SAANZ Conference 2024

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: 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: 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: 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: 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.

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: 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.

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: 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.