Race, Health, Cultural Safety, Birthing and Justice
So if you really want to hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself —Gloria Anzaldua. Language maintenance and pluralism mean different things to different groups. Multilingualism is an act of […]
This is a lengthier version of an editorial published in this month’s Kai Tiaki New Zealand Nursing Journal. It is based on an invited address I gave at the 10th Annual Conference of the Women’s Health Section:’Divine Secrets of the Sisterhood’ on April 26th 2012. I recently spoke at the NZNO Women’s health conference about sisterhood. Not that […]
In 2007 a student nurse called Lisa Kenyon wrote to the Kai Tiaki asking questions about nursing. I’ve reprinted her letter here and then my response. It seems relevant at the moment I am a year-one nursing student from Waiariki Institute of Technology, doing my bachelor of nursing at Windermere in Tauranga. I have recently […]
At the weekend it was my parents’ wedding anniversary. They got married in Dar es Salaam and one of the distinguishing features of their wedding was the hockey stick “guard of honour” that their friends created for them outside the church after the service (my Mum played hockey for Tanzania). The family capability and Goan cultural propensity to excel at sport (take […]
In almost thirty years of being a nurse I’ve learned that what one person thinks is helpful can be coercive to another. “Help” is complex, raising questions such as: how has the helper negotiated the relationship? Does the helper understand the problem? Do the people being helped agree with the helper’s framing of the problem? […]
Hot off the press! I’ve just had this chapter on power relations published in S. Shaw, A. Haxell & T. Weblemoe (Eds.), Communication and lifespan development. Melbourne: Oxford University Press Many practitioners see themselves as apolitical and powerless, particularly with regard to their relationships with the structures of medicine and management. However, in reality practitioners […]
The Decolonise Your Minds! Hui on February 5th in Tamaki Makaurau, Aotearoa provided a great opportunity to present my PhD work to awesome folks with similar theoretical and political commitments. Outside a professional or academic context and supported by fabulous vegan food and great korero and creativity, the radical space provided a great opportunity to not have to explain […]
Originally published in Contact: Newsletter for members of the Pharmacy Guild of New Zealand, December 2011-January 2012 (Issue 11), Pages 8-9. New Zealand has earned the right to call itself super-diverse. this term refers to an unprecedented level and kind of complexity that surpasses anything previously experienced in a particular society. This super-diversity leads to […]
Presented at the Prevention, protection and promotion. Second International Asian Health and Wellbeing Conference, November 11,2006. Cite as: DeSouza, R. (2006). Becoming informed health care consumers: Asian migrant mothers in New Zealand. In S. Tse, M.E. Hoque, K. Rasanathan, M. Chatterji, R. Wee, S. Garg, & Y. Ratnasabapathy (Eds.), Prevention, protection and promotion. Proceedings of […]
DeSouza, R. (2004). Working with refugees and migrants. In D. Wepa (Ed.), Cultural safety (pp. 122-133). Auckland: Pearson Education New Zealand. The art of walking upright here Is the art of using both feet. One is for holding on. One is for letting go. (Colquhoun, 1999, p.32) Glenn Colquhoun’s poetry captures the challenge dislocation from […]