplinary scholar with a PhD in Media, Film and Television from University of Auckland (2023), a BA Honors in Sociology from University of Victoria in Wellington, NZ (2017), a MA in Sociology from New School in NYC (1998), a Master of Public Administration from California State University East Bay, and a BA in Economics from California State University Fresno. Her research focuses on how the military-networks that became the Internet were tested, distributed and commercialized. She uses classical sociological theories by Marx and Weber to frame contemporary issues pertaining to networked society vs. non-networked society. She arrived at this line of research by hosting a conference session about collective, individual and electronic memory for the Pacific Sociological Association for 15 years.

Chamsy el-Ojeili
After Liberalism?

In a recent reflection on the field of ideology studies, Freeden (2019, p. 1) has contended that “the world of formal ideologies has been rocked to its foundations”. Ideologies “have lost much of their staying power”, and ideology studies is increasingly characterized by immediacy, fragmentation, and ephemerality – the contemporary ideological landscape obscured by “swirling clouds of dust” (p. 2). This situation has been of particular concern to liberals, a concern expressed by a wave of interventions warning of the declining popular enthusiasm for the creed and the accompanying rise of illiberalism (see, for instance, Emmott, 2017; Fukuyama, 2022; Luce, 2017). One part of the contemporary challenge to liberalism has been the rise of Anglo-American “postliberalism”, a current of thought associated with figures such as John Milbank, Adrian Pabst, Patrick Deneen, and Adrian Vermeule, and with publications such as American Affairs, Prospect, First Things, and Compact. In this paper, I attempt an ideological mapping of post-liberalism, exploring its origins, core claims, and political and theoretical affiliations and ambiguities.

Chair: Liz Beddoe

Poulamee Guha
Can Intersectionality be Hybrid and multidirectional?’ Embedding Reflexive and critical narrative methodologies in feminist multicultural social work research in the context of post-colonial transnational migration.

Globalisation has resulted in large-scale high-skilled migration of Indian professionals over the last few decades. The gendered dimension of the phenomenon is less explored and the female spouses in this process of migration remain largely invisible. The ‘Trailing spouses’ occupy a contradictory, gendered positioning within the Indian diaspora, creating complex intersectionality. I have argued in my thesis that gender structures within the family, diaspora community and state policy create an invisible vulnerability for the female trailing spouses. As neoliberal discourse shapes our social work service systems, the need for critical social work practices seems urgent. Critical social work approaches in social work are diverse but share a common commitment to both personal and structural change.

A qualitative transnational study employing in-depth interviews and narrative methods for data collection has been conducted as part of my PhD Thesis in New Zealand, Australia, the USA and the UAE to explore this phenomenon. The study analysed narratives of trailing wives via a critical feminist epistemological framework. My findings indicated complex Intersectional subjectivities experienced by the women in their gender, class, ethnic and national identities. Using intersectional post-colonial and transnational theories within social work, I have presented my theories, to open debates about the conceptualization of gender. The use of a critical feminist perspective for this study has allowed me to focus on the subtle nuances and detailed descriptions that are necessary to understand gender ideologies and practices in the everyday interactions of families. the relevance of social constructionism as a perspective within the overarching paradigm of intersectional feminism holds meaning in my research. I focused on developing methodological processes that support giving significant attention to subjective, socially situated, and multi-faceted experiences. As a critical narrative inquirer whose research design is premised on the values of social constructionism and feminism, my personal, academic, and professional history are inseparable from my identity as a researcher, and, correspondingly, my identity as researcher informs my engagement with participants and my analysis of the data.
My thesis emphasizes that social work increasingly encompassing multicultural practice in the context of culture and mental health, should adopt a focus on gender that occurs within various settings. My research has guided my recommendations for future research and action on the issues addressed in my thesis, including gender-sensitive visa policies, further organizational support for spouses of skilled migrants, evolved and active role of diaspora communities and further research through specific and cross-comparative feminist studies to comprehensively understand the challenges and pathways to change. The transnational nature of the profession demands greater accountability regarding inclusion, sustainability, safety and discrimination.


Soma Chatterjee and Virginia Stammers
Pedagogy of crossings: Reflections on teaching for mobility justice in social work

A prevalent practice in social work is to teach about migration under the instrumental and managerial framework of social work for immigrants and refugees. In contrast to this project of training professionals to work with immigrants and refugees, this presentation advocates for reorienting social work pedagogy to ‘mobility justice’. A heuristic device, ‘mobility justice’ is our conceptual framework to place social work teaching at the crossroads where migrant and Indigenous lives and struggles meet, dialogue and diverge. This, we argue, will shift our disciplinary (mis)understanding of justice for immigrants from the tedious rhetoric of settlement and integration, and instead, allow ‘mobility’ to stand for ‘sovereignty’ and ‘freedom.’ Most crucially, such a framework will help develop and deepen social work understanding of migration in conjunction with, not in separation from, Indigenous, place-based justice. This presentation will build on a comprehensive review of social work literature, specifically its fault lines in regard to migration, and our own teaching/learning experience in schools of social work in Canada. We will draw from a series of experiential education activities conducted in the city of Toronto, a place of contact and crossings for migrant and Indigenous peoples, albeit globally known only for its mobile andmulticultural diaspora. We will end with an invitation to our educator colleagues across settler colonial sites to join in conversation about teaching for mobility justice.


Rebeccah Nelems
Challenging Individualist Approaches to Youth Gang Prevention: The Case of Victoria, BC, Canada

This paper explores a Canadian case study in which it is argued that the individualist structure of institutional approaches to youth resilience and youth programming are directly contributing to the failure to address surging rates of youth gang exploitation in BC’s capital. Although local actors have collaborated across agencies, jurisdictions and geographies for ten+ years to deliver cost-efficient, effective (88% success rate), wraparound youth gang prevention programming, funding is being reduced as youth gang exploitation reaches an all-time high, compounded by the growing epidemics of opioids, homelessness, youth mental health, sexual and online youth exploitation. Whilst the literature argues that youth gang prevention programs across the country are challenged by the chronic lack of funding, this research explores the ways in which this scarcity is generated by the fundamental misalignment between individualist institutional approaches to youth resilience and programming, and the relational, youth-centred approaches that a social ecology approach entails. Drawing on relational and critical sociological theory, I present the initial stages of a community-based, inter-agency research project that uses relational, decolonizing methodologies to bring community actors and agencies together, to transform individualist institutional approaches and funding practices towards advancing youth-centred, social ecology approaches to the youth gang exploitation crisis.