Māori health and wellbeing: Voices from the margins

Christine Elers (Ngāti Kauwhata), Massey University

The broad aim of this research is to utilise the culture-centered approach (CCA) to foreground the voices of Whānau Māori, whose lived experiences reflect socio-economic disadvantage and voice erasure from mainstream and Māori discursive spaces. The CCA is an approach to social change communication that emphasises the nuances of listening to communities (Dutta, 2014); centering their knowledge claims, strategies and solutions that are often tied to structural injustices. The CCA method intentionally centers Whānau Māori as the experts of their own realities.

By building infrastructures for listening and co-creating platforms for voice, community participatory communicative spaces emerge often disrupting the hegemony of knowledge production and decision-making by dominant actors for the very Whānau and communities who have been erased from these sites of participation. 

Māori meanings of health and wellbeing Voices from the margins articulates the lived experience of Whānau who regularly navigate various services to comprehend the nature and effect of policies on the daily lives of people, situated against the background of colonial neoliberal health organising. In this way, Whānau participants are positioned as fully capable of co-creating Whānau-led strategies and solutions to unmask and dismantle hegemonic dominance that has stifled social justice transformation.