scholarly journals To wish you well: the biopolitical subjectivities of medical crowdfunders during and after Aotearoa New Zealand’s COVID-19 lockdown

BioSocieties ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Wardell

AbstractCrowdfunding platforms apply a marketized, competitive logic to healthcare, increasingly functioning as generative spaces in which worthy citizens and biopolitical subjects are produced. Using a lens of biopower, this article considers what sort of biopolitical subjectivities were produced in and through New Zealand crowdfunding campaigns during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown. It focuses on a discursive and dialogical analysis of 59 online medical crowdfunding campaigns that were active during lockdown and chose to mention the pandemic. These pages pointed to interrelated biological, social and economic precarities, speaking to questions about how citizens navigate uneven needs during uncertain times. Findings showed that crowdfunders referred to the pandemic in order to narrate their own situation in culturally coherent ways and to establish context-specific relations of care. This included contextualising their needs through establishing shared crisis narratives that also made the infrastructural contexts of healthcare visible and performing relational labour in ways that aligned with nationally specific affective regimes. By highlighting their own vulnerability, crowdfunders strategically mobilised broader lockdown discourses of self-sacrifice on behalf of vulnerable people. In this way, New Zealand’s lockdown produced subjectivities both drawing on wider neoliberal moral regimes and specific to the nuanced and emergent moral systems of pandemic citizenship.

Author(s):  
Madhuri . ◽  
Hare R. Tewari ◽  
Pradip K. Bhowmick

Vulnerability is the capacity to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from the impact of natural disasters. Floods add to the distressed conditions of the poor and vulnerable people in Bihar. Floods have a different impact on households depending on differences in their livelihood choices. Therefore, in order to identify the variability in vulnerability of affected households, the livelihood vulnerability index (LVI) of Hahn, Riederer and Foster was modified according to the context of the study area. The LVI aims to identify sources and forms of vulnerability that are specific to the context in order to design context-specific resilience measures. However, vulnerability and resilience are not interdependent but discrete entities. The study was conducted in the seven blocks of Bhagalpur district in the state of Bihar. Naugachia was found to be the least vulnerable because of better access to basic amenities and livelihood strategies, whilst Kharik was found to be highly vulnerable in respect to other blocks because of high sensitivity and less adaptive strategy. The study also revealed that better access to resources does not necessarily mean that households are adopting resilience measures because of apathetic or indifferent attitudes.


2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (6) ◽  
pp. 1219-1246 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bikram Chatterjee ◽  
Carolyn J. Cordery ◽  
Ivo De Loo ◽  
Hugo Letiche

PurposeIn this paper, we concentrate on the use of research assessment (RA) systems in universities in New Zealand (NZ) and the United Kingdom (UK). Primarily we focus on PBRF and REF, and explore differences between these systems on individual and systemic levels. We ask, these days, in what way(s) the systemic differences between PBRF and REF actually make a difference on how the two RA systems are experienced by academic staff.Design/methodology/approachThis research is exploratory and draws on 19 interviews in which accounting researchers from both countries offer reflections on their careers and how RA (systems) have influenced these careers. The stories they tell are classified by regarding RA in universities as a manifestation of the spectacle society, following Debord (1992) and Flyverbom and Reinecke (2017).FindingsBoth UK and New Zealand academics concur that their research activities and views on research are very much shaped by journal rankings and citations. Among UK academics, there seems to be a greater critical attitude towards the benefits and drawbacks of REF, which may be related to the history of REF in their country. Relatively speaking, in New Zealand, individualism seems to have grown after the introduction of the PBRF, with little active pushback against the system. Cultural aspects may partially explain this outcome. Academics in both countries lament the lack of focus on practitioner issues that the increased significance of RA seems to have evoked.Research limitations/implicationsThis research is context-specific and may have limited applicability to other situations, academics or countries.Practical implicationsRA and RA systems seem to be here to stay. However, as academics we can, and ought to, take responsibility to try to ensure that these systems reflect the future of accounting (research) we wish to create. It is certainly not mainly or solely up to upper management officials to set this in motion, as has occasionally been claimed in previous literature. Some of the academics who participated in this research actively sought to bring about a different future.Originality/valueThis research provides a unique contextual analysis of accounting academics' perspectives and reactions to RA and RA systems and the impact these have had on their careers across two countries. In addition, the paper offers valuable critical reflections on the application of Debord's (1992) notion of the spectacle society in future accounting studies. We find more mixed and nuanced views on RA in academia than many previous studies have shown.


2019 ◽  
pp. 83-108
Author(s):  
Manfredo Manfredini

Woundedlands are places of crisis of the civic sphere, where architecture contributes to escalate the agency of forces that annihilate associative, differential and commoning processes. They are spaces of exemplary expression of the destructive capacity of contemporary technology to increase control, abstraction and exclusion. The Wall and the Mall are two salient Woundedland types addressed in this research. The Wall—a harsh boundary displacing and negating access to the stranger—epitomizes the increasing instances of unmovable and unforgiving socio-spatial divides. The heavily armed Demilitarized Zone created by the stalled Korean conflict is chosen as an egregious walling example. The Mall—a supreme urban embodiment of digitally enhanced urban de-commoning and homogenizing forces—typifies the post-consumerist spectacular production of implanted and exogenous pseudo-civic centralities. The heterotopic integrated shopping centre Sylvia Park—the main centre of this kind in New Zealand—is selected as a key representative instance of the dissociative enclaves of spectacle. Two major phenomena characterize the spatial production of these two Woundedlands: pervasive translocalization—the diffusing mobilization of territorialization patterns—and multiassociative transduction—the iterative production of combinant and immersive metastable spatialities. Through an articulated design proposition set, these Woundedlands are reimagined as productive utopias of reappropriated and (re)creational Wonderlands. These Wonderlands are a cultural response to the contemporary mode of production, challenging and transmuting its alienating apparatus. The symbols of geopolitical and mercantile warfare are recast into possible analogue worlds where a rich mix of instrumentalities is designed to empower latent and marginalised counterforces. These Wonderlands have mobilised metastable spatialities that give consistency and affirm the commoning of the digitally augmented social networks, boosting socio-spatial relationality and maximal differentiation. The proposition set shows how by producing alternative discursive frameworks of coordinated narratives with scenario-based and context-specific sign-value articulations, tightly crafted chains of recoded elements propose a novel cultural understanding of the current spatial paradigm. Leveraging on the productive agency of desire, their allegorical fabulatory proses of (extra)ordinary commoning machines for pluralism, justice and jouissance affirm the value and necessity of utopia.


2021 ◽  
pp. 146247452199991
Author(s):  
Claudia McHardy

Australia’s detention-deportation regime is setting the agenda for New Zealand’s domestic criminal justice system, with implications for criminological understandings of ‘crimmigration’ and ‘bordered penality’. In response to recent changes in Australian migration law which have seen an increased number of deportations to Aotearoa New Zealand, the New Zealand government introduced legislation, the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) (“ROMI”) Act 2015, which created a monitoring regime for returning New Zealanders convicted of criminal offending in an overseas jurisdiction. The sentence an individual is subject to in Australia is extended, both geographically and temporally, creating multiple punishments for this particular group of offenders. While ostensibly modelled from domestic parole arrangements, in practice the ROMI regime entails greater restriction while offering less in the way of legal protection. The differential treatment of returning New Zealanders is sustained through their discursive construction as both “criminals” and de facto “aliens”. By treating returnees as threatening outsiders to be contained, rather than vulnerable people to be supported, the New Zealand state also extends the risk logics underpinning the Australian regime. Although the ROMI Act is novel, the regime conforms to the racialised patterns of exclusion and criminalisation which have persisted in Aotearoa New Zealand since colonisation.


BMJ Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. e042464
Author(s):  
Nethmi Kearns ◽  
Nick Shortt ◽  
Ciléin Kearns ◽  
Allie Eathorne ◽  
Mark Holliday ◽  
...  

ObjectiveTo characterise the self-isolating household units (bubbles) during the COVID-19 Alert Level 4 lockdown in New Zealand.Design, setting and participantsIn this cross-sectional study, an online survey was distributed to a convenience sample via Facebook advertising and the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand’s social media platforms and mailing list. Respondents were able to share a link to the survey via their own social media platforms and by email. Results were collected over 6 days during Alert Level 4 from respondents living in New Zealand, aged 16 years and over.Main outcomes measuresThe primary outcome was the mean size of a self-isolating household unit or bubble. Secondary outcomes included the mean number of households in each bubble, the proportion of bubbles containing essential workers and/or vulnerable people, and the mean number of times the home was left each week.Results14 876 surveys were included in the analysis. The mean (SD) bubble size was 3.58 (4.63) people, with mean (SD) number of households 1.26 (0.77). The proportion of bubbles containing one or more essential workers, or one or more vulnerable persons was 45.3% and 42.1%, respectively. The mean number of times individual bubble members left their home in the previous week was 12.9 (12.4). Bubbles that contained at least one vulnerable individual had fewer outings over the previous week compared with bubbles that did not contain a vulnerable person. The bubble sizes were similar by respondent ethnicity.ConclusionIn this New Zealand convenience sample, bubble sizes were small, mostly limited to one household, and a high proportion contained essential workers and/or vulnerable people. Understanding these characteristics from a country which achieved a low COVID-19 infection rate may help inform public health interventions during this and future pandemics.


2014 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brenda Midson

In a number of jurisdictions failure to protect a child from violence renders a person liable if a duty is owed to the child. This duty presumes the defendant has the capacity to act positively to protect the victim, which has implications for defendants who are also subjected to violence or coercion. In the understandable haste to prosecute and prevent child abuse, there is a risk of neglecting the realities of other vulnerable people. Consequently the criminal justice system ought to reject a binary approach to victims and offenders, recognising that defendants may also be victims and that mothers, due to the coercive control exerted by intimate partners, may also be vulnerable. In New Zealand there are no statutory or common law defences that operate to exculpate a mother charged with failing to protect her child from the violence of another. This article argues for the creation of an affirmative defence that takes into account the totality of a coerced mother's circumstances in considering whether she has, in fact, failed her child.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Davina Stanford

<p>The impacts of tourism, both good and bad, are many and diverse. Responsible tourism has been suggested as one way of maximising the positive and minimising the negative impacts of tourism. The tourist's contribution to responsible tourism is somewhat overlooked in the literature and they are often seen as part of the problem rather than as part of the solution. They are also frequently accused of taking a break from responsibility while on holiday. This thesis concentrates on the actions of the tourist, seeking to understand what influences or constrains responsible behaviour while on holiday; to compare some responsible behaviours on holiday with similar behaviours at home. It also explores effective communication to encourage responsible tourist behaviour. The influences and constraints are multiple and complex and a fluid methodology was required, to be sufficiently structured to allow for comparability, while flexible enough to allow for the unexpected. A multi-phase, multi-method iterative research design was used, based on comparable case studies of two locations within New Zealand, Kaikoura and Rotorua. Kaikoura is a fairly recent, developing destination, Rotorua is a mature, established destination. The first phase of research employed in-depth interviews with industry representatives and with tourists and document analysis. The initial stage of the method allowed five actions of responsible behaviour to be identified. These represented responsible behaviours in a range of situations: environmental, cultural, social and economic. These behaviours were then applied in a visitor survey, based on a social psychological framework using Ajzen's Theory of Planned Behaviour. The survey identified instances of responsible behaviour and the influences and constraints on this behaviour. The survey also explored effective means of communication to encourage responsible behaviour, using Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development. Generic definitions of responsible tourism and responsible tourists were developed and five actions representing responsible behaviour were identified which operationalised the definitions from the specific context. Influences and constraints on these responsible behaviours were also identified. These were internal, emanating from the tourist and included culture; values and attitudes; ethics and motivations; and mindfulness and mindlessness, and external, emanating from the destination, which included marketing; visitor management; and information and communication. Awareness was considered an important aspect of responsible tourist behaviour yet few tourists were aware of context specific details. Information, therefore, is considered important in achieving responsible tourist behaviour. Information may be most effective if it appeals to good citizenship and provides a reasoned and positive argument. A three step model was developed to foster responsible tourist behaviour. The first and crucial step is for the destination to set its objectives, then, to market to the most appropriate tourists. The third step is to optimise the responsible behaviour of these tourists once they have arrived, through visitor management which encourages and facilitates responsible behaviour. The New Zealand context provides a good example of this approach.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Louise Anne Proctor

<p>The New Zealand public sector is facing an increasingly pluralistic stakeholder landscape due to a range of political, economic, social, and technological factors, all of which require public sector organisations to develop new ways of understanding and responding to diverse and complex stakeholder needs. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate whether the theory of stakeholder networking can contribute to strategic planning in the public sector, to assist organisations in planning to meet strategic goals and ultimately move toward their strategic direction. A qualitative research approach, known as participatory action research, was adopted. This required strong involvement with the two sample organisations, contributing to the development and application of the stakeholder networking process and also to the findings. Information gathering occurred through a variety of methods including focus groups, team meetings, interviews, document analysis and workshops. A Stakeholder Networking Framework is proposed as an approach for public sector organisations to apply stakeholder networking theory in practice, which takes into account the key issues participants raised during application. Three primary uses of stakeholder networking theory for strategic planning were found, including a means for providing greater clarity to the stakeholder context surrounding strategic issues, identification of potential relationship strategies to meet strategic goals, and assisting with the prioritisation of stakeholders. The Stakeholder Networking Framework has purposefully been developed in a way that is non-prescriptive and flexible, enabling it to be adapted by managers to suit the context specific needs of their organisation during application. Managers can then use the stakeholder network maps as outputs of the process to inform relationship management activities and strategic decision making. This thesis fills a gap in the literature that provides practical research to public sector organisations and managers on how to integrate a stakeholder networking perspective into their strategic planning processes. It addresses common concerns that arise when trying to deliver such objectives in practice, drawing on the practical considerations of organisations' day-to-day realities.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Davina Stanford

<p>The impacts of tourism, both good and bad, are many and diverse. Responsible tourism has been suggested as one way of maximising the positive and minimising the negative impacts of tourism. The tourist's contribution to responsible tourism is somewhat overlooked in the literature and they are often seen as part of the problem rather than as part of the solution. They are also frequently accused of taking a break from responsibility while on holiday. This thesis concentrates on the actions of the tourist, seeking to understand what influences or constrains responsible behaviour while on holiday; to compare some responsible behaviours on holiday with similar behaviours at home. It also explores effective communication to encourage responsible tourist behaviour. The influences and constraints are multiple and complex and a fluid methodology was required, to be sufficiently structured to allow for comparability, while flexible enough to allow for the unexpected. A multi-phase, multi-method iterative research design was used, based on comparable case studies of two locations within New Zealand, Kaikoura and Rotorua. Kaikoura is a fairly recent, developing destination, Rotorua is a mature, established destination. The first phase of research employed in-depth interviews with industry representatives and with tourists and document analysis. The initial stage of the method allowed five actions of responsible behaviour to be identified. These represented responsible behaviours in a range of situations: environmental, cultural, social and economic. These behaviours were then applied in a visitor survey, based on a social psychological framework using Ajzen's Theory of Planned Behaviour. The survey identified instances of responsible behaviour and the influences and constraints on this behaviour. The survey also explored effective means of communication to encourage responsible behaviour, using Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development. Generic definitions of responsible tourism and responsible tourists were developed and five actions representing responsible behaviour were identified which operationalised the definitions from the specific context. Influences and constraints on these responsible behaviours were also identified. These were internal, emanating from the tourist and included culture; values and attitudes; ethics and motivations; and mindfulness and mindlessness, and external, emanating from the destination, which included marketing; visitor management; and information and communication. Awareness was considered an important aspect of responsible tourist behaviour yet few tourists were aware of context specific details. Information, therefore, is considered important in achieving responsible tourist behaviour. Information may be most effective if it appeals to good citizenship and provides a reasoned and positive argument. A three step model was developed to foster responsible tourist behaviour. The first and crucial step is for the destination to set its objectives, then, to market to the most appropriate tourists. The third step is to optimise the responsible behaviour of these tourists once they have arrived, through visitor management which encourages and facilitates responsible behaviour. The New Zealand context provides a good example of this approach.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Louise Anne Proctor

<p>The New Zealand public sector is facing an increasingly pluralistic stakeholder landscape due to a range of political, economic, social, and technological factors, all of which require public sector organisations to develop new ways of understanding and responding to diverse and complex stakeholder needs. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate whether the theory of stakeholder networking can contribute to strategic planning in the public sector, to assist organisations in planning to meet strategic goals and ultimately move toward their strategic direction. A qualitative research approach, known as participatory action research, was adopted. This required strong involvement with the two sample organisations, contributing to the development and application of the stakeholder networking process and also to the findings. Information gathering occurred through a variety of methods including focus groups, team meetings, interviews, document analysis and workshops. A Stakeholder Networking Framework is proposed as an approach for public sector organisations to apply stakeholder networking theory in practice, which takes into account the key issues participants raised during application. Three primary uses of stakeholder networking theory for strategic planning were found, including a means for providing greater clarity to the stakeholder context surrounding strategic issues, identification of potential relationship strategies to meet strategic goals, and assisting with the prioritisation of stakeholders. The Stakeholder Networking Framework has purposefully been developed in a way that is non-prescriptive and flexible, enabling it to be adapted by managers to suit the context specific needs of their organisation during application. Managers can then use the stakeholder network maps as outputs of the process to inform relationship management activities and strategic decision making. This thesis fills a gap in the literature that provides practical research to public sector organisations and managers on how to integrate a stakeholder networking perspective into their strategic planning processes. It addresses common concerns that arise when trying to deliver such objectives in practice, drawing on the practical considerations of organisations' day-to-day realities.</p>


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