Browsing by Author "Joensen, Clare"

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Being big, becoming small : conversations with Māori women about weight loss surgery : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Social Anthropology at Massey University, Albany, Aotearoa, New Zealand
(Massey University, 2019) Joensen, Clare
Weight loss surgery is increasingly being used to combat obesity, resulting in recipients becoming more visible in society. This in turn facilitates the normalising of what once would have been considered a radical medical procedure and the proliferation of discourse that more often than not measures success against models of slimness and appearance and underplays the downsides of surgery. Through the use of a narrative phenomenological approach, this research explores the experiences of surgery recipients, specifically Māori women, and asks the question; ‘how does the embodiment of radical change impact on relationality, interiority, conviviality, and ‘being in the world’?’ Through learning from Māori women, this research also explores how being Māori shapes experience both before and after surgery and in doing so, contrasts to literature which frames experiences of indigenous women through a Foucauldian lens of colonialism. I argue that, as Māori, these women are supported by the collective – significantly so – but also have to grapple with and push back negative discourses that leak into their world. I also argue that life post-surgery is entangled with both liminality and potentialities; precarious, unsettled and unsettling, while being simultaneously imbued with hope and focused towards an extending future. Surgery does transform bodies through enabling tremendous weight loss but also transfigures far more than it is designed to do.
Knowing, belonging & becoming-with the Ōruawharo : an ethnography of a river : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Social Anthropology at Massey University, Albany Campus, Aotearoa, New Zealand
(Massey University, 2025-11-17) Joensen, Clare
This thesis is situated in the northwest of Te Ika-a-Māui, the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand along the Ōruawharo river, a salty tidal tributary of the Kaipara Harbour. For over a hundred and fifty years, the Ōruawharo and surrounding district have been storied by a dominant ‘settler’ narrative which maps onto place, as names, text, histories, monuments and civic apparatus. However, this is not the only story of the Ōruawharo. There are multiple stories, multiple ways of knowing the river; knowings which produce different belongings. As such belonging to a place is always a process of becoming, and this becoming is produced relationally, as a series of “withs”, with both humans and non-humans. These becoming-withs produce embodied ways of knowing which in turn, remake place when given the opportunity to be known by others. This thesis aims to bring to light the unknown, hidden and subordinated Ōruawharo knowledges in order to reveal multiplicities and develop new ways of thinking about place. This is Pākehā research done inbetween Māori and Pākehā worlds in a Māori-Pākehā place; a form of research which comes with its own set of troubles. As it is a Pākehā imperative to decolonise (Shaw 2021b), I stay with the trouble (Haraway 2016), and through a level of discomfort, produce small decolonising acts in written text, public speaking roles and through the curation of an exhibit. Decolonising actions, spurred on by this thesis, have then led to others as people come to know more, including that which cannot be unknown. Drawing on knowledges generated with boats (boat ethnography), people (interviews and casual conversations), texts (archives, books, texts, journals, letters and documents), the curation of an exhibit and a wide range of encounters in my community, I debunk knowing place as a singularity and demonstrate the value of knowing place differently through these methods. Ultimately, this ethnography of a river offers a multiplicity of knowings-with and in doing so, shifts human-centric and settler-centric narratives with tendencies to dominate. With dynamism, knowing, becoming and belonging are shown as relational, embodied, in amongst the withs, ever in motion, shaping lives and reshaping place, place as seen, imagined, felt, understood, experienced and remade.