Belinda Borell

Reading News about Māori: Responses from non-Māori media audiences

The media has the potential to undermine wellbeing and opportunities for Treaty-based social justice in its representation of Māori, relationships between Māori and non-Māori, and in its promotion of particular understandings of the Treaty of Waitangi. This paper presents research exploring the meaning-making of Pākehā and tauiwi (immigrant) focus group participants in relation to media representations of Māori and the Treaty of Waitangi. We also discuss the impact of recurrent media portrayals of Māori and the Treaty on health and well being as understood by the focus groups.

Nursing in media-saturated societies: implications for cultural safety in nursing practice in Aotearoa New Zealand:

This educational piece seeks to apprise nurses and other health professionals of mass media news practices that distort social and health policy development. It focuses on two media discourses evident in White settler societies, primarily Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, drawing out implications of these media practices for those committed to social justice and health equity. The first discourse masks the dominant culture, ensuring it is not readily recognised as a culture, naturalising the dominant values, practices and institutions, and rendering their cultural foundations invisible. The second discourse represents indigenous peoples and minority ethnic groups as ‘raced’ – portrayed in ways that marginalise their culture and disparage them as peoples. Grounded in media research from different societies, the paper focuses on the implications for New Zealand nurses and their ability to practise in a culturally safe manner as an exemplary case. It is imperative that these findings are elaborated for New Zealand and that nurses and other health professionals extend the work in relation to practice in their own society.

Conceptualising historical privilege: the flip side of historical trauma, a brief examination

Historical trauma is an important and growing area of research that provides crucial insights into the antecedents of current-day inequities in health and social wellbeing experienced by Indigenous people in colonial settler societies. What is not so readily examined is the flip side of historical trauma experienced by settlers and their descendants, what might be termed “historical privilege”. These historic acts of privilege for settlers, particularly those emigrating from Britain, provide the antecedents for the current-day realities for their descendants and the structural, institutional and interpersonal levels of advantage that are also a key feature of inequities between Indigenous and settler. This article theorises an explicit link between historical trauma and historical privilege and explores how the latter may be examined with particular reference to Aotearoa New Zealand. Three core elements of historical trauma are posited as a useful framework to apply to historical privilege.