SAANZ Conference 2024

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 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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.