Explorations of Health in Aotearoa New Zealand’s Low-income Suburbia

Abstract

ABSTRACT Underpinned by the notion that community voices should be central to the development of localized communication infrastructures for health and well-being, this study applied Dutta’s culture-centered approach to examine the meanings of health and the navigation of being healthy among 118 people residing in low-income suburban areas in Aotearoa New Zealand. The culture-centered approach is based on dialog between researchers and community members, and it centralizes local contexts by building theories from within the culture and co-creating dialogic spaces of listening, formed at the intersection of structure, culture, and agency. In this study, participants constructed health in relation to food, housing, and health care, underpinned by financial inaccessibility and a deep-rooted cultural conflict between the collectivist norms practiced by the community and the neoliberal individualized structure. The study illuminates how the pathologization of culture by structure constitutes poor health outcomes and how agentic expressions of culture negotiate local structures to regain health and well-being through acts of resistance.