Aotearoa New Zealand's public health crisis communication approach amidst the COVID-19 pandemic effectively mobilized the nation into swift lockdown, significantly reducing community transmission. This communication approach has been applauded around the world. How did communities situated amongst the "margins of the margins" in Aotearoa New Zealand navigate through the existing structural barriers to health during the pandemic? In this study, we use a culture-centered analysis to foreground the structural context of disenfranchisement amidst the COVID-19 lockdown. Drawing on in-depth interviews with participants in a larger ethnographic project on poverty and health across three communities in Aotearoa New Zealand, we attend to the ways in which health is negotiated amidst the COVID-19 outbreak and lockdown response at the "margins of the margins." The narratives point out that health communication interventions to prevent COVID-19 in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand furthered the marginalization of communities at the margins, and community voices were largely erased from the enactment of interventions. With the extant structures failing to recognize these aspects of everyday struggles of health at the margins, the health and access challenges were further magnified during COVID-19. Our attention to communication situated in relationship to structures builds a register for health communication scholarship in the context of COVID-19 that is committed to disrupting the behaviorally based hegemonic health communication literature and transforming the unequal terrains of health experiences. The trajectories of COVID-19 (C19) as well as the preventive policy responses to it have disproportionately impacted the global margins (Dutta et al., 2020). Across countries, regions, and communities, those at the gendered, raced, and classed margins have borne largely the effects of the pandemic (Patel et al., 2020). Aotearoa New Zealand has been globally recognized for its decisive leadership and the overarching effectiveness of its science-based C19 response, accompanied by clear communication and state-led welfare support (Cousins, 2020; Dutta et al., 2020; PRovoke Media, 2020). How then do inequities in health play out amidst this effective model of C19 response? Traditionally, Māori, Pasifika, and refugee communities have borne the greatest burdens of poor health outcomes in Aotearoa New Zealand (Mahony et al., 2017; McIntosh & Mulholland, 2011; Ministry of Health, 2014). These features of raced/citizenship-based identity intersect with poverty to produce marginalization (Bowleg, 2020). In this essay, we draw on our ethnographic fieldwork embedded in the culture-centered approach (CCA) with Māori, Pasifika, and refugee communities across three sites in Aotearoa New Zealand to examine the interplays of culture, structure, and agency at the margins in constituting the everyday negotiations of health and wellbeing amidst the C19 outbreak (Dutta, 2020). Our emphasis here is on foregrounding the structural context of margina...

Hegemonic Open Science, emergent from the circuits of knowledge production in the Global North and serving the economic interests of platform capitalism, systematically erase the voices of the subaltern margins from the Global South and the Southern margins inhabiting the North. Framed within an overarching emancipatory narrative of creating access for and empowering the margins through data exchanged on the global free market, hegemonic Open Science processes co-opt and erase Southern epistemologies, working to create and reproduce new enclosures of extraction that serve data colonialism-capitalism. In this essay, drawing on our ongoing negotiations of community-led culture-centered advocacy and activist strategies that resist the racist, gendered, and classed structures of neocolonial knowledge production in the metropole in the North, we attend to Southern practices of Openness that radically disrupt the whiteness of hegemonic Open Science. These decolonizing practices foreground data sovereignty, community ownership, and public ownership of knowledge resources as the bases of resistance to the colonial-capitalist interests of hegemonic Open Science.

The culture-centered approach (CCA) foregrounds the organizing role of communities at the "margins of the margins" of the globe as the spaces for identifying the structural challenges to health and well-being and for co-creating community-anchored solutions to these challenges. Pandemics such as COVID-19 render visible the deep-rooted inequalities across and within societies, seeded and catalyzed by over three decades of variegated neoliberal reforms. The trajectories of COVID-19 outbreaks as well as the effects of COVID-19-related policies render visible the inequalities that are written into the neoliberal organizing of political economy. Community participation is scripted into the neoliberal framework as an instrument for depoliticizing community and utilizing it as a channel for disseminating top-down individual behavior change messages. Drawing on the examples of community organizing in Kerala where the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has actively co-created an infrastructure for socialist organizing, and Iwi-led Maori checkpoints in Aotearoa New Zealand, we delineate the features of transformative community organizing. Community organizing in the CCA is political, foregrounding community sovereignty as the basis for resisting neoliberal health structures. Community struggles for communication equality thus point to alternative forms of organizing health and well-being that challenge and seek to dismantle neoliberal governmentality.

In this essay, drawing on our ethnographic work at the “margins of the margins” in Aotearoa New Zealand, we depict the role of communicative pedagogy for radical democracy in sustaining spaces for community participation in pandemic response. Based on accounts offered by community advisory group members and observations of emergent community spaces of co-operation amidst the pandemic, we suggest that the ongoing work of building co-creative pedagogy for “habits of democracy” is vital to community response. The work of learning to learn together the habits of radical democracy in communities is permanent work that prepares communities for crises, simultaneously building anchors for imagining radically transformative futures.

This article theorises the question—what is the role and nature of Indigenous environmental defenders in Aotearoa New Zealand? We explore Māori—the Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand—who act as environmental defenders of their lands and waters despite the perpetual insecurity of their constitutional rights and imbalances in power and resources compared with state and corporate actors. The environmental defence of Aotearoa New Zealand by Māori began with the arrival of European explorers’ intent on overturning Indigenous institutions of environmental management that has sustained their peoples for a thousand years. Stemming from case study analysis of Māori environmental defenders at Ihumātao in Māngere and Ōroua River in Manawatū, we propose whenua (land) resilience theory to explain the concomitance of environmental defence and development from an Indigenous perspective.