Research at the School of Social Sciences
Our Research
Our research in the School of Social Sciences is interdisciplinary and international. These interdisciplinary themes represent just some of the issues investigated by our passionate staff:
- The retreat from the sea
- Evangelical religions in the Pacific
- Disability activism
- The impact of climate change on indigenous peoples
- The future of farming
- Intersex and transgender rights
- Oral history
- The impacts of the pandemic
- Whakapapa
- Ethics
- Calculating the surface melt rate of Antarctic glaciers
- Ownership of the ocean
- Intransigent beliefs
- The housing crisis
- Perspectives on gene-editing
- The influence of Taniwha
- International security
Research Success
Earthquake Commission for Environmental Planning
- Awarded $450,000 by the Earthquake Commission
Professor Iain White and Senior Lecturer in Environmental Planning Dr Xinyu Fu, have received Earthquake Commission funding for work to reduce the exposure and vulnerability of homes to natural hazards.
The research will help understand and model future residential growth, better linking it to future hazards. It will also help understand how the effects of different policies on future risk can help us make smarter decisions on where and how cities grow.
Professor White and Dr Fu and their team including Dr Silvia Serrao-Neumann, Dr Sandi Ringham and Dr Rob Bell will research how regulation and land development practice can impact risk exposure to natural hazards over long timeframes.
NIWA/Environmental Planning Programme
- Awarded $3 million by the MBIE Endeavour Fund
Flooding is one of New Zealand’s most damaging hazards. It is also the hazard that will change the most rapidly in intensity and nature as climate change impacts become realised. For instance, flash flooding caused by very heavy rainfall over a short period of time is expected to increase the most dramatically. At the same time our country is undergoing intense urban development, that if not linked to climate futures will increase the risk to people’s homes and wellbeing. These dual challenges make reducing flood risk extremely difficult for our current planning and response systems.
There is a knowledge vacuum about the scale of these problems, the integration of different policy domains, and the details of how different parts of the country will be affected. Our research programme will support the changes that are needed. We will produce New Zealand’s first consistent national flood map, showing where flooding is likely to occur, but also identify how vulnerable our assets and taonga are. In partnership with local and central government agencies, iwi, communities and key financial organisations we will work collaboratively to design, test and establish novel decision-making practices that integrate different climate and socio-economic projections and promote proactive adaptation to changing flood risks. Recent flooding events have demonstrated the ongoing impacts of flooding are not restricted to rescuing those inundated by water but are felt widely through society and the economy.
We will work closely with communities to understand these cascading impacts and how we can be better prepared for them. This programme will generate information and guidance that is immediately relevant as local and central government form the regulations and policy that will drive our response to climate change.
Dr Charlotte Greenhalgh
- Awarded $300,000 by the Royal Society Te Apārangi: Marsden Fund
Twentieth-century New Zealand women remade gender roles at work and in the home while medical advances transformed the management of their pregnancies. Yet there is no major study of women’s experiences of pregnancy during this period of significant change, either in New Zealand or internationally. While scholars have explored aspects of contraception, abortion, and childbirth, this is the first sustained examination of women’s responses to pregnancy itself.
The project takes pregnant women’s decision-making about work and family as its starting point to consider the history of gender in the twentieth century and the evolving possibilities of women’s lives. Along the way, the project asks and answers questions about the personal impact of medical and technical advances, the experiences and political leadership of Māori and migrant women, and the shifting status of women’s testimony over time. Events of the twentieth century raise urgent questions about how and why gender inequality has persisted amid momentous social change.
This project answers those questions by examining the opportunities and obligations of pregnant women across time. The research listens to previously ignored voices in order to connect the private lives of New Zealanders to large-scale changes in medicine, technology, society, and culture over 100 years.
Dr Fraser Macdonald
- Awarded $300,000 by the Royal Society Te Apārangi: Marsden Fund
The globalization of Pentecostal Christianity in the 20th century was a development of enormous historical and religious significance. Within this narrative, the explosion of Pentecostalism in Melanesia in the 1970s remains an untold story. During this time, the spiritual worlds of people throughout Melanesia were radically transformed as the result of an intense Pentecostal revival brought from New Zealand that swept through the region like wildfire.
In society after society, Christians experienced visions, speaking in tongues, violent shaking, crying, and the confession of sins, all seen as unequivocal signs of the Holy Spirit at work. This profound upheaval made Christianity significant within Melanesia in a way it had never been before, at the same time as inspiring a far reaching critique of local religious traditions. Anthropologists and missionaries have documented the uptake of Pentecostalism throughout Melanesia during this time, yet almost exclusively from the perspective of particular village communities.
Through a combination of ethnographic and historical research, this project will bring together understandings of local conversions to Pentecostalism in Melanesia to provide a definitive account of how they were, in fact, interconnected parts of a much wider, regional religious movement that had its origins in New Zealand.
Dr Justin Phillips
- Awarded $360,000 by the Royal Society Te Apārangi: Marsden Fund
The proliferation of white supremacist discourse on social media may represent the enduring challenge of our time.
Despite our country leading the Call to better understand online extremism, debate continues regarding the size, scope, and nature of the online white supremacist presence here within New Zealand. This knowledge gap is all the more problematic, given social media operates as a premier space where white supremacists can seek to expand their ranks and incite further violence. Such online activity also presents important opportunities for researchers to more deeply understand these NZ-based individuals and groups.
Our project is designed to address these critical knowledge gaps. In order to do so, we complement a big data methodological perspective with detailed qualitative analyses to examine the domestic issue from both a macro and micro level. In turn, this research will help develop more comprehensive domestic data on the problem, and will serve as a foundation for us to strengthen understanding of NZ-based extremist online activities and beliefs. This research therefore seeks to offer a much needed, New Zealand specific answer to the Call.
Dr Kate Stevens
- Awarded $300,000 by the Royal Society Te Apārangi: Marsden Fund
Land, village and family lie at the heart of identity and belonging throughout the Pacific, yet urban life has long evolved in parallel. This project examines Suva, Fiji’s capital, as a key space of cultural, economic, and environmental encounters: a central trade and tourism port at the heart of both British colonial rule and postcolonial regionalism.
I will explore the contested process of Suva’s urbanisation from 1868—when a major Suva land purchase occurred—to the political coup of 2000, by examining the transformation of key spaces of integration and of separation in the urban environment. These spaces include the changing coastline and creeks, rara (village green) and parks, fences and boundaries, markets, cemeteries, and buildings. Largely absent in wider urban histories, this research considers what is distinctive about Pacific urbanisation, and situates Suva as an indigenous Pacific environment, as well as a colonial one, from its foundation.
Using diverse sources, including archives, interviews, and literature, I will investigate the historical dimensions of urbanisation and the displacements and opportunities it produced for indigenous Fijians and diverse newcomers. This research will contribute new historical knowledge on identity formation, economic inequality, and environmental transformation in an increasingly urban, multicultural Pacific.