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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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?