Platform technologies are being introduced by health providers in Aotearoa New Zealand to mediate relationships between care recipients and Home Support Workers (HSWs). They have been publicized by those providers as a potential solution to these challenges of health sector strain and ageing population. Much like in other sectors, platform technology is represented as offering autonomy for clients and empowerment for workers. This report critically investigates these claims and the broader impact of the introduction of platform technologies on the working lives of HSWs and their ability to provide dignified care for their clients. Drawing on 16 in-depth Zoom interviews and 1 focus group with Aotearoa-based support workers, we argue that technologies as currently used are exasperating pre-existing systemic failures, which have also been severely exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Synopsis: Platform technologies are being introduced by health providers in Aotearoa New Zealand to mediate relationships between care recipients and Home Support Workers (HSWs). They have been publicised by those providers as a potential solution to these challenges of health sector strain and ageing population. Much like in other sectors, platform technology is represented as offering autonomy for clients and empowerment for workers. This report critically investigates these claims and the broader impact of the introduction of platform technologies on the working lives of HSWs and their ability to provide dignified care for their clients. Drawing on 16 in-depth Zoom interviews and 1 focus group with Aotearoa-based support workers, we argue that technologies as currently used are exasperating pre-existing systemic failures, which have also been severely exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
About the Panelists:
Jan Logie is a Green Party MP based in the Mana Electorate. Jan worked for Women’s Refuge, the New Zealand University Students’ Association, the YWCA and numerous other social causes before entering Parliament in 2011. She served as the Parliamentary Under-Secretary to the Minister of Justice from 2017-2020 with a focus on sexual and domestic violence issues, and is Green Party spokesperson for Disability, ACC, Women, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, Public Services, Children, and Workplace Relations.
Dr. Andrea Fromm is a policy advisor with the NZ Public Service Association Te Pūkenga Here Tikanga Mahi (PSA). After receiving a PhD in political studies from the University of Otago, Andrea continued to focus on issues related to the decent work agenda. Her work has concentrated on labour markets and employment, working conditions and industrial relations and public and community services. Andrea worked with international organisations such as the ILO and Eurofound, as well as with Statistics NZ. Andrea started her career as a social worker.
CARE: Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation’s Activist In Residence Programme (AIRP) with Tina Ngata , #Aotearoa #NewZealand #Activist | 15th – 18th May 2023 | CARE, Manawatu campus, Massey University
Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation is proud to host and welcome our next Activist in Residence- Tina Ngata, an Aotearoa New Zealand activist, who will be conducting Activist in Residence public events focused around Anti-racism and will collaborate with Prof. Mohan Dutta on a CARE White Paper at CARE, Manawatū campus, Massey University.
On 4th August 32023, CARE Will be launching the White Paper Issue #18: Māori-Migrant solidarities in resisting white supremacy with Tina Ngata & Prof. Mohan Dutta.
Scroll to the CARE White Paper Section below for more details.
Bio: Tina Ngata is a Ngati Porou mother of two from the East Coast of Te Ika a Maui. Tina’s work involves advocacy for environmental, Indigenous, and human rights. This includes local, national, and international initiatives that highlight the role of settler colonialism in issues such as climate change and waste pollution and promote Indigenous conservation as best practice for a globally sustainable future.
Visit the CARE social media links below for updates :
The figure of the “Miya” forms the infrastructure of the anti-Muslim hate in Assam, the Northeast frontier of India.
In this essay, I will argue that the genocidal hate reflected in anti-Muslim violence and anti-Muslim public policies in Assam is mirrored in the ongoing production of the “Muslim other” in the infrastructure of the fascist National Register for Citizens (NRC) carried out by the Hindutva regime.
The rhetorical trope of the “Miya” depicts the power of cultural discourse in organizing violence through the turn to a monolithic cultural essence based on exclusion.
The construction of the “Miya” as the Muslim other lies at the core of the cultural chauvinism that has historically mobilized the middle-class, upper-caste cultural nationalist movement in Assam. Elsewhere, I have described the communicative tools that actively produce “the other” to organize cultural nationalism, constructing the nation on the basis of a monolithic cultural essence.
The term “Miya” is rife with the racist fear of the Muslim illegal immigrant taking over Assamese land and culture, mobilized to build a movement of cultural nationalism. It is often used to describe Muslim migrants from the Myemensingh region of neighboring Bangladesh (which was part of undivided Bengal) who migrated in the early twentieth century, encouraged and in many instances forcibly moved by the British imperialists, settling in the riverine islands of the Brahmaputra river.
The activist-scholar Sooraj Gogoi powerfully describes the ways in which the cultural revivalism that shaped the Assamese nationalism underlying the Assam movement in the 1980s created the discursive climate of fear and hate around the illegal Muslim immigrant, classified as the foreigner. He further describes the role of middle-class caste Assamese cultural workers, intellectuals including academics, poets, lyricists, performers etc. in constructing the discursive ecosystem of cultural nationalism.
The basis of the cultural turn underlying the Assam movement draws on an Assamese essence depicted in linguistic and cultural artifacts. Simultaneously, this cultural turn as cultural nationalism is deployed toward the production of hate through the circulation of the image of the foreigner. Through songs, poems, and graffiti, the foreigner is crafted as a perpetual threat to the cultural essence, as a danger to a monolithic Assamese cultural identity.
This discursive climate of hate is financialized by the political class, turning hate into the basis for mobilizing the movement and political participation. It is this ecosystem of hate seeded by caste Assamese political-cultural society that mobilized largely tribal and oppressed caste communities in participating in the violence at Nellie that resulted in the death of 3,300 Muslims. The Nellie massacre remains one of the most violent pogroms since World War 2.
The xenophobic anti-Muslim violence scripted into mainstream caste Assamese society as cultural nationalism flows seamlessly into the Islamophobic fascist laboratory of Hindutva.
The chauvinism of Assamese cultural nationalism feeds directly into the cultural nationalism of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The threat of the illegal foreigner in Assam is mobilized into the concept of the registry, crystallized in the National Register for Citizens (NRC), sending Muslims into detention centers, stripped of the “right to have rights.” The violence of the NRC process, marked by the haphazard implementation of documentation, the arbitrariness of the Assam foreigners tribunal, the disenfranchisement of Muslims who have lived in India across generations through incarceration in detention centers (locally referred to as concentration camps), and the absence of access to juridical processes, have resulted in plethora of health challenges, including challenges to mental health and suicides. In a period of five years between 2015 and 2020, between 38 and 42 individuals committed suicide in Assam in the context of the revocation of their own or a relative’s citizenship status.
The discursive construction of Muslims as foreign nationals is built on the ideology of border-making that catalyzes the material construction of the border as the basis for othering. This process of othering Muslims as the basis of cultural nationalism in Assam reflects the organizing role of cultural essence as the organizing ideology that drives hate, violence, and fascist politics.
Online platforms are at the core of manufacturing and disseminating Islamophobic hate globally, and in Aotearoa New Zealandi. The Islamophobic hate on these platforms is largely unregulated, with both platform-driven mechanisms and state/civil society led mechanisms largely absent in regulating this hate. The current digital environment in Aotearoa is largely unregulated when it comes to addressing hate targeting communities at the margins, and particularly so when it comes to regulating Islamophobic hate. The Human Rights Act does not offer protections to Muslims who are targets of religious hate. Moreover, hegemonic constructions of human rights within the structures of colonialism have produced and disseminated Islamophobia to legitimize neocolonial interventions, including in the most recent instances of imperial intervention as evidenced in Operation Iraqi Freedomii, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestineiii.
The constructions of free speech in policy conversations on regulation have catalysed the proliferation of digital hate while simultaneously silencing the voices of communities at the margins experiencing the hateiv. In Aotearoa New Zealand, the discursive constructions of freedom as an instrument for spreading colonial violence are embedded in the white supremacy of the settler colonial state that has systematically worked to erase the voices of Māori while simultaneously protecting and feeding racist speech targeting Māoriv. The Harmful Digital Communications Act 2015 and the mechanisms of Netsafe are not built to address the hate targeting marginalized communities. The underlying whiteness that shapes the digital environment individualizes the sources of hate, simultaneously individualizing the responses to hate, and is not built to address pile-on, networked forms of hate, and hate that originates from the structures of white supremacy. This individualizing ideology leaves the underlying infrastructure of white supremacy intact, replete with rhetorical devices that claim kindness and altruism. This lack of an adequate regulatory framework is normalized through the Islamophobic infrastructure of the Crown, reflected in its security intelligence infrastructure that has mainstreamed Islamophobia through the marking of the Muslim as the “other” in the 9/11 climate and the neocolonial war on terrorvi.
The response then is an individualizing response, directed at the individual extremist with the justice system of the settler colonial state organized to respond to the extremist.
The intelligence-security apparatus of the settler colonial state is organized around techniques of surveillance and monitoring directed at identifying and containing individuals likely to be radicalized and turned into extremists.
The individualizing ideology on one hand places the cause of the violence in the actions of an individual who is portrayed to have been radicalized by an ideology. On the other hand, the individualization of the violence keeps intact the very structure of white supremacy that underpins the violence.
Moreover, the individualizing ideology conveniently erases the white supremacy that makes up the institutional structure of the intelligence-military-police infrastructure of the settler colonial state.
The Australian extremist who carried out the violence in Christchurch is an extension of the white supremacy that forms the settler colonial infrastructure of Australia. This settler colonial structure in Australia is scripted into its political, juridical, military, security, and intelligence institutions.
White supremacy is built into the structure of the Australian state that has historically been organized around violence directed toward aboriginal communities.On March 18, 2023, a few days after the four-year anniversary of the Christchurch terrorist attack, at an anti-transgender event hosted by the British anti-trans rights figure Kellie-Jay Keen who is currently touring Australia, Nazis dressed in black are seen taking the Nazi salute on the steps of the Victoria parliament.
As the Nazis march through the streets onto the steps of the parliament, the Australian police are seen protecting them. In powerful images that depict the interplays of white supremacy of the police and the Nazis, the police are shown lining up to safeguard the Nazis as they take the salute.
Anti-fascist activists challenging the Nazis document the violence carried out by the police directed at the anti-fascist activists protesting the Nazis.
Moreover, anti-fascist activists document an Australian police member who flashed a white power sign at an earlier protest. In another report, Australian activists document the presence of Nazis in the Australian military.
The institutionalization of white supremacist hate within the infrastructures of the police and military exists in continuity with the racist colonial structure of Australia.
Four years since the Christchurch terrorist attack and the Australian state has continued to let the white supremacy within its structures go unchallenged.
To address the white supremacist hate that led to the Christchurch terrorist attack is to first recognize the white supremacy that is embedded within the organizing logics of the state.
This recognition then can offer the starting point for undoing the racism and hate percolating through the cellular structures of Australian police, military, and related institutions.
I have been so looking forward to reading Byron Clark’s “Fear.”
Over the past three years, as I have read and watched Clark’s analyses of the far-right ecosystem in Aotearoa New Zealand, I have come to respect his evidence-based analytic work that is at the same time activist, directly responding to the threats to marginalized communities posed by far-right extremism.
His analytic work has been critical to the ongoing challenges to far-right extremism led by activists.
Byron’s knowledge of the hate ecosystem emerges directly from the empirically grounded challenge he has posed to this ecosystem by placing his body on the line. It is worth pointing out here, that like many other activists in this space, Byron mostly does this work as unpaid labor, and he sustains himself through his day job (I will return to this point toward the end of the article).
So, when some of my activist interlocutors whose work challenges Islamophobic hate in Aotearoa sent me a review of Byron’s book by Chris Wilson, I was disappointed to read it.
Let me note at the beginning that Wilson begins his review by praising Byron for his work exposing a range of what Wilson terms fringe political ideologies. He then goes on to point out places where the book could have been improved, specifically in its definition of terms and presentation of evidence.
I will focus here on a particular part of Wilson’s review, his suggestion that Clark presents no evidence of a Hindutva threat in Aotearoa.
What counts as evidence
In his review, writing about Hindutva, Wilson writes:
“For example, Hindutva is presented as present and threatening in New Zealand, but with little to no evidence. Because of a lack of demonstrable activity or presence here, the author uses the fact that the New Zealand Hindu Council is affiliated to the India-based nationalist organisation VHP, to discuss in much greater length the VHP’s extremist activity in India, even including a discussion of the riots in Gujarat in 2002.”
This paragraph is flawed in its argumentation.
It begins with the claim that Clark presents Hindutva as threatening in Aotearoa, “with little to no evidence.”
Note then the following sentence that points to Byron’s observation that the New Zealand Hindu Council is affiliated to the India-based nationalist organisation Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP).
That Clark has established the link between the New Zealand Hindu Council and VHP is itself evidence of the threat to social cohesion in Aotearoa posed by Hindutva.
Also consider here that Wilson doesn’t operationalize the concept of threat; so what is he assessing Clark’s evidence on the basis of is largely unclear.
If we take social cohesion as the value to uphold (my insertion of a value), that the New Zealand Hindu Council is affiliated to the India-based nationalist organization VHP is of great concern here in Aotearoa. I have personally learned about the threat posed by Hindutva-aligned organizations such as the VHP to New Zealand democracy (including academic freedom) the hard way.
A number of Indian-origin community members, including Indian minorities and Indian activists in Aotearoa have documented the threat posed by Hindutva to democracy and social cohesion in Aotearoa. In March 2021, a Sikh youth had been attacked online in New Zealand.
Wilson then goes on to write:
“This history of violence and extremism in India will give many readers the impression that something similar is present in New Zealand, when no evidence has been provided for this inference.”
The sentence above is ambiguous and lacks clarity. The ambiguity itself is strategic, not naming Hindutva as the driver of the violence and omitting the robust body of evidence on the nature of the VHP and other affiliated Hindutva organizations as right-wing extremist groups and their roles in violence.
Wilson’s account bypasses this history of violence and extremism in India directly connected to the VHP, instead making a generic statement about the history of violence and extremism in India.
Consider here that the VHP has been linked with attacks on Muslims and Christians, organized attacks on mosques and churches, destruction of the Babri masjid, and various incidences of violence across regions.
Hindutva is a radicalizing force globally, leading to violence in the Indian diaspora across Western democracies. It has been linked with violence in United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia.
CARE’s research has documented the online infrastructure of Hindutva in Aotearoa New Zealand. The activist group Aotearoa Alliance of Progressive Indians (AAPI) has consistently and systematically highlighted the presence of Hindutva in Aotearoa New Zealand including the role of the New Zealand Hindu Council in spreading disinformation as an organization affiliated with Hindutva. AAPI has raised critical concerns of relationships between community leaders in Aotearoa New Zealand and Hindutva.
That the association of New Zealand Hindu Council with VHP doesn’t count as evidence of threats posed by Hindutva to Wilson is of concern, particularly given his expert role on countering violent extremism. Although Wilson is not discounting the presence of Hindutva in Aotearoa New Zealand, his argument about what counts as evidence for an organization to be counted as threat raises the question whether the incidences outlined above meet Wilson’s threshold of a threat. Alas, we wouldn’t know because Wilson doesn’t define the term threat within this context, something he accuses Clark of not doing adequately in his book.
By this logic, affiliation or association doesn’t count as evidence of the presence of a threat. Is the same definitional parameter used by the New Zealand security community when conceptualizing affiliations with organizations such as ISIS (Note here the similarities with ISIS shared by Hindutva).
Moreover, Wilson complains that Clark does not explain why Hindutva should be understood as “far right,” ignoring the evidence that Byron does present of Hindutva’s underlying fascist far-right ideology.
In fact, Byron is one of the few New Zealand-based activists that has engaged activists in the Indian diaspora in dialogue about the threats of Hindutva. One of his earliest analyses of the relationship between the Hindutva proponent Roy Kaunds, Kelvyn Alp and Counterspin media (Wilson does accept Alp and Counterspin as examples of the far-right) offered a conceptual framework for examining the discursive flows between the Islamophobia of Hindutva and the Islamophobia of white supremacy that I have discussed in my public writing.
Performative references to Christchurch
It is ironic that Wilson begins his opinion piece in Newsroom by referring to the Christchurch terrorist attack (that directly targets Muslims, with its attack on mosques).
Yet there is not a single reference to Islamophobia (the driving force behind the Chrictcurch attack and the underlying ideology that connects white supremacists with Hindutva) in Wilson’s essay.
The whiteness (referring to the hegemonic values of white culture, held up as universal) of the extremism industry that has flourished post-Christchurch is marked by similar ongoing gaslighting of the actually existing Islamophobia in Aotearoa New Zealand (including its casual omission).
There is no reference in Wilson’s review of the concerns regarding Hindutva extremism and Islamophobia in Aotearoa expressed by Muslim women activists.
These same activists had earlier raised multiple alarm bells about a potential extremist attack targeting Muslims and driven by Islamophobia. Here’s the noted activist Anjum Rahman speaking about Hindutva:
“It’s extreme hate…It’s dehumanising material, trying to dehumanise our community.”
The Stuff article citing Rahman goes on to note:
“Later, Rahman shares with Stuff social media posts containing abuse directed at Muslims. She’s right – it’s dehumanising and awful. Similar material has been cited in a report from Massey University researcher Mohan Dutta who has studied discrimination against minority groups in India and in the Indian diaspora.”
Context and structures matter
The systemic erasure of the voices of Muslim communities and activists post the Christchurch terrorist attack has been accompanied by the ongoing erasure of the evidence of Islamophobia presented by Muslims.
In our research carried out at CARE with Muslim communities experiencing hate, the ongoing erasure of accounts of evidence is part of the racist structure that upholds and perpetuates Islamophobia. Muslim communities and activists often ask, How much evidence on the drivers of violence is actually evidence that will count for security experts?
And more vitally, when will the accounting of this evidence actually lead to positive policy responses that do something about the drivers of hate.
This ongoing discounting of evidence is accompanied by the systemic individualization of the analytic framework imposed by the expert security community, shaped by the hegemonic values of whiteness.
As focus is turned on identifying, categorizing and surveilling violent individuals, the structural contexts and drivers of violence remain erased from mainstream analytic frameworks. It is this individualization within the security apparatus that fails to see Hindutva’s links to violence (after all, Hindutva supporters in the Indian diaspora are often professionals and members of the successful model minority business community).
Moreover, the absence of structural analysis means that security experts and bureaucrats conveniently turn a blind eye to the actually existing Islamophobia within the security community itself, which fundamentally underlies the perpetuation of Islamophobia.
Silence doesn’t make the problem go away
Toward the end of his review, Wilson suggests that we need to take care about how we describe the various groups under the umbrella of the far-right, conspiracy theorists, and anti-government movements. He suggests that not taking adequate care in defining these groups would likely push them together, generate misplaced fear, and contribute to rising polarization.
I agree with Wilson. We need to take great care in defining the various groups that threaten democracy and social cohesion and develop appropriate response strategies that are nuanced.
At the same time, digging our head in the sand and pretending these groups don’t exist or they don’t pose a threat to our social cohesion is not going to curb the rising polarization. In fact, doing so might fuel further polarization.
Not counting, categorizing and adequately responding to the threat posed by Hindutva in Aotearoa New Zealand is likely to further heighten the sense of marginalization felt by Indian minorities here. Moreover, such discounting of evidence is likely to empower Hindutva ideologues here in Aotearoa New Zealand to continue to target social cohesion and democracy.
Without adequate structural responses and frameworks for empowering communities at the margins in the Indian diaspora, the inter-communal threat posed by Hindutva is likely to go unchecked. We can’t wait for Hindutva violence to show itself for us to then respond to it post-hoc. Lessons learned from Christchurch, Australia, Leicester ought to offer us insights into strategies for countering Hindutva.
What qualifies you as an expert
Talking about credentials, historically, we have turned to academic expertise as the basis for generating knowledge. This knowledge then has shaped how we have historically crafted policies, developed interventions, and responded to these interventions.
Knowledge, therefore, is directly tied to policies.
Given the severe lack of diversity in academic disciplines, this has meant that academic knowledge informing policy formations is also severely limited. The absence of minority communities who are the targets of majoritarian hate and violence from decision-making spaces has meant that conceptual frameworks are largely absent in addressing the hate and violence.
Consider the area of terrorism and conflict studies and the ways in which this area has been shaped by academic expertise. That the area has been largely dominated by whiteness and imperial agenda has meant that what is operationalized as terror and therefore placed under surveillance has been grossly shaped by Islamophobia post-9/11. The prevailing ideology of the “War on Terror” has over-surveilled Muslims, mainstreamed the racist targeting of Muslims, and legitimized the terror narrative that drives Islamophobia. Ultimately, the mainstreaming of the Muslim terror narrative is directly tied to the accelerated growth of Islamophobic white supremacist and Hindutva hate post 9/11.
In this backdrop, the work of activists such as Byron Clark is vital to generating knowledge and to countering the myopic frameworks of analysis imposed by academic experts.
I have found my own knowledge of studying social change as constrained within the rules and norms of academia. These rules and norms themselves are often established within the structures of whiteness, the hegemonic values of white mainstream academic culture.
Working with activists in CARE’s activist-in-residence programming and learning from their knowledge I have found brings critical insights that shape the mobilization toward structural transformation. The ability to see broad linkages and to explore these linkages is vital to mapping the far-right threat to social cohesion and democracies globally. I am so glad that Byron has dedicated a Chapter on Hindutva in his book. For the Indian diaspora minority communities and activists who have witnessed the accelerated growth of Hindutva in Aotearoa over the past decade, Byron’s intervention is vital to placing in the mainstream their concerns about hate.
The Highbury Advisory Rōpū, built by tangata whenua community researchers at the Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) in partnership with the community in Highbury, has been working hard over the last many months to put together the community-led culture-centered social cohesion intervention called Pā Tamariki. Drawing upon the Māori concept of Pā as a protective space that nurtures the community and supported by funding from the Lotteries Community Grant, the advisory Rōpū envision social cohesion as emergent from the everyday spaces of care, connection, and love in the community.
Pā Tamariki is built with the goal of bringing the whanau and the community together in Highbury to create and sustain a strong community that protects and safeguards the children and the youth.
According to Venessa Pokaia, lead community researcher and community organizer at CARE, “the idea of the Pā as a generative space in the community brings the community together to build positive pathways for the youth. In doing so, the Pā connects the many diverse groups in the community, creating dialogues between the groups and connecting them together in the work of creating a strong community that supports the youth.”
The opening event on Saturday, December 17, witnessed diverse communities in Highbury come together to build this space of dialogue, understanding, care and support, anchored in manaakitanga. Through sharing food, games, and community activities, Pā Tamariki offered a message of hope for Highbury, that positive transformations can come about when community members connect with each other.
The Pā Tamariki campaign builds on the earlier campaign “I Choose Highbury” that was designed by the Highbury Advisory Rōpū to challenge and shift the dominant deficit-based narrative around Highbury. It centered stories of Highbury as a space for positive community interactions, community support, and community mutual aid. The “I Choose Highbury” campaign was launched at a Matariki celebration event in 2020, and was accompanied by community-led community garden initiatives, community cupboards, and community-driven public education programmes on the prevention of violence.
The Pā Tamariki event showcased activities that connected them to culture, offered interactive games, and enabled intercultural interactions among diverse communities residing within Highbury. The hāngī put together by the community after three decades and the food prepared by the Afghan refugee community demonstrate the power of community sovereignty, when communities at diverse intersections come together to create spaces for love, care, and generosity. The organising power of the Highbury Advisory Rōpū demonstrates the effectiveness of culture-centered community-led interventions when power is transferred into the hands of communities as drivers of social change communication. Community sovereignty, the capacity of the community to make decisions and drive change, lies at the heart of positive transformations.
Massey News: Pā Tamariki event brings the communities of Highbury together
Synopsis: Center for Culture-Centered Approach for Research & Evaluation (CARE) has completed 10 years and is organising this conference to celebrate the journey. Centre for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE ) at School of Communication, Journalism & Marketing, Massey University is humbled to invite you to the 10 year anniversary conference and proud to share with you some snippets of the work we have done at CARE. As with any recounting of a decade, our reflections here take stock of our milestones, and at the same time, invite you to join the collective work of Culture-centered interventions resisting structures: Building transformative futures, imagining a just future together where human health and wellbeing are universally upheld. Please do join us for the keynotes, sessions and panels to be conducted in a hybrid mode- in person and online.
9:00am – 10:00am | Day 1 | Session 1 Welcome, “New forms of resistance for transformative futures” Keynote to the Conference, Distinguished Professor Graham Hingagaroa Smith10:00am –
11.00am | Day 1 | Session 2 Keynote “Tangata Whenua and Tangata Tiriti” by Marise Lant
11:00am – 12:30pm | Day 1 | Session 3 Culture-centered interventions on poverty (Glen Innes): Dr. Phoebe Elers & Mohan Dutta
1:30pm – 3:00pm | Day 1 | Session 4 Culture-centered interventions led by Māori at the margins (Highbury): Venessa Pokaia & Mohan Dutta
3:30pm – 5:00pm | Day 1 | Session 5 Indigenous leadership in organising resistance (Feilding): Selina Metuamate & Mohan Dutta
6:00pm – 8.00 pm |Day1 | Session 6 CARE Opening Ceremony & Reception @ SGP2.01 | Sir Geoffrey Peren Building / Auditorium
Keynote “Observations on Culture-centered Scholarship” by Dr. Shaunak Sastry
10:00am – 11:00am | Day 4 | Session 2 Margins negotiating legal structures: Dr. Rati Kumar & Mohan Dutta
11:00am – 12:30pm | Day 4 | Session 3 Culture-centered social justice and challenging hate: Mohan Dutta
1:30pm – 3:00pm | Day 4 | Session 4 Climate organising in/from the Global South: Indranil Mandal, Pankaj Baskey, Mohan Dutta
Friday 2nd December 9:00am – 10:30am | Day 5 | Session 1
Transgender organising at the margins of the margins: Mohan Dutta, Raksha Mahtani, De’Anne Jackson
11:00am – 12:30pm | Day 5 | Session 2 Activists in conversation: Anti-hate organizing: Challenging disinformation and dismantling racism with Sina Brown-Davis, Tameem Shaltoni, Haroon Kasim, Byron Clark
1:30pm – 3:00pm | Day 5 | Session 3 Conclusion CARE conference
CARE: Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation congratulates its Director, Professor Mohan J. Dutta, Massey University for being named in the latest World’s Top 2% Scientists List (Stanford University). The excellence in the research impact at CARE is reflective of the contributions of our collective of community advisory groups, community researchers, activists-in-residence, and academic research teams working tirelessly to build strong communities as participants in organizing for social change.
We are proud of this recognition of excellence that speaks to the impact our collective scholarship makes to the theorizing of justice-based health communication processes, demonstrating the power of culture-centered community-based communication organizing for social change in transforming colonial, capitalist, patriarchal, racist and casteist structures.
by Marise Lant and Mohan J. Dutta, Center for Culture – Centered Approach to Research & Evaluation, Massey University
In this white paper [1], we outline the vitality of connecting across cultures, anchored in Māori leadership in shaping and guiding anti-racist interventions in Aotearoa New Zealand, connected to anti-colonial struggles by Māori. Noting that the entrenched settler colonialism in New Zealand is based on a history of Whiteness[2], we argue that witnessing this Whiteness in the colonial configuration of New Zealand is the first step to dismantling it[3]. Māori have historically experienced, negotiated and resisted the racist structures of Whiteness that form the architectures of settler colonialism in New Zealand through their everyday organizing across whanau and hapū. We center Whiteness to the colonial structures of racism in New Zealand because of the centering of White norms as the basis for perpetuating oppression, expulsion, genocide, rape, and murder of indigenous communities (Māori in New Zealand) and the simultaneous marginalisation of communities of colour, many of whom have experienced similar histories of expulsion, genocide, and violence.
In this paper, we argue that recognizing and centering the leadership of Māori as people of the land lies at the heart of the process of cultural centering we discuss here, anchoring interventions seeking transformations in racist structures in the everyday lived experiences of the indigenous people of the land. The leadership of Māori is vital to anti racist struggles not only as a way for building strategies that work but more fundamentally as the basis for turning to Te Tiriti. At the same time, connecting with the struggles of communities of colour, migrants and refugees in Aotearoa New Zealand creates a framework of solidarity that sees the Whiteness percolating through racist structures, witnesses the connections between them, and seeks to decolonize them. We argue here that seeing the connections between and across indigenous, ethnic, migrant and refugee struggles is central to culture-centered strategies of anti-racism that seek to dismantle Whiteness in colonial organisations, institutions, and society.
[1] We note in the naming of the white papers as authorial sources of knowledge the logics of Whiteness that constructs it.
[2] Whiteness refers to the hegemonic values of the colonising white culture, established as universal. See Moreton-Robinson, A. (2015). The white possessive: Property, power, and indigenous sovereignty. U of Minnesota Press
[3] Here we note the ongoing efforts at silencing conversations on Whiteness in Aotearoa by both white liberals and white supremacists. While white liberals suggest that the concept of Whiteness does not apply to Aotearoa, white supremacists deploy the age-old strategy of using communicative inversion by labelling anti-racist critiques of Whiteness as racist toward white communities.
Marise Lant is a Māori leader; Lobbyist,an Indigenous rights protector; Founder of 250 Years of Colonisation – The Aftermath leading the protest and burning of the Union Jack in opposition and response to the arrival of the year replica of Endeavour to Gisborne on 8 October 2019;Previous chairperson of the Tairāwhiti District Māori Womens Welfare League; Current representative on the Tairāwhiti District Māori Council;Supporter of the Tairāwhiti Multicultural Council.
