SAANZ2022

Chair: TBC

Toni Bruce - University of Auckland & Margaret Henley - University of Auckland
Reimagining Equality: Innovative Methodologies to Capture Marginalised and Precarious
Knowledge

In this presentation, we discuss the successes and challenges of two innovative methodologies—‘roving chats’ and research-organisation-journalist collaborations—we developed to remedy the remarkable inequality in sociological and historical research on Aotearoa’s major women’s sport. Compared to its male equivalent, rugby union, netball research is almost invisible and much of the sport’s unique sociological impact and heritage is at real risk of being lost forever. The two methods have enabled us to engage with a wide range of netball fans, and unearth knowledge and artefacts that are vital to our understandings of netball’s place in national culture. First, with the support of Netball New Zealand, we have conducted hundreds of short, under 10-minute, ‘roving chats’ with fans at live elite-level games, which have provided a breadth of rich data that might be difficult to capture in other ways. We conceptualise this method as a form of ethnographic fieldwork, in which participants and researchers chat on a more-or-less equal footing. Second, the three-way researcher-Netball New Zealand historian-Stuff.co.nz journalist collaboration was not only unique, but the wide circulation of the story in written, video and podcast formats has continued to generate further information from the public about netball’s early history. https://interactives.stuff.co.nz/2020/11/silver-ferns-coach-history-mrs-muir/


Bruce Curtis - University of Waikato
Are sociologists scientists?

The presentation will survey some definitions of science and sociology and discuss relationships between the two. Does it matter if sociology is a science or not? What are the implications in terms of the current push for Vision mātauranga by funding agencies?


Nicole Ashley - Massey University, Alice Beban - Massey University, Trudie Cain- Massey University & Vicky Walters - Massey University
Methodological Reflections on Existing and Emergent Relations of Care in Feminist Research 

In this presentation we discuss the implicit, explicit and unanticipated relations of care that emerged within a research project exploring gender inequality over the life course. The research participants were twenty individuals who self-identified as women (65+) and involved three data collection methods: a life story interview, an inequality ranking exercise over their life course, and a collaborative workshop where participants were invited to share a life lesson that they would like to pass on to women of younger generations. The relations of care that emerged throughout the research process took shape through five sets of relations: within the research team; between the researchers and the individual participants; between the participants as a group; in participants' relationship with their past, present and future selves; and between oneself and the unknown but imagined others. These different relations of care reveal that “openness” and “reciprocity” are inherently valuable parts of feminist praxis and ethical research, albeit not always in ways that are able to be anticipated.