The Shaming State with Sara Salman

In this episode I spoke with Dr. Sara Salman, Senior Lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington in Criminology and Scholar in Residence at He Whenua Taurikura. We talked about how social neglect and injustice can negatively affect our social relationships, responses different groups of people had to New Zealand's Covid-19 policies, and how Māori led responses to disaster show us an alternative way help those in need. If you are interested in learning more about what Sara discussed in this interview, see the resources below. 

Fitzmaurice, L., & Bargh, M. (2021). Stepping up: COVID-19 checkpoints and rangatiratanga. Huia Publishers.

Hamilton, K. (2023) Maia Whakatakaia - A working paper on Māori recovery and responses for Cyclone Gabrielle.

Salman, S. (2023) Playing in the Team of Five Million: Conformity and Nonconformity to the New Zealand Covid-19 Pandemic Response. Crit Crim 31, 343–361. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-023-09707-7

Salman, S. (2023). The Shaming State. NYU Press.

Salman, S. (23 Feb 2024). Shaming the poor doesn’t work. It’s also cruel. Newsroom.

Transcript

Unsettling Extremism
The Shaming State with Sara Salman

Sara  

I think it's really important to understand that people aren't starting from the position of being bad or cruel. You know, have you have these sorts of conversations? The conversations about are people good or evil? I would argue that these conversations completely missed the point, right? That actually, human beings are essentially social beings. So it is really the social that feeds our sense of the world and our perception of the world.

Avery Smith  

Kia ora. I'm Dr. Avery Smith, on this episode of unsettling extremism, I'm joined by Dr. Sarah Solman, senior lecturer at Victoria University in criminology, and a scholar in residence at a federal Antarctic quota. We talked about how social neglect and injustice can negatively impact our social relationships, the responses, different groups of people had to the New Zealand government's COVID policies, and how Māori led responses to disaster show us an alternative way to help those in need. I'm sure this episode will leave you with a lot to think about. It's my pleasure to introduce you to Sara. Just tell us a little bit about yourself. What were you like as a kid? Where did you grow up?

Sara  

So I grew up in the Arab world, I was born in the United Arab Emirates. I am an Iraqi and Egyptian background. And I grew up in the United Arab Emirates before relocating to New Zealand in the 1990s. And that was sort of a family decision to keep the family together. Yeah. So I spent my childhood basically split really between these two parts of the world. So I received education there, I’ve received education here.  

Avery Smith  

How old were you when you moved here?

Sara  

I was 15.

Avery Smith  

Did you go to Auckland? Where did you end up?

Sara  

Oh, yes, I grew up in Auckland. Yeah, we moved to the North Shore. And a lot of it had to do with an existing community. So you know, when people migrate to places around the world, it is not really it's not a random process, right? People often think through what places they want to go to, and think about the existing communities there. And at the time, I mean, the Arab community is very small in New Zealand anyway, was certainly smaller in the 90s. And so it was important for us to have that connection. So there was there was a a small but not insignificant Arab community in the north shore of the time,

Avery Smith  

you probably went right into high school, is

Sara  

that right? That's right. Yes. Yeah.

Avery Smith  

What was that transition? Like? It

Sara  

was definitely, honestly, it was, it was challenging. So when you think about being a teenager to begin with, it is quite a hard thing to navigate all the, you know, the changes that you're going through, and you're at this point where you're a child, but also a person who's trying to grow and kind of assert themselves in some ways, and then that completely gets ruptured by a move to this country. And in terms of, you know, moving here, I didn't really have a choice. So this was a decision my parents had made. So my life was sort of upended. And we ended up in New Zealand. And in terms of high school, it was certainly a huge adjustment, not just it actually wasn't so much the language, but it was more around the culture here. The culture on education here is very different. The stuff that you have that I really only saw on TV in terms of the clicks and the kind of the popular kids and the not so popular kids and the culture of bullying, which I know I'm gonna get pushback on this. But there is a culture of bullying in schools here, that was not so apparent where I where I was growing up. So it was definitely a big adjustment. And particularly, being sort of appearing as a, as a person who's different, who sounds different as well, was definitely a challenge. I certainly had very supportive teachers I made, you know, lifelong friends, but it was a it was a difficult transition to try and navigate all those different cultural bits while also arriving here. As a teenager, and the child of immigrants. We are often as children of immigrants, particularly when you're the first generation or the 1.5 generation, often tasked with helping parents navigate the world. And so it was sort of I was put in a position where I quickly had to become all those things at once. Understanding the culture very quickly, but also kind of becoming an adult very quickly. So it was definitely a big, big transformation. And then, you know, towards the end of high school, you know, the events of 911 happened. And so it was like another change coming through. Of you You're experiencing kind of a very acute sort of rash of racialization, this acute racialization of people who look like me or sound like me, which, again, was sort of another moment of rupture, not just for my family, but also my community. Can

Avery Smith  

you talk a little bit more about like, what that was? What that was like, like, post 911? How did that how did that impact you?

Sara  

Well, you know, it's, it's, you know, I'll think about so that bad event is often described as the event that changed the world, right? And we tend to the way we describe it as something that changed the world, we're often you know, rightfully so, you know, we're thinking about the people who were victimized that day, the violence of that day. And sometimes you will get the strategic conversations around it, that that it really did sort of up end, the kind of hegemonic order, and so on and so forth, right there, all these things going on there. But for me, when I think about the lived experiences of, of people, not just people like me, but people in general, I think the impact was this incredible securitisation response that existed, obviously, the level of policy and the political language, but also the incredible racialization that happened socially. So the kind of panic about people who are brown people, or suspected of being Muslim people are Arab, or even look Arab, all of a sudden becoming subject to this incredible social hostility and othering. And even in New Zealand, which is, you know, as a faraway country. It was very visceral, you know, so some of the reactions included members of the Arab community, being followed by New Zealand media, for instance, that sort of there was this weird suspicion around being Arab or having loose connections to the Arab world, our loyalty was questioned. Young men were suspected of having these kinds of sympathies. And I was often asked to explain the attacks to explain the motivations of this terrorist group or that terrorist group

Avery Smith  

To who? People in school like your classmates?

Sara  

Yeah, so so they're not my friends. But there were classmates who would ask about these things about, you know, whether people from the Middle East hate Western people for their freedom whether the teaching of Islam encourage violence against civilians, or so I almost became the sort of, I almost appear to them as like an authority figure or representative figure that had to explain things like that. And then, of course, there was the kind of the dichotomy and the responses. So I remember in school, you know, there was this official response of sympathy to what had happened, right? school assemblies had like moment of silence for that. For the 911 events, of course, we know that the following year, and then the following year, two countries got obliterated had nothing to do with 911. And there was no moments of silence, there was no conversation about the harm that was done to civilian populations in these countries. And so you start to become very, very aware very quickly, that there is like a dichotomy of deservingness around victimhood, like some people, their death deserves our mourning, and others, we just wouldn't be paying attention or we naturalize it, we normalize it well, these are these areas are failed states anyway, the violence is intrinsic to these areas and so on, rather than understanding the context of the violence.

Avery Smith  

Yes, 100%. No, I hear you, you know, like living through that. And like being a person who is like, impacted by that. I think that it really does put it in stark contrast, right? What, what side of that othering you're on? So my next question was, how did you kind of get into criminology? How did that become your place? How did that become your thing?

Sara  

Well, it's I mean, I would reflecting on I think that relates to my own experiences in the world as well. So I took sociology classes at the University of Auckland, and I had phenomenal professors just phenomenal. Who discussed in the class questions like othering and dehumanization, and the social construction of violence. You know, reading Edward Saeed in the classroom, in the university, for me opened the possibility of studying these questions that I've grappled with. My parents had hoped that I would get into something like medical school or tend to stray that didn't quite pan out for them. But that really wasn't for me that didn't feel like it was my calling. I mean, my parents are supportive now, and I love them very much. But I think at the time, there were certain questions about my academic choices, and why was I choosing this field and that field? So I got into sociology, and I was really very much interested in questions of violence. So that's what I did my Master's on. And when I did my PhD, I was looking at state neglect as a form of violence. And so that got me into criminology. particularly critical criminology, which is really interested in understanding this notion of social harm. How is that perpetrated questions of power around who can perpetrate it? Who's victimized by it? And so on. So that's sort of what really got me into into this field of study.

Avery Smith  

Can you tell us a little bit more about your, your area of study? Sure. Yeah. So

Sara  

I, so I come from what would be described as critical criminology. And so that's a field that's interested, you know, in the way, criminalization or the construction of deviancy happens. So how is it that some people are all of a sudden seen as a social problem, it can also very much look at things that we would consider that we that they would have a wide consensus over, as things will be considered for crimes, right, like violence against women, or murder or things like that. Absolutely. There's also another space there around state crime and state neglect of people as a form of violence as a form of violence, and particularly, as a form of systemic social harm. So harm that impacts large communities and large groups of people. That is what I'm really interested in. So I'm really interested in looking at harm perpetrated by those in power. So that's why I look at something like state neglect, which for me, I define as the state retreating from the duty of care that is supposed to be enshrined in what we would call like a social welfare regime, enshrined in the language of the law, like things like the regulate the regulatory functions of the state, you know, the regulations that we take for granted, like, you know, roads, or hospitals, or education or quality of consumer goods, things like that, but also welfare, that that includes things like poor relief programs, or post disaster relief, understanding how the state by diminishing or undermining these functions, retreats from the duty of care it has to citizens, and how that affects citizens, how that produces precarity, or insecurity or material insecurity that could then translate into emotional insecurity, which then translates into social hostility, and so on. Oh,

Avery Smith  

Fascinating. That's really great leads exactly into what you were talking about, right? Because in your book, you argue that the US is a shaming state. And you talked a little bit about what you what you meant about that. But you know, would you categorize New Zealand, also in that same kind of shaming state that you were just talking? 

Sara  

I would, I would I think that so the shaming state really comes out of empirical study in the United States. So there was a study I did in the United States looking at particular cases of a moment of disaster and how these communities were essentially abandoned by the government. There were reasons why I chose those two groups. I wanted to understand what welfare looks like for groups of people who don't automatically inhabit the spaces of pathology in the way we imagined pathology, right. So when we, and this is all of us, we all have these sort of biases that exist socially against people who are poor, unemployed or underemployed. The pervasive narratives around people who live in poverty, for example, is that somehow they're responsible for their poverty, they're not working hard enough. They're not looking for jobs hard enough. You know, they have children out of wedlock, all sorts of stereotypes and misconceptions that that is, you know, that are pervasive socially. I wanted to take that and say, Okay, well, if we believe that, you know, in the state makes this argument to the government makes this argument to that help will come to those who are trying, right, so they got to do their bit, pull themselves by the bootstraps, and we will help and that's one of the discourse that politicians take. That is sort of the discourse that frames policy programs. So I took that and decided to see to what extent that actually exists. So I accepted the argument for you know, for the sake of what I was trying to find out, okay. The government is saying we're only going to help those who help themselves. If you're not working, don't expect anything. Well, what about people who are doing all the right things? What happens when they need help? So I looked at resettled Iraqi refugees who arrived into the United States on the Special Immigrant Visa after assisting the American military forces and allied forces. So these were people who risked everything when they were in Iraq and had to come to the United States because their lives were under enormous acute an imminent danger. And the second case study was community in New York that was affected by Hurricane Sandy. And Hurricane Sandy was a big storm that hit New York very similar to cyclone Gabriel. It swallowed about 17% of New York's landmass. It was a huge devastating storm. And I looked at a community that was made up of white lower and middle-class, lower middle-class and middle-class families, and many of whom had connections to New York City. They worked in civil service City jobs, police officers, firefighters, first responders, some had connections to 911. Some have active military personnel, people very much embedded in in New York City and people who would be considered, quote unquote, deserving right people who are the coveted class of people that are often pander to politically right, what happens when their homes are stormed. And what I found was that there were obviously distinctions between each case study. So the minute Iraqi refugees land in the United States, they become a people who are burdened, so they lose that right bearing status. And the reason for that is our refugee assistance programs in the United States resemble poor relief programs. So poor relief programs, including things like cash assistance, or food stamps, refugees receive what is called refugee cash assistance, refugee food stamps. So it's already you can see the parallels. So in a way, it makes sense that they immediately lose that status. The basis for shaming refugees was that, basically, they were told that they were culturally different, they can't assimilate, or they can become American, because they don't understand the virtue of work where the value of work, they want to be dependent, and all sorts of pathologizing narratives around them. And they were also told, which I thought was really interesting, right, was that they were told very clearly, help comes to those who help themselves. And so the basis for exclusion from social welfare was that these people are not working. The second case study, these are people who are working well, what happens, then, the framing of the relief programs, in the case of people affected by Hurricane Sandy was, absolutely we must help you, these people need help. The programs have to be quick and simple and efficient. We're cutting through the bureaucratic red tape, or declaring a state of emergency that's going to release the funds. It took years for people to access those funds. And so even though ideologically, they were presented as deserving materially, it was the same kind of thing. And the reason why that had happened in the case of New York was that the programs were presented a simple, but actually they were also full of conditionality. So they were full of administrative burdens, because the the programs were basically presented as public money that needs to be protected from fraud. So implicitly, that sort of suggests that asking for help in the aftermath of a disaster, potentially could be fraudulent. And so you have, you have a, you have a situation where nobody really deserves any kind of help. And the assumption is that people tend toward fraud. And so therefore, we must be very careful with dispensing public money, whether somebody works or doesn't work, it's almost irrelevant. And so that's, that's the, basically, the conclusion I was trying to make in that book is that we need to put aside the ideological framing of deservingness. Because ultimately, what we are seeing is that, basically, the state is playing us. They are well we're seeing is discourses that legitimize social exclusion, and they create narratives of us on them. And that's an important realization to have.

Avery Smith  

Yeah, we're all of them when we need help, when we need help. We're never us,

Sara  

We're all them. Absolutely. We are never asked when we need help. And I understand that when you're trying to make the comparison to the New Zealand context, we do have to come to terms with clear distinctions between the United States and New Zealand, the United States has, you know, a slightly different version of neoliberalism where there is much more of emphasis on individual responsibility trumping all other forms of responsibility. The New Zealand context is slightly different, there's still some expectation around the role of the state and providing a duty of care, we saw that very clearly, for instance, in the COVID-19 response, but that does not negate the issue at hand, which is that New Zealand is still very much a neoliberal country. And by this I mean it is, it is a country where social care, social welfare provided by the government is seen as quite suspicious, and has been eroded and diminished over the years. And we can see that very clearly, you know, in the in the discussions we have, whether it's policy discussions or media investigative pieces around the state of health care, in this country, for instance, the state of education in this country, funding for this or that program, coming under scrutiny. So we definitely live in a in a country where the kind of social welfare that people have taken for granted for a not insignificant number of years in the 20th century is really unraveling right now. And we're not really seeing a whole lot of care right now. Of course, it does look different in the New Zealand context. But for example, if you look at something Think like the discussions around the job seeker benefit in New Zealand, it's very much a punitive discussion that suspects people who are underemployed or unemployed for refusing to find work for expecting something for nothing for not doing their bit socially, kind of and presenting the program itself, almost as a punishing program that has high conditions. So that will be described as conditionality of welfare in the New Zealand context, the American parallel in terms of terminology would be administrative burdens. So programs of poor relief tend to have conditionality, right? certain, certain requirements that have to be consistently met. And the purpose of these requirements, these bureaucratic hurdles, is ultimately to deter people from asking for help for help in the first place, by making the process itself quite humiliating, and inadequate as well, which means that the state is quite open about shaming people for expressing need in this society.

Avery Smith  

In your introduction, you were telling us a little bit about yourself, and you were talking about those who are deserving, and then those that are undeserving? And do you see that sort of play out with this as well, in the way that the state, you know, parcel out care to people?.

Sara  

Absolutely I mean, there's definitely a dichotomy of deservingness. And the dichotomy does map onto existing, existing distinctions that we have in our society on the basis of race or ethnic identity on the basis of class on the basis of gender. We have these distinctions already, right, we have relations of inequality. And so the notion of deserving this and undeserving this map onto those existing social distinctions or social differentiations. I think the COVID-19 response presents a case study of that as well. For example, if you think about the messages of kindness, they were quite, I would say, quite ubiquitous, really, right. Like everyday with the press briefings, conversations around, you know, being kind to each other and supporting each other. The initial measures of things like lockdown, and the alert levels were couched in terms of taking care of people if they get sick. And yet, we know that when we had outbreaks, we know that their reaction to them was quite different depending on who got sick. So the way we talk, for instance, there were a couple of high profile outbreaks that happened in 2020 and 2021. That happened in South Auckland, and affected Pacifica communities there. And the the social reaction was quite hostile. So instead of supporting people who got sick, people got shamed for falling ill even though they got sick at their places of employment. So these are people who are doing all the right things. You know, these were people who couldn't take time off work, couldn't zoom into work had to show up to work, they show up to work, they get sick, and they get blamed for it. And so here you can see that the notion of deserving kindness or respect or what have you, it's not something that is given to everybody in this country, and those who, for whom that becomes those who are seen as undeserving, you can totally map it onto the what we call the race class, gender articulation, right? So where do they fall in social structure in terms of their ethnic or racial identity, their class status, their gender, or even their sexuality.

Avery Smith  

And you know, the interesting thing that I noticed, when I was, you know, looking at your book is that you mentioned how both of the groups you looked at, when they were shamed by the state by the US how they turn their anguish into apathy towards socially vulnerable others. And I thought that was really important to highlight, can you talk more about that?

Sara  

that is, so that is one of the more devastating impacts of state neglect or government neglect. So if you think about, if you want to understand the kind of atomization that we're experiencing, socially, the kind of lack of empathy that people seem to be having for each other socially. I argue that that comes from a place where material insecurity is being institutionalized. So what happens when people are experiencing unmet material needs and made to feel really bad for even needing them is that people start to feel ashamed of who they are. But shame is a very sort of, shame is a very complicated emotion, right? The shame that is felt. I was surprised by it, because I thought when I was talking to these two cases, the families in each case, they knew what that what they were asking for was righteous. They weren't lying. They weren't trying to game anybody. They really needed help. But somehow, they couldn't help us shake the feeling that they fail that something somehow was a failure that they even needed help in the first place. So there was a lot of expressions of like regret, or what if I'd done things differently, and so on and revisiting the scenarios in their head. So there was an attempt at kind of resisting the shame. But instead of uncovering it, so instead of saying, you know, or identifying the discourses that are employed by government officials are the social discourses as being not only wrong, but also really unjust. What ended up happening was that the premise of the shame, the idea that if you ask for help, it's a moral failure was taken and then put onto other communities. So it became people rationalize their experiences and say, Well, I know why the government is not dispensing of cash assistance right now. Because there are all these other people who use cash assistance to buy drugs and alcohol. And because of them, our life is sort of ruined. And similarly, in New York, there is a sense that, you know, federal city state responses basically cuddled people who live in government, housing, or social housing, the projects, and that they must be living in some kind of luxury while we are waiting for help. Of course, it's not true. Of course, it's not true. But that was a very strong belief. And so what we were what I was seeing was not, the experience of humiliation was transformed into rage at social others who are vulnerable. So it's a very socially destructive reaction, because rather than seeing the injustice and building solidarities, what was happening was that groups were further atomizing and sort of dissolving almost the community connections,

Avery Smith  

yeah, that the shame sort of metastasized into this anger, rage, hatred at whoever they would perceive as the, the culprit or the other.

Sara  

That's right. That's right. 

Avery Smith  

Of course, I know that this was based on what you noticed in the States. But I'm just curious if you have seen any sort of parallels around how that happened in the US, and maybe around some of the things that have happened here in Aotearoa.

Sara  

Yeah, you can definitely see, you can definitely see the discourses of othering, in New Zealand as well. And you can definitely see a social hostility in New Zealand as well. I think one example would be, for example, to look at some of the reactions or the responses to the COVID-19 response, right, particularly if you think about things like the anti-mandate sort of protests, right, of course, that was an assemblage of different aggrieved parties, and someone who we know to be very dangerous and have connections to very harmful sort of political positions. But it is also true that some of the people who participated in these protests, were expressing a kind of a general discontent about government neglect over the years. Right. So this is a government that was not necessarily interested in health care in rural areas, for instance, right. Some of these people came from areas in Auckland, where the hospitals are, were in disarray. And so why all of a sudden, now there's a mass campaign to vaccinate. So you have groups of people who have low trust in the government, that then is, that is quite persistent because of material government neglect over the years. And so when you see a public health response that's supposed to protect everybody, they're suspicious of it. And this suspicion, took the form of very, very destructive, not only anti-mandate, protests on parliament, but also harassment of other people conspiratorial beliefs about who is getting the vaccine and who isn't. And so you can see, you can see here in real-time, what happens to experience to those who experience neglect and how they start to make sense of that. And how that sort of then maps on to destructive social reactions are where you see these strange assemblages of people congregating, you know, on Parliament ground, you can also see it in terms of even the hostility to positive communities who call COVID and 2020, and 2021, where you can see how the insecurity around the pandemic that lagged on for people, then, the anxiety that people felt from the pandemic is reconfigured into hostility on to people who are accused of causing it right. And what's important to understand here is that in all of the examples I'm giving, I think it's really important to understand that people aren't starting from the position of being bad or cruel, you know, how you have these sort of conversations, the conversations about are our people good or evil? Yeah. I would argue that these conversations completely missed the point right, that actually, human beings are essentially social beings. So it is really the social that feeds our sense of the world and our perception of the world. And so people who become cruel, it's not. It's not that people all of a sudden realize that they that they don't like Pacific communities. That's not how it works. The discourse that marginalizes and others and excludes communities such as the Pacific community already exists socially. And it just gets tied into something like COVID-19. Much like the discourse, post 911, there was already plenty of racist representations of Arab people out there already stereotypes about what it means to be Arab, and so on. And so something like 911 only brings that to light. It's not that it wasn't there. And it's not that people sort of, it's not it doesn't emanate from people, it exists socially. The beautiful thing about all of this, of course, is that none of that is inevitable. So if you think about the COVID-19 response, we did have some very positive responses to government neglect, including responses in modern communities that wanted to protect the communities from you know, people from big cities wanting to spend the summer locked down months in their, in their backyard. And, and, you know, and potentially bringing COVID-19 with them. So communities there and these in these, in these areas, basically decided, well, we're going to set up checkpoints, and you know, people like Maria   Barge talked about that as well. Luke Fitzmorris, talks about as well in their work on the COVID-19 checkpoints. And so here you see a community response that wanted to make sure that the community is safe as government help lagged. So the government wasn't always prepared wasn't always well resourced. For instance, to create these checkpoints, people weren't going to wait, they were going to make sure that the elderly and the vulnerable in their communities are protected. So you see a positive response to something like state neglect there. There was obviously also the disinformation stuff that were floating around, again, Māori communities, made sure to bring in Māori health expertise, not Māori health expertise do to, to kind of counter the flow of DIS and misinformation in their communities. So it is not inevitable that neglect is going to produce destruction. 

Avery Smith  

I want you to talk more about the occupation. And sort of what you what you thought, in your paper, you were talking about the different sorts of people that you saw, all there together and sort of how that was revealed a bit like how alienated some New Zealanders had felt. And so I wondered if you could give us a bit more context.

Sara  

So if you look at the protests, on parliament, but even from late 2021, we're seeing quite a bit of discontent right? Now, the broader context for that is that if you recall, it feels like it was many years ago, but we'd had an outbreak in 2021 that came out of Auckland that was essentially uncontainable. It was a Delta variant. Lockdown didn't seem to work lagged on I think we call that the 100 day lockdown, where Auckland was basically separated from the rest of the country for about 100 days. So it was really quite a taxing experience not just for Auckland, but for New Zealanders who were had relations with Auckland. You know, it really it affected all of us in some ways. And I understand obviously that that was regional. I know that people in South Auckland and sorry, not South Auckland, people in the South Island didn't feel the same sort of Brunt and things. They felt like they were living in a different country. I understand all of that. But around the Auckland area, there was definitely a lot of disaffection around the lockdown. The other thing was that each time we had these lockdowns, there are disruptions to businesses and everyday life and so on. And for some people that was more taxing because if because not everybody's income was guaranteed in the same way not everybody's job was guaranteed in the same way as everybody else. So if you held a comfortable middle-class job, if you worked on the government, if you worked in the university, perhaps you could just zoom into work and things are fine, right? That is not the case for everybody else. So there were these sort of differences in terms of our susceptibility or vulnerability, not only to COVID-19 but also the ramifications of the necessary public health measures like lockdowns, so you could see the kind of discontent building as well. So we went from wide sweeping support into you know, slightly some people are feeling a bit discontent and so on. I must say, though, that overall, New Zealand was very much conformist with the COVID-19 response. We really, we did our bit. I think 90% of the population got their vaccines. So we are definitely we definitely conformed right there was a small number of people who are disaffected and they were pretty noisy and so that's why they there was a lot of attention on them. And of course, I'm not discounting the destruction of the party. and ground. So that small group of people, again, I would say was an assemblage. So there were different sort of contingencies. There are different groups there that were interested in expressing a kind of a discontent and arranged you know, some people believe that the vaccine would infringe on liberties. Some people believed that the vaccine was there to to be a mess, sterilizing event, right. So you had you had a wide range of people there. Some people carried very specific signs alluding to white nationalism and things like that, and others were carrying. Tino Rangatiratanga flags, right? So there was this different things going on the one thing that really stood out for people, to me when I was looking at the coverage of the protests, the one thing that seemed to puzzle New Zealanders was seeing references to Trump in the protests, right, the flags, the very, very localized signs that really come from very specific local contexts in the United States, including Let's go, Brandon. And so there was this idea, which is, it's a very, it's almost like an instant knee jerk reaction to the protests. This is not us, right. One of the one of the critiques around the protests was that it was simply an import from you know, the Ottawa protests using language of Trump. Clearly, this is really not something that New Zealanders could come up with on their own. And in some ways, it's really fascinating to see the references from other cultures. But these references from other cultures like the Ottawa protests, and the and the Trump signs and so on, should not be understood as simple imports with no context. Rather, we should think of these in the broader context of what it means to express discontent in New Zealand. And actually, I argued at that point in time, precisely because New Zealand up to that point, all of us really work when all of us, but most of us were conforming, for the most part, most of us did comply with the lockdown measures, most of us didn't end up getting the vaccine and so on, there was a sort of a mood in New Zealand, where you couldn't express discontent, that any kind of critique of the government response basically produced sort of a public backlash, that somehow critique of the government meant that, you know, people weren't taking COVID, seriously, people were being anti science, so people don't care about the elderly, in their lives dying, and so on. So there wasn't a whole lot of room to express discontent. And so what that means is that that language of opposition had to be borrowed from elsewhere, right, it appeared elsewhere, and it was presented as a way to articulate disagreement. That doesn't mean that it wasn't disruptive, it doesn't mean that it wasn't harmful. But it simply means that we perhaps in some ways, we really need to work better at creating spaces where people can express a concern or a disagreement without having to borrow from these very destructive symbols elsewhere. Well, you know, the good news is that it's already happening. So I think, you know, one of the one of the things to note is that, as we are seeing cruelty in these kinds of policies, as we're seeing shaming discourses, negative media representations, that is not all there is we are actually seeing very robust communitarian responses, mutual aid responses, that are allowing us to really imagine a world where we can all thrive together. So that is all already happening, what I would say for people who may not know about it, one thing that I found that was that seems to counter this notion of shame that counters the way people sort of feel inadequate, when they need help, is to present help as part of being human right, that actually all human beings need each other, we have a shared condition of vulnerability. And because we have a shared condition of vulnerability, we have a duty of care for each other. And that duty of care is not just about me and my family and my friends, it extends to other people in the country who I may never meet in person. So we all have a duty of care to each other. Even if we don't know each other. We have the shared fate of being all in New Zealand. If you think of yourself as a citizen of the world, it's everybody else in the world. But we have a duty of care. And the way that has articulated itself in pro social and very good ways, is for example, if you look at my responses post cyclone Gabriel, right, so post cyclone Gabriel, people were very concerned about things like looting and so on, and there were these communities that were like turning into basically fortified spaces because we're very afraid of loot Right. That's a very, that's a very typical reaction in these kinds of moments, right. But you know what else was going on there, too, was that you had mud eyes, opening up their doors to help people shelter people shield people, even for six months after the storm as government assistance lacked. So here you see a response that not only counters the kind of state of neglect, but also counters the deep insecurity that could happen, and the aftermath of a disaster that could metastasize into something negative, but actually countering it in a way that produces abundance, right? Don't worry, you have a space here, and you can stay here, there's plenty for everyone. And that kind of language or that kind of approach, that kind of care, shifts people's perception of themselves and others. For example, during COVID-19, there was very these very robust community responses to food insecurity in places like South Oakland, right, where you had food banks, but the idea was with the food banks is we'll take what you need, take what you need, take what you want. So rather than prescribing it, so for example, if you think about the more problematic, you know, charity responses, where it's very top down, and it's presented as if it's like, it is presented as a thing, that the person receiving help has no autonomy over, that can be quite humiliating and degrading. But with the foodbanks did were basically presented as you can take care of yourself. We're all down at the moment, we all need help at the moment, take what you need, and you can decide what you need and what you don't need. And so giving people autonomy, even while they're experiencing precarity, or insecurity is also a way to empower people and counter that experience of shame as well. So there are different ways of of actually responding to a state that shaming and neglectful, that don't, that are not destructive, that are not optimizing, that are not hostile. What

Avery Smith  

can we all do as a society? To sort of counter what we've been talking about here today?

Sara  

Well, you know, the good news is that it's already happening. So I think, you know, one of the things  note is that, as we are seeing cruelty in these kinds of policies, as we're seeing shaming discourses, negative media representations, that is not all there is we are actually seeing very robust communitarian responses, mutual aid responses, that are allowing us to really imagine a world where we can all thrive together. So that is all already happening, what I would say for people who may not know about it, one thing that I found that was that seems to counter this notion of shame counters, the way people sort of feel inadequate, when they need help, is to present help as part of being human right, that actually all human beings need each other, we have a shared condition of vulnerability. And because we have a shared condition of vulnerability, we have a duty of care for each other. And that duty of care is not just about me and my family and my friends, it extends to other people in the country, who I may never meet in person. So we all have a duty of care to each other. Even if we don't know each other, we have the shared fate of being all in New Zealand, if you think of yourself as a citizen of the world, it's everybody else in the world. But we have a duty of care. And the way that has articulated itself in pro social and very good ways, is for example, if you look at my responses post cyclone Gabriel, right, so post cyclone, Gabriel, people were very concerned about things like looting, and so on. And there were these communities that were like turning into basically fortified spaces because we're very afraid of looters, right. That's a very, that's a very typical reaction in these kinds of moments, right. But you know, what else was going on there, too, was that you had mud eyes, opening up their doors, to help people shelter people shield people, even for six months after the storm as government assistance lacked. So here you see a response that not only counters the kind of state of neglect, but also counters the deep insecurity that could happen, and the aftermath of a disaster that could metastasize into something negative, but actually countering it in a way that produces abundance, right? Don't worry, you have a space here, and you can stay here. There's plenty for everyone. And that kind of language or that kind of approach, that kind of care, shifts people's perception of themselves and others. For example, during COVID-19, there was very these very robust community responses to food insecurity in places like South Auckland, right where you had food banks, but the idea was with the food banks is we'll take what you need, take what you need, take what you want. So rather than prescribing it, so for example, if you think about the more problematic, you know, charity responses, where it's very top down, and it's presented as if it's like, it is presented as a thing that the person receiving help has no autonomy over For that can be quite humiliating and degrading. But with the foodbanks did were basically presented as you can take care of yourself. We're all down at the moment, we all need help at the moment. Take what you need, and you can decide what you need and what you don't need. And so giving people autonomy, even while they're experiencing precarity or insecurity is also a way to empower people and counter that experience of shame as well. So there are different ways of of actually responding to a state that shaming and neglectful, that don't that are not destructive, that are not atomizing that are not hostile. 

Avery Smith  

Thank you so much for coming today and talking with us.

Sara  

Thank you. Thank you for having me, it's been really great.

Avery Smith  

And thanks to you for listening to this episode of unsettling extremism. We certainly covered a lot of ground in this conversation. If you believe, as Sarah discussed, that we all deserve a world where we can thrive together, subscribe to this podcast and share it with your community. If you want to know more about Sara’s research, go to our website, hwt.ac.nz, and look for the episode show notes.