Melbourne School of Population and Global Health - Theses
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ItemConnections, constraints and continuities: wellbeing, relationality and young Pasifika women in Melbourne Australia( 2019)Among many theoretical and methodological approaches to studying wellbeing the relational approach I adopt in this thesis has the potential to enrich understanding of the concept. The assumption of this thesis is that observing the flow of relationships and practices in lived spaces foregrounds the forces that enable and disrupt wellbeing. The thesis captures these flows through an ethnographic exploration of the experiences of young Pasifika women in Melbourne’s west. Through my roles as a volunteer, a participant and a researcher with a Pasifika youth group, I attend to their unique transnational context which shapes the young women’s relationships and practices and is essential to their wellbeing experiences. The meaning the young women make of wellbeing is interpreted through their family and community relational processes, through their participatory activities in cultural projects and through their perception and reporting of the impact of broader structures of power such as educational and regulatory regimes. I argue that the agency of the state specifically through restrictions imposed on migrants from Aotearoa/New Zealand after February 2001 - including eligibility for education and welfare services - is a constituent factor in diminishing young Pasifika’s wellbeing potential. In researching relational wellbeing I draw on scholarship informed by Pasifika, medical anthropological and critical theoretical frameworks. These frameworks provide a valuable basis for the analysis of processual and political dimensions of wellbeing. In studying the spaces the young women inhabit the thesis engages with conceptual issues central to this literature. I have identified and separately examined wellbeing practices in three spaces which I call restorative (Chapter Four), participatory (Chapter Five) and structural (Chapter Six). My argument is counterposed to a common notion of wellbeing as an abstract, measurable and ahistorical entity. For these young women, wellbeing experiences are grounded in, and shaped by ongoing historical, socio-economic and political processes. In Chapters Two and Three I provide an account of these processes in the historical/ethnographic context. This is essential to developing my concept of wellbeing as social and historical experiences embedded in the relational spaces. There is both potential and constraint in these spaces; and the young women’s wellbeing experiences emerge from complex processes of negotiation and balancing of these. My thesis argues that wellbeing is essentially an unfinished project as the young women weave stories of possibilities into their imaginings. In using multidisciplinary perspectives on wellbeing, this thesis makes an original contribution to health literature on Pasifika youth in Australia. The thesis presents an alternative epistemological foundation to health and wellbeing approaches that do not adequately address the relational dynamics of wellbeing in minority populations. It focuses on strengths and capabilities of the young women; it also argues that a study of wellbeing is incomplete unless it foregrounds the impact of structural forces on wellbeing pathways. This thesis will be of interest to Pasifika and minority youth who contest deficit-based portrayals of their communities. It will also be of interest to scholars and policy makers working at the intersections of immigration, justice and settlement agencies and health delivery.