Coming Into Being: Productive Potentials, Creativity, and Wellbeing in the Lives of BIPOC Women and Femmes in Aotearoa

Wellbeing, as a term and pursuit, has gained incredible momentum in popular discourse. Wellbeing is largely linked to individual happiness, low levels of distress, good physical and mental health, or good quality of life. For Black, Indigenous (Māori) and people of colour (BIPOC) this notion of wellbeing is complicated by the effects of racism and colonisation. Reflections on the wellbeing of this diverse group have largely been deficit focused contributing to the critique, resistance and dismantling of unjust and problematic systems and structures which continue to impact on BIPOC lives. The research contributes to this ongoing struggle by offering a strengths-based portrayal of BIPOC wellbeing. Departing from deficit and individual approaches it positions BIPOC as creatively demonstrating and generating capacities and potentialities toward wellbeing. The overall objectives of this project were threefold. The research explored 1) the intersections of gender, culture and sexuality which shape BIPOC realities 2) the creative mechanisms which support wellbeing for BIPOC and 3) the relationship between resilience and resistance as it pertains to conceptualisations of wellbeing for BIPOC. Within a Kaupapa Māori, intersectional and decolonial theoretical framework the research takes a strengths-based approach to gain in-depth knowledge of how women and femme-identified BIPOC negotiate their wellbeing. Pūrākau, photo elicitation, Indigenous auto-ethnography, and poetic inquiry methods were employed to tell the seven peer (participant) narratives. This methodology highlights creative existence and decoloniality in the lives of the research peers while attending to the role of resistance and resilience within their stories. This provided insight which both critiques and reimagines wellbeing discourse. The thesis finds that BIPOC women and femmes reimagine and negotiate their wellbeing relationally. Wellbeing is created beyond temporal boundaries, individualisms, and structural limitations. Their stories are of subverters of the colonial gaze, disruptors of heteropatriarchy and other forms of hegemony. They are creators, expanding the margins of identity, culture, sexuality and gender through spirituality, creativity, and the celebration of femmehood. These narratives highlight BIPOC communities’ resources and capacities towards wellness by presenting mechanisms they create, adopt, reclaim, and reshape towards healing and wellbeing

Name thesis:degree_name

PhD

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Psychology

Grantor dc:publisher

ResearchSpace@Auckland

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Beckford, Kara Areta Alice

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Purdy, Suzanne
• Hoskins, Te Kawehau

Statement dc:rights

• Items in ResearchSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/docs/uoa-docs/rights.htm

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/2292/69729

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:researchspace.auckland.ac.nz:2292/69729