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    Overtourism in Iceland: Fantasy or Reality?
    (MDPI (Basel, Switzerland), 2020-09-08) Sæthórsdóttir AD; Hall CM; Wendt M
    Iceland has been one of the main destinations that have been incorporated into the discourse of overtourism. However, Iceland is different to many other supposed overtourism destinations in that its tourism is based on natural areas. Nevertheless, destination discourses can play an important part in influencing tourist decision-making and government and industry policy making. A media analysis was conducted of 507 online media articles on overtourism in Iceland that were published in 2018, with the main themes being identified via content analysis. The results indicated that the media discourse represented only a partial picture of overtourism and the crowding phenomenon in Iceland, with mechanisms to respond to crowding, the satisfaction level of tourists with their Icelandic nature experience, and local people's support for tourism being underreported. Some of the findings reflect that of other media analyses. However, there are considerable discontinuities between media representations and discourses of overtourism in Iceland, which highlight the importance of national-or destination-level media analysis. The media analysis illustrates the need for a better understanding of different destination discourses and their influence.
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    Due diligence and psychosocial risk : examining the construction of compliance : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Management at Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2024-07-20) Deacon, Louise Joy
    New Zealand’s Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 introduced two significant changes to the country’s work health and safety regulatory landscape: (1) it placed a duty upon officers to ensure that the business of which they are an officer complies with its duties under the Act; (2) it broadened the definition of health to include mental health. The latter inclusion confirmed the scope of the Act to apply to psychosocial risks at work. Despite the officers’ duties being lauded as a profound change to New Zealand’s regulatory landscape, there has been little research investigating how officers respond to these legal duties. Further, internationally, there are significant gaps in knowledge regarding the role senior company managers play in psychosocial risk management, particularly relating to the intersect of legal responsibilities and psychosocial risks. This research adopted a Foucauldian analytical approach to examine how ideas about compliance and psychosocial risks are constructed and organised. Specifically, the research questions led to an investigation of the ways in which officers conceptualised and carried out their due diligence duties as they applied to the protection of workers’ mental health and the implications thereof. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 24 officers of large companies operating in New Zealand. The findings indicate that officers tended to discursively construct risk in ways which frequently obfuscated causes of harm arising from work while also problematising the possibility of eliminating or minimising risks to workers. Further, through a process of “risk translation,” psychosocial risks were often transformed into risks which were individualised, psychologised and managerialised. This translative effect functioned to displace psychosocial risks with risks which were more recognisable and amenable to management and posed less challenge to management prerogative. In this way, a dominant construction of risk came to represent worker mental health as a cause of risk to the organisation and the object of compliance, rather than a consequence of psychosocial risk exposure. The resultant compliance responses may therefore be considered symbolic in that they represented attention to legal ideals while marginalising the management of risks arising from work. Thus, the potential of work health and safety legislation to regulate psychosocial harm arising from work was largely curtailed, highlighting the limits of self-regulation in a legal context characterised by uncertainty and ambiguity.
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    Supporting Intellectually Disabled Women’s Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights: A Qualitative Study With Support Workers in Aotearoa New Zealand
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2023-11-16) Bloom O; Morison T
    This article presents findings from a qualitative study of support worker responses to intellectually disabled women’s sex and reproductive health. Drawing on reproductive justice theory, interviews with seven support workers from various disability service providers in New Zealand were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. The findings point to the persistence of a sexual risk discourse, which undermines progressive perspectives, including the rights-based approach that is usually advocated for in sexual and reproductive health, and ultimately constrains intellectually disabled women’s sexual agency. The value of a reproductive justice framework for countering risk-oriented framings in favor of a social justice perspective that expands the notions of individual rights is discussed. The findings support a growing global evidence base and have implications for national and international policy and practice.
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    Storm Clouds and Rainbows: Visual Metaphors of Parents of Transgender Children in Aotearoa (New Zealand)
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2023-07-12) de Bres J; Morrison-Young I
    This article explores the discourses parents adopt to support their transgender children in Aotearoa (New Zealand). Previous research with parents is limited by its focus on trauma rather than resistance and its lack of attention to intersectional experiences. To investigate how parents resist gender-based oppression, we use the method of reflective drawing, asking twenty parents of diverse social and cultural backgrounds to draw their experience of parenting a transgender child and discuss this in interview. We identified eight visual metaphors of storm clouds and rainbows, a maze, family portraits, blank space, standing side-by-side, hearts, arches, and question marks. These represent parent discourses of family resilience, personal transformation, shifting gender ideologies, depathologisation, child-led parenting, unconditional love, protection, and uncertainty about their child’s future. The parents’ discourses serve several interests: enabling them to focus on the hope of overcoming adversity, foreground the positive aspects of raising a transgender child, justify their gender-affirming approach, reframe their family gender ideologies, normalize their child’s experience, deflect stigma from their child and themselves, construct themselves as good parents, draw strength from solidarity, and express incertitude about what lies ahead. These provide parents with a means of enacting discursive resistance, with potential for driving broader social change.
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    Love and lifestyle: how 'relational healthism' structures couples' talk of engagement with lifestyle advice associated with a new diagnosis of coronary heart disease.
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2023-12) Robson M; Riley S; Gagen E; McKeogh D
    Objectives Healthy lifestyle change improves outcomes in coronary heart disease (CHD), but is rarely sustained. To better understand barriers to lifestyle change, we examined couples’ talk of engaging with lifestyle advice after one partner receives a diagnosis of CHD. Design A longitudinal qualitative design, in which a poststructuralist discourse analysis was performed on 35 interviews, conducted with 22 heterosexual British people in a long term relationship. The interviews occurred over three months after one partner was referred to a cardiac rehabilitation programme designed to support lifestyle change. Results Couples understood their health as a shared practice underpinned by an ideological framework of healthism, creating a form of ‘relational healthism’. Practicing relational healthism was not straightforward because the practices of surveillance, control, and discipline related to healthism often contravened relationship norms of support, acceptance and respect for the other’s autonomy. Couples struggled to resolve this tension, dynamically adopting, resisting, and occasionally transforming discourses of health and love in ways that worked for and against engagement in lifestyle change. Conclusion In foregrounding the discursive and relational contexts of behavioural change engagement, we show the considerable complexity for couples, including costs related to engagement with lifestyle advice.
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    Understanding Neoliberalism, Media and the Political: An Interview with Sean Phelan
    (2016-07) Dawes, Simon SD
    In this interview, Sean Phelan discusses the differences between ‘ideological’ and ‘post-ideological’ or ‘post-political’ neoliberalism, and sets out his own approach to critiquing neoliberalism, which draws on Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory and Bourdieu’s field theory. Arguing for the benefits of a comparative cross-national approach, he illustrates examples of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ in UK, US, Ireland and New Zealand contexts. Phelan concludes the interview by suggesting potential sites of cultural politics and the possibility of a radically different kind of media and political culture.
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    The morality and political antagonisms of neoliberal discourse: Campbell Brown and the dorporatization of educational justice
    (University of Southern California, 2017) Salter LS; Phelan SP
    Neoliberalism is routinely criticized for its moral indifference, especially concerning the social application of moral objectives. Yet it also presupposes a particular moral code, where acting on the assumption of individual autonomy becomes the basis of a shared moral-political praxis. Using a discourse theoretical approach, this article explores different articulations of morality in neoliberal discourse. We focus on the case of Campbell Brown, the former CNN anchor who reinvented herself from 2012 to 2016 as a prominent charter school advocate and antagonist of teachers unions. We examine the ideological significance of a campaigning strategy that coheres around an image of the moral superiority of corporatized schooling against an antithetical representation of the moral degeneracy of America’s public schools system. In particular, we highlight how Brown attempts to incorporate the fragments of different progressive discourses into a neoliberalized vision of educational justice.