Browsing by Subject "New Zealand"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Constructing and Contesting “the Girlhood of Our Empire”: Girls’ Culture, Labor, and Mobility in Britain, South Africa, and New Zealand, c. 1830-1930
    (2019-04) Dillenburg, Elizabeth
    This dissertation studies girls’ complex, often paradoxical roles in the British Empire and analyzes how discussions about the education, employment, and emigration of girls both reflected and shaped broader political, economic, and social debates. Although girls are marginalized in studies of colonialism, concerted efforts to educate and emigrate girls reveal how the project of empire building depended on the mobility and labor of girls and young women. This dissertation begins by considering the ways in which youth organizations sought to transform girls into “empire builders” and girls’ roles as migrants, settlers, laborers, and creators and transmitters of colonial knowledge. Girls supported the empire, but they also challenged systems of colonial power and resisted prescribed roles in various ways, from penning criticisms of false imperial propaganda to absconding from exploitative situations. While most histories of childhood focus on one region, “Constructing and Contesting ‘the Girlhood of Our Empire’” employs a multi-sited framework that examines girlhood in different areas of the empire—concentrating specifically on Britain, New Zealand, and South Africa—to elucidate variations within broader colonial processes. As explored in the second part of the dissertation, emigration programs for British girls to New Zealand and South Africa faced innumerable obstacles, and their limited success exposed fault lines within the colonial project. The third part of the dissertation focuses debates over the employment of African and Māori girls as domestic servants in British colonial households and how these debates reveal the ways in which ideas of girlhood and girls’ lives were intertwined with conceptualizations of the nation, empire, and race. The nature of the colonial archive means that girls’ experiences rarely appear in the traditional sources, but their voices do emerge in letters they wrote to family and friends, articles they composed for children’s periodicals, scrapbooks they crafted, and photographs and artwork they created. Utilizing these myriad sources, “Constructing and Contesting ‘the Girlhood of Our Empire’” provides new insights into girls’ roles in the empire and more nuanced understandings of how class, race, and geography mediated girls’ experiences of and engagement with colonialism.
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    Indigenous global politics.
    (2009-11) Lightfoot, Sheryl Rae
    The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples passed the United Nations General Assembly on September 13, 2007. This document articulates the minimum international standard on indigenous peoples' rights that nation states are obligated to recognize and protect. It took more than thirty years of intense effort by the indigenous rights movement to achieve passage of the Declaration. This dissertation explores how indigenous politics at the global level compels a new direction of thought in International Relations. I argue that indigenous global politics is a perspective of International Relations that complicates the structure of international politics in new and important ways, challenging both Westphalian notions of state sovereignty and the (neo-)liberal foundations of states and the international system. A case study of the international indigenous peoples' movement and the development of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples demonstrates how attempts to secure indigenous rights at the international level are helping to forge new articulations of the concepts of sovereignty, the state, and territoriality. I have also detected a peculiar pattern of state response to these changes, a pattern that was previously undetected, unexamined and thus also unnamed in International Relations. I have termed this puzzling pattern "over-compliance," by which I mean that a state's indigenous rights policy behavior goes above and beyond its international commitments. My qualitative case studies of Canadian and New Zealand indigenous rights "over-compliance," based on original field research, analyze both the potential and the limits of the challenges posed by indigenous global politics. My research identifies several mechanisms that explain both legal "over-compliance" with treaty standards and de facto policy under-compliance, including the domestic and international strength of transnational indigenous movements and coalitions, and changes within a state's domestic political discourse regarding indigenous reconciliation.
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    New Zealand - Sustainable horticulture crop production
    (2010-11-28) Bredeson, Heath
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    Planning for cycling in local government: Insights from national surveys in Australia and New Zealand
    (Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2022) Babb, Courtney; McLeod, Sam; Noone, Conor
    Despite a broad consensus that cycling can address a range of transportation issues, many countries have struggled to institute measures to increase cycling participation. Even for cities that have achieved marked progress, there remains a gap in making cycling a truly normative mode of transportation. The practical problem of translating research and converting policy vision into broad-based cycling participation has become an increasingly central focus of international cycling scholarship. To examine the challenges of practically planning for cycling, we focus on the role of local government and report on a survey of all urban and major regional local governments in Australia and New Zealand. By analyzing results across the two countries, we diagnose challenges faced by practitioners in implementing measures to support cycling. Key findings suggest there is support among local government officers and stakeholders for cycling to play an increased role in daily transportation, yet this support is much more mixed at the implementation stage of cycling plans, policies, and infrastructure projects. These findings indicate a pressing need to better equip local government practitioners with tools and knowledge to overcome barriers to providing for cycling, particularly in increasingly politicized and complex contexts.
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    The role of information flow in climate change policy formation in New Zealand: a social analysis.
    (2012-08) Vaughter, Philip Claude-Dziuk
    Climate change threatens all nations of the world with risk of adverse environmental consequences. Science has linked the mechanisms of climate change to the emission of greenhouse gases produced by human industry. Yet despite this, most societies around the globe lack the incentive to implement national policy to mitigate climate change for fear of short-term economic loss. New Zealand is the first nation outside of the European Union to create an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) to decrease the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere from domestic greenhouse gas emissions, the majority of which come from agricultural production. In this study, I examine the discourse about climate change in New Zealand's media and examine though survey data how different sectors of the economy responded to impending carbon legislation. To do this I model communication networks that operated in New Zealand to disseminate climate science from the IPCC and other research organizations. I also examine the action network that formed an advocacy coalition around passage of the ETS. This research is an extensive study of how climate change was operationalized within New Zealand and how a policy instrument was drafted and passed in order to address climate change.
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    Unsettling Recovery: Natural Disaster Response and the Politics of Contemporary Settler Colonialism
    (2019-07) Kensinger, Steven
    This dissertation is an ethnographic case study of the Christchurch Central City Rebuild. Following a series of severe earthquakes near Christchurch, New Zealand between September 2010 and February 2011, the central government declared a state of emergency and passed the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Act (CER Act) in April 2011. This act mandated the creation of a new governing body, the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority, to oversee the development and implementation of a recovery strategy and plan for the Central City to be developed in cooperation with the Christchurch City Council and Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu, the local Māori tribal authority. I analyze the structure of power established by the post-earthquake recovery legislation through the lens of Rebuild discourse, a discursive regime comprised of multiple political projects that each engaged in recovery in particular ways to enact their specific vision of what future Christchurch ought to be. I argue that the passage of the CER Act and the structure of power it created in post-earthquake Christchurch drew on the legacy of New Zealand’s settler-colonial history to enable the neoliberal settler state in its efforts to dispossess local Christchurch residents of access to their city while also maintaining the ongoing dispossession of the local indigenous group Ngāi Tahu in order to serve the interests of economic and political elites.