SAANZ Conference 2024

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: 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: Anna Friedlander

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Chair: Simon Clay

Chris Brickell
Who’s Afraid of Performativity?

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

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

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

Chair: Liana MacDonald

Simon Barber
The imperialism of no borders


Neil Vallelly
The Borders of Hospitality

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


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

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

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: 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.