The combined effects of geography, economics, the dental care system and the professional culture of the day, in the context of contemporary (flawed) understandings of oral disease, appear to have been the key drivers. These were supported (in turn) by a widespread acceptance by the profession and society alike of the extraction/denture philosophy in dealing with oral disease.
In New Zealand, as in other industrialised nations, rates of work-related gradual onset injuries increased during the 1980s and 1990s. The perspectives and experiences of workers suffering what became known as occupational overuse injuries in New Zealand offer insights into local lived political economies. Here, we explore the dominant metaphor, 'battling', in participants' narratives. On the face of it, battles were fought over diagnoses, over occupational health and safety in the workplace, and over entitlements to therapy and income compensation. However, participants were also battling to maintain their identities as hard workers, while resisting and challenging normalising technologies of self and morally charged negative identities offered them by employers, state-funded accident and injury insurance agencies, and the medical profession. Inherent in their narratives is a critique of the neo-liberal capitalist political economy that allows workers' bodies to be exploited (and sacrificed) for employers' profits.
In this article we recount some of the memories, hopes and strategies of 22 older migrants who are ageing in their adopted country of Aotearoa New Zealand. Having arrived as young adults in the 20 years after World War II, most of the immigrants have lived on ' foreign ' soil for twice as long as their brief sojourns of childhood and early adulthood in their country of origin. Arriving from a variety of backgrounds in 12 different countries, they can all be considered ' white ' immigrants in relation to New Zealand's indigenous Māori population and other non-European immigrant groups such as those from Pacific Island Nations or Asia. Their lives encompass the experience of globalisation and transnationalism in communication technologies and inter-country migration. As they recount the meaning of living through these changes, these older folk discuss the delicacies of assimilation in post-World War II New Zealand and the interplay between the daily life of New Zealand as ' home ' and the homeland as Heimat. Their stories argue against the assumption that decades of residence, particularly for white immigrants in a white-majority nation, imply an 'assimilation ' of cultural identity. Instead, the stories evoke recognition of the negotiation of gain and loss which continues as they, and their contexts, change over time.
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