SAANZ2022

Chair: Peter Howland

Sonja Bohn - University of Otago
Packaging ‘glorious’ New Zealand for tourism consumption

Tourism in Aotearoa involves complex worlds with contradictory relationships to land and nature: one where land is whenua, intricately linked to people through whakapapa; and one where scenic nature is resource to be protected even while it is consumed. These worlds collide and intersect at tourist sites. As the industry recovers from Covid-19, responds to the climate crisis, and rebuilds a perceived loss of social licence, planners propose a move towards more just relationships, invoking sustainability, regeneration, and co-governance.

This presentation gives a brief history of promotional films that package Aotearoa for tourism consumption. A 1920s film shows a scenic wonderland, a little outpost on the ‘rim’ of the British Empire, while later publicity presents a 100% Pure adventure playground, and most recently, the emphasis has shifted to kaitiakitanga. Analysis of each of these campaigns suggests they reflect the colonial/capitalist relations of their times. To begin imagining less-exploitative alternatives for tourism in Aotearoa, I propose using a critical lens, that highlights structural injustice while also revealing future imaginaries prefigured in current practices.


Chris McMillian - Massey University
Revolutionary Play? Cricket, Capitalism and Resistance

Cricket, with its antiqued pace, ancient rules and archaic insistence on tradition, is seemingly antithetical to the frantic rationality and restlessness of contemporary capitalism. Equally, the game’s conservatism makes it an unlikely point of resistance. In this presentation, however, I argue that not only is cricket a product and propagator of capitalism but contains within it a radical potential. Forged by the unruly commercial interests of the English elite in the eighteenth century, cricket emerged as an effective ideological antidote to the revolutionary shocks of the industrial revolution before becoming the game of the English-led British empire which forged the first iteration of international capitalism. It has also stood as a marker of capital’s eastward shift, with India’s economic power upturning the English game. Today, the ‘cricket industry’ is a media product increasingly played by freelance cricketers engaged by franchise teams owned by private capital. Conversely, not only was the game used as a means of negotiating and rejecting colonial power but the ‘play-spirit’ of the popular informal iterations of the game stand as a moment of critique to an all-pervasive global capitalism. This presentation explores the history and contemporary dynamics of cricket to find the radical potential within it.


Stella Pennell - Massey University
Airbnb, surplus and a methodological conundrum.

Drawing on the experiences of my PhD research into Airbnb, this presentation explores how two conceptually different methodological ontologies can operate separately and distinctly within one research project to produce knowledge and insights that account for independent aspects of the object under scrutiny. As Fredric Jameson notes, philosophical contradictions are mediated at the level of context, not at a philosophical level (Jameson, 2015).This presentation traverses the methodological conundrum when the presence of multiple aspects of an object necessitates separate methodological ontologies, which in turn requires the researcher to develop the ability to hold two distinct philosophical ideas at the same time while resisting the temptation to collapse or simplify ideas into a hierarchy. The two methodological ontologies at work in this research, therefore, do not ‘combine’, but rather, move in relation to one another. This particular kind of mediation has enabled greater expression of the two ontologies – that of socially constructed meaning and of structurally generated surplus. The interpretative methodologies are specifically deployed to develop an understanding of the construction of subjectivities, and a post-Marxist / psychoanalytical analysis to understand the presence and impact of different forms of surplus.


Emma Passey- University of Waikato
A Growing Bicultural Awareness of Heritage: Four Case Studies in Aotearoa New Zealand 

This paper presents four examples of a shifting understanding of heritage and history in Aotearoa New Zealand. Today we are in the middle of emerging alternative narratives of indigenous heritage which repositions an unreflective assumption that heritage is about castles, cathedrals, and old buildings. This change is not without contestation and resistance in the new framing of what is valuable and what heritage means to New Zealanders. The four examples briefly discussed, two each from Auckland and Hawke’s Bay, illustrate this cultural shift. These are Ihumātao, Maungawhau-Mount Eden, Ōtātara Hawke’s Bay and Lake Whatumā.