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Item ‘One big team working together’ - Shifting narratives to encourage civic participation and collective action in disaster preparedness(Elsevier Ltd, 2025-02-15) Das M; Becker J; Doyle EEHDisaster risks cannot be reduced by individual efforts alone and necessitate community participation and collective action. However, communicating and encouraging collective action is difficult. Existing studies show that stories and narratives are useful to convey complex less-understood phenomena, like disasters, in a comprehendible and relatable manner. As such, this paper explores existing disaster narratives and aims to understand how they encourage civic participation and collective action for reducing disaster risks. The findings show that the framing of disasters in mass media narratives are unlikely to encourage collective action as they do not emphasize citizen's agency and efficacy in reducing disaster risks. However, in the narratives shared at the local level between emergency management agencies and community members, there is currently a shift towards emphasizing community agency, efficacy, and responsibilities in reducing disaster risks. Four dominant themes are identified in these narratives: reframing the concept of heroes, promoting connection and care, emphasizing collective efficacy and collective responsibility. While the narratives are beneficial, they also cause some tensions, such as, confusion arising from lingering response-centric narratives; frustration around the collective responsibility narratives; and resistance to the current narratives as they are perceived as attempts by emergency management agencies to transfer emergency management responsibilities to people. The implications of the findings and the future directions are presented.Item Pesticide poisoning in Aotearoa New Zealand : a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand(Massey University, 2015) Torrington, Ciaran DawnAs a nation for over 70 years New Zealand has used unprecedented amounts of pesticides within our workplaces, homes, lands, communities and our National Parks. The health and environmental hazards from exposure to pesticides is now well accepted within Science, but as an illness pesticide poisoning is not well acknowledged within society. Historically pesticide poisoning has been strongly contested by Science, Government, Medicine, Business & Industry and as a result people who have experienced illness from pesticide poisoning frequently encountered denial or de-legitimisation of their illness stories. Despite the long history of pesticide use in this country no study has considered what it is like to experience pesticide poisoning in workplaces in New Zealand, and this study attempts to redress this lack of research effort. A narrative methodology and theories was employed because it explores an illness experience in depth, allows for marginalised stories such as pesticide poisoning to be explored, and is a popular method for exploring health experiences within the Social Sciences. There were sixteen participants interviewed who had experienced pesticide poisoning in their workplaces in New Zealand. This thesis presents three perspectives of narrative theory of the pesticide poisoning experience. The first perspective is of the overarching narrative of pesticide poisoning in New Zealand which shows how the narratives of this study are distinctly automythology quest narratives. The second perspective is how the narratives are structured to give form and meaning, and within this study the narratives are structured within the domains of the Whare Tapa Wha conceptual model of health and the study demonstrates how this can form a foundation for an embodied perspective of health and identity. The third perspective considers the social forces that surround and influence pesticide poisoning illness stories. The participants reconstruct their sense of identity in response to the illness experience and actively advocate for change within their environment. The narratives of this study are surrounded by the powerful authority over knowledge by powerful institutions who sought to deny their experiences of pesticide poisoning.Item An inquiry into the meaning of Guillain-Barré syndrome : a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts(Massey University, 2001) Mace, Janet-LeeGuillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS) is an autoimmune syndrome characterized by a severe and rapid onset of paralysis that ascends without warning. It has an unknown aetiology and is generally unknown by most people, including medical professionals. When a person who has had GBS is asked to speak about their experience, they are likely to talk about aspects of it that are personally meaningful. Their account can be likened to a story in that it collates seemingly unconnected facts, episodes of activity and emotional attributions into a sequence that provides knowledge and understanding. A story is a powerful form for expressing suffering and experiences and so is particularly suitable for the study of trauma and illness. The actual process of creating the story, plus its presentational and organisational forms, provides sources for uncovering the identities authors choose to create and present of themselves. Six people who have had GBS were interviewed about their experience, and their stories were analysed using a narrative inquiry to discern the meanings attributed to GBS from the participants’ own understandings and perspectives. The intended focus of the research was holistic and content based. The result of the narrative inquiry was a plot common to all six narratives. Namely, GBS is an inexplicable condition, during which horrendous things happen, but people do recover with time and it is likely their life view will be changed in the process. Four fundamental issues, identity, meaning, making sense and meaningfulness were drawn from the stories and configured into a narrative of the researcher’s making. What the participants chose to speak about became the meanings, or themes, major and minor, of their stories. No event has meaning in itself, however traumatic events can precipitate crises of meaning. When these crises are viewed within the context of other events, and are perceived to add value to life, then they have meaningfulness. In the telling of meanings and meaningfulness, the purpose for storying and the audience to whom the story is directed are the criteria for which the storylines are chosen. Both the story and the storying provide opportunities for the authors to create and offer images of themselves, that are then open to interpretation by an audience. As a traumatic experience, GBS enabled six people to tell their stories. In doing so they were able to make sense of important issues for themselves, and re-examine the way they saw themselves and the world.Item Futurority : narratives of the future : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (Social Policy), Massey University, Albany, New Zealand(Massey University, 2005) Kenkel, DavidThis thesis examines narratives of the future and their impact on late-modern constructions of the self. The argument is made that neo-liberal narratives have effectively promoted an idealised narrative of the self that views the achievement of a desired future for individuals as primarily a function of personal autonomy, effort and intention. The thesis contends that this narrative is promoted in society through multiple trajectories involving an array of social forms and institutions. Education policy and media are considered as exemplary examples of the sorts of social forms and institutions where this idealising narrative is promoted. A limited range of education policy narratives and media narratives are then examined. The position is taken that the adoption of neo-liberal ideals of the self relies on a supporting context of other narratives of the self and society. These are explored. A governmental framework (Rose, 1998) is used to consider the implications for child and adult subjects of the adoption of an individualised culpability for future success, or lack of success within what is argued is a subjectifying discursive regime of the self. Resistance to this governing regime is considered from a number of theoretical perspectives. The contention is made that effective resistance is likely to be local, partial and continuous rather than involving or resembling a disjunctive ideological shift. The thesis engages with post-structuralist ideas and hence is written from a perspective that necessarily incorporates a local and personal narrative.Item Establishing relations: Photography in wordless comics(Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2015) Postema B; Pedri, N
