In imagining how their lives might turn out, 100 young New Zealanders aged between 16 and 18 years wrote descriptions of their future lifecourse. Their descriptions of themselves at the nominal age of 80 years form the basis of the research reported in this paper. For these young people, ageing and old age are understood as accomplishments in the context of an imagined lifecourse. They see personal ageing as shaped by a common temporal ordering of life events that ensures material security, financial success, and an enduring intimate relationship. In imagining themselves aged 80 years, three key themes that constitute a discourse of ' accomplished ageing ' were identified : the experience of old age would be contingent on achievements throughout the lifecourse ; old age would be a time for harvest ; and while people may look old they can continue to 'be ' young. Although their images of bodily appearance included some negative stereotypes of old age, appearance and bodily function were understood as amenable to life-long self-management. The young people imagined themselves as life-long active agents, and framed a positive image and homogeneous social identity for older people. The ' accomplished ageing ' discourse has implications for how ageing is understood by young people. In particular, the social identity that accomplished ageing implies may shape how they relate to those who do not accomplish ageing in the imagined optimistic and homogeneous way.KEY WORDS -imagined futures, young people, lifecourse, accomplished ageing.
The February 2011 Canterbury earthquake was a dramatic reminder of the need for schools to have emergency management plans in place. A number of other disaster and hazard events have historically caused New Zealand schools to close temporarily, and often within a short time frame. At such times principals must act decisively and communicate clearly with their communities in complex and difficult circumstances, carrying risk for student well-being. Here we present two hazard-specific New Zealand case studies, pandemic (H1N1) and adverse weather (snowstorm) − both precipitating instances of temporary school closure. Lessons taken from the case studies offer an opportunity for management staff to reflect on how to best plan for and manage environmental hazards precipitating temporary school closure in order to mitigate immediate and long-term risk to pupils and the wider school community.
This article analyzes how 100 young New Zealanders (aged 16 to 18 years) imagined their futures, and particularly their future family life. In their written accounts imagining themselves aged 25 to 40 years, the participants drew upon dominant parenting norms in which contemporary gender beliefs positioning men and women as separate and discrete categories of people were implicit. Parenting was typically positioned as concrete and compulsory by young women and as abstract and complementary by young men. Conversely, paid work as abstract, contingent and amenable to interruption was imagined by young women; and as continuous and compulsory by young men. Given these findings we argue young New Zealanders ‘do gender’ in the social relational contexts of future family life and paid work. These findings are situated by the historical antecedents of New Zealand’s current modernized male-breadwinner family ideal, and recent ‘family-friendly’ policies designed to encourage mothers into paid work.
PurposeNatural disaster stories narrate unsettling natural events and proffer scripts for social action in the face of unforeseen and overwhelming circumstances. The purpose of this study is to investigate stories of natural disasters recounted for New Zealand school children in the School Journal during its first 100 years of publication.Design/methodology/approachContent analysis is used to categorise the disaster event and to identify two distinct periods of disaster stories – imperial and national. Textual analysis of indicative stories from each period centres on the construction of social scripts for child readers.FindingsIn the imperial period tales of individual heroism and self‐sacrifice predominate, while the national period is characterised by stories of ordinary families, community solidarity and survival. Through this investigation of natural disaster stories for children, the paper identifies the shifting models of heroic identity offered to New Zealand children through educational texts.Originality/valueThis study adds to the existing literature on the School Journal and to the broader study of the history of imperialist and nationalist education in New Zealand. In these times of increased disaster awareness it also draws attention to the significance of disaster narratives in offering social scripts for children to draw on in the event of an actual disaster experience.
<p>As in other late modern societies with a history of liberal welfarism, 'lone mothers' in New Zealand occupy contested subject positions. On the one hand, lone parenting is understood as the outcome of broader changes in family life and gender relations, and in particular, the emergence of new forms of intimacy as people seek relationships to sustain individual identity projects. On the other hand, in the context of neo-liberal welfare discourses, lone mothers are constructed as a problematic Other, categorically different to 'ordinary' women, mothers and citizens. In New Zealand, welfare reform discourses have constructed women who parent alone as 'particular types of people', and subjected lone mothers to welfare reforms that have had real material effects in their everyday lives. The construction of lone mothers as Other is not only a product of neo-liberal welfare reform discourses. Rather, the ways in which women who parent alone are 'made up' as particular types of people is historically specific. This thesis situates current discourses around lone mothering in New Zealand in the context of a hierarchy of maternal legitimacy that has produced historically specific subjects through a number of traditional, modern and late modern subjectification discourses. Discourses have effects, both materially and in terms of the subjectivity and experience of the people 'made up'. This thesis offers an analysis of the narratives of twenty-one lone mothers in the context of New Zealand welfare reform. In particular, the ways in which women who parent alone make sense of becoming lone mothers, of being 'different' in negotiating the social identity of mother, and of the materiality of the experience of parenting alone are examined. The thesis argues that when narrating experience, women who parent alone enact particular narratives in the form of validation stories. Validation stories are drawn from an amalgam of discourses that both construct lone mothers as particular types of people and shape the material conditions of lone mothers' lives. In enacting validation stories, women who parent alone negotiate these discourses, producing narratives to make sense of their experience and position themselves as ordinary women, mothers and citizens. In this sense, validation stories are narratives that ameliorate the oppressive effects of welfare reform discourses that relentlessly shape lone mothers' lives. The thesis concludes that although validation stories make the lives of lone mothers more 'liveable', sociological theorising around changes in family life must critique claims of individualization as a benign tendency of late modernity, and attend empirically to the ways in which persistent gendered inequalities in family life are both discursively legitimated and reproduced, and continue, for example, to discriminate against lone mothers.</p>
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