Journal Articles
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://mro.massey.ac.nz/handle/10179/7915
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Item Curating Life in Vacant Spaces: Community Action Research and Reversing the Process of Academic Knowledge-Making(UTS ePRESS, 2025-01-27) Dombroski K; Shiels R; Watkinson HFor scholars in academic institutions, the process of research usually begins with a question often gleaned from academic literature, progresses through some methods and results, then ends in writing and dissemination of the findings. ‘Impact’ is identified by trying to see if anyone takes up the research and uses it to inform policy or action outside of academia – with contemporary impact databases measuring this by whether it has been cited in policy documents. But this way of understanding impact is fundamentally at odds with researching community-led activism, where impact is already happening, and researchers engage with communities to document and evaluate the impact in ways that support the work. For activists out in the community, research and learning are happening all the time and have impact without anyone writing it up at all. This paper reflects on a research project in the city of Ōtautahi Christchurch in Aotearoa New Zealand, where researchers and community activists began with ‘impact’ and ‘dissemination’. From there, we developed frameworks and methods, developed evidence, then ended with asking wider theoretical questions relevant to academic literature. Effectively, we reversed the order that research projects usually follow. In order to recognise this ‘reversed’ order, our paper utilises a reversed structure, using the concept of thinking infrastructures to understand what academic research adds to the knowledges already produced in community impact.Item Pluriversal bodies: Researching care through embodied ethnography(Wiley, 2024) Dombroski KIn this research note, I outline an approach to embodied experiences of care and caregiving in ethnographic scholarship on care. I describe how ethnographers of care and caregiving can use embodied methodologies, particularly through attending also to the cross-cultural differences in embodied experiences. In this research note, I bring together care research and cross-cultural embodied ethnography with my own work in Asia Pacific to outline an approach to researching care in the pluriverse – the multiple, overlapping realities of ontology, culture and experience that underpin all our lives. I draw on Annemarie Mol's conceptualisation of the body multiple (2002), Anna Tsing's understanding of awkward engagement (2005), Gibson-Graham's reading for difference (2020) and Sean Hsiang-lin Lei's research on hygiene (2014) to consider how researcher bodies might be useful in detecting pluriversal encounters in caregiving.Item Food for people in place: reimagining resilient food systems for economic recovery(MDPI (Basel, Switzerland), 2020-11-11) Dombroski K; Diprose G; Sharp E; Graham R; Lee L; Scobie M; Richardson S; Watkins A; Martin-Neuninger RThe COVID-19 pandemic and associated response have brought food security into sharp focus for many New Zealanders. The requirement to “shelter in place” for eight weeks nationwide, with only “essential services” operating, affected all parts of the New Zealand food system. The nationwide full lockdown highlighted existing inequities and created new challenges to food access, availability, affordability, distribution, transportation, and waste management. While Aotearoa New Zealand is a food producer, there remains uncertainty surrounding the future of local food systems, particularly as the long-term effects of the pandemic emerge. In this article we draw on interviews with food rescue groups, urban farms, community organisations, supermarket management, and local and central government staff to highlight the diverse, rapid, community-based responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings reveal shifts at both the local scale, where existing relationships and short supply chains have been leveraged quickly, and national scale, where funding has been mobilised towards a different food strategy. We use these findings to re-imagine where and how responsibility might be taken up differently to enhance resilience and care in diverse food systems in New Zealand.Item Cultivating commoners: Infrastructures and subjectivities for a postcapitalist counter-city(Elsevier B.V., 2023-12-01) Dombroski K; Conradson D; Diprose G; Healy S; Yates AIn this paper, we investigate how infrastructure and care shape commoner subjectivities. In our research into an urban youth farm in Aotearoa New Zealand, we heard and observed profound tales of growth and transformation among youth participants. Not only were our interviewees narrating stories of individual transformation (of themselves and others), but they also spoke of transformations in the way they engaged with the world around them, including the land and garden and its many species and ecological systems, the food system more generally, the wider community and their co-workers. Such transformations were both individual and collective, having more in common with the collective caring subject homines curans than the autonomous, rational work-ready subject of homo economicus. Using postcapitalist theory on commons, commoning and subjectivity, we argue that these socio-affective encounters with more-than-human commons enabled collective, caring commoner subjectivities to emerge and to be cultivated through collective care in place. We suggest that the commons can be thought of as an infrastructure of care for the counter-city, providing the conditions for the emergence and cultivation of collective caring urban subjects.Item From absences to emergences: Foregrounding traditional and Indigenous climate change adaptation knowledges and practices from Fiji, Vietnam and the Philippines(Elsevier B.V., 2024-04-01) See J; Cuaton GP; Placino P; Vunibola S; Thi HD; Dombroski K; McKinnon KThe differential impacts of climate change have highlighted the need to implement fit-for-purpose interventions that are reflective of the needs of vulnerable communities. However, adaptation projects tend to favour technocratic, market-driven, and Eurocentric approaches that inadvertently disregard the place-based and contextual adaptation strategies of many communities in the Global South. The paper aims to decolonise climate change adaptation guided by the critical tenets of ‘Decolonising Climate Adaptation Scholarship’ (DCAS). It presents empirical case studies from Fiji, Vietnam, and the Philippines and reveals the different ways that Indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) and strategies are devalued and suppressed by modernist and developmentalist approaches to climate adaptation. The paper then foregrounds some of the adaptive techniques that resist and remain, or have been re-worked in hybrid ways with ILK. Ultimately, this paper combats the delegitimisation of ILK by mainstream climate change adaptation scholarship and highlights the need for awareness and openness to other forms of knowing and being.Item Ethnography In and With Bodies: Embodied Learning and the Academic Life(Victoria University of Wellington, 2019-12-19) McKinnon K; Dombroski KThe body is a vital part of ethnographic experience and learning. This essay reflects on the complex work that the body does during ethnography, not just as an instrument for data collection, but as a means of collaboration, a site of embodied learning, and a conduit for connection and communication that is more-than-verbal. In this contribution we reflect on research engagements that have been profoundly embodied, involving deep embodied learning and communication, touch and connection in the contexts of childbirth, infant care, and midwifery. Building on experiences in China, Laos, New Zealand, and Australia, we discuss the richness and the challenges of consciously collaborating with, in, and via bodies and embodied communications. We also explore what might be learned from the embodied experience of ethnography that we can bring back into academic life: are there lessons we can learn from collaborating with bodies that can help us to thrive amongst the challenges of the neoliberal university?Item Journeying from “I” to “we”: assembling hybrid caring collectives of geography doctoral scholars(Taylor and Francis Group, 2018-02) Dombroski K; Watkins AF; Fitt H; Frater J; Banwell K; Mackenzie K; Mutambo L; Hawke K; Persendt F; Turković J; Ko SY; Hart DCompleting a PhD is difficult. Add a major earthquake sequence and general stress levels become much higher. Caring for some of the nonacademic needs of doctoral scholars in this environment becomes critical to their scholarly success. Yet academic supervisors, who are in the same challenging environment, may already be stretched to capacity. How then do we increase care for doctoral scholars? While it has been shown elsewhere that supportive and interactive department cultures reduce attrition rates, little work has been done on how exactly departments might create these supportive environments: the focus is generally on the individual actions of supervisors, or the individual quality of students admitted. We suggest that a range of actors and contingencies are involved in journeying toward a more caring collective culture. We direct attention to the hybridity of an emerging ‘caring collective’, in which the assembled actors are not only ‘students’ and ‘staff’, but also bodies, technologies, objects, institutions, and other nonhuman actors including tectonic plates and earthquakes. The concept of the hybrid caring collective is useful, we argue, as a way of understanding the distributed responsibility for the care of doctoral scholars, and as a way of stepping beyond the student/supervisor blame game.Item Feminist geographies in Aotearoa New Zealand: cultural, social and political moments(1/01/2019) Adams-Hutcheson G; Bartos AE; Dombroski K; Le Heron E; Underhill-Sem YAotearoa New Zealand is a nation of promise, potential and enigma: it was the first country in the world where women gained the vote in 1893 and now boasts the youngest woman world leader in 2017. It is also a postcolonial nation where structural racism, homophobia, and sexism persist, yet it has also given legal personhood to a river. Our Country Report foregrounds Aotearoa New Zealand feminist geographic scholarship that responds to, reflects, and sometimes resists such contrasts and contradictions at the national scale. We employ the lens of the 2017 national election to critically engage with current gendered and indigenous politics in the country. Analyzing these politics through three ‘feminist moments,’ our paper highlights the breadth and scope of current Aotearoa New Zealand feminist geographic scholarship and directions.Item Dialogues for wellbeing in an ecological emergency: Wellbeing-led governance frameworks and transformative Indigenous tools(SAGE Publications, 20/06/2022) Yates A; Dombroski K; Dionisio RAt a time of ecological emergency there are pressing reasons to develop more responsive wellbeing-led governance frameworks that engage with both human and more-than-human wellbeing. Attempts to incorporate wellbeing indices into wellbeing-led governance include the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations, the Gross National Happiness index of Bhutan, and a variety of emerging wellbeing-led governance frameworks in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Some of these frameworks have begun to include more-than-human wellbeing indices in their toolkit, but like many geographers and Indigenous scholars, we are wary of the dangers of universalising and abstractionist ‘indexology’ (Ratuva, 2016). In this paper, we review wellbeing-led governance frameworks with a view to more-than-human wellbeing and Indigenous knowledge. We outline an emerging pluriversal and prefigurative project where Indigenous scholars engage with partners in co-creation methods in place, incorporating Indigenous-Māori cultural perspectives into more situated and holistic wellbeing tools. We argue that while critique is important, so too is engaging in Indigenous-led research interventions fortransformative metrics and tools, particularlyin these times of socio-ecological crisis. As we ‘stay with’ this trouble (Haraway, 2018), we hope to contribute to a culturally specific place-based set of wellbeing indices and tools to inform wellbeing-led governance for more-than-human wellbeing.Item The affect of effect: affirmative political ecologies in monitoring climate change adaptation interventions(2018) Dombroski K; Do HTAll over the world, climate change adaptation interventions (CCAIs) are being implemented in a variety of ways, but mostly monitored using outcomes-based monitoring and evaluation (M&E) frameworks that are prone to oversimplification and outside-imposed priorities and knowledges about climate change. Existing monitoring and evaluation practices can only provide results with reference to project goals and processes, and tend to be top-down and neo-colonial in method and scope. This means they may frequently miss unexpected or localised aspects of adaptation interventions, some of which may be useful beyond the local level. While it may be possible to just explore the neo-colonial aspects of this political ecology of monitoring and evaluation of climate change adaptation interventions in our fieldwork in Thai Binh Province of Vietnam, an affirmative political ecology also tries to identify and proliferate alternative possibilities for meaningful monitoring and evaluation of adaptation interventions. In this essay, we reflect on the ways in which our research into embodied knowledge in local level monitoring and evaluation in rural Thai Binh province of Vietnam could be understood as affirmative political ecology. Through paying attention to the embodied knowledges and the cares and concerns of farmers and ourselves as scholars, we can get at the physical and material changes in environment and livelihood, but also move beyond critique into rethinking how new worlds and ways of being in and with the more than human can emerge.
