Negotiating Health Amidst COVID-19 Lockdown in Low-income Communities in Aotearoa New Zealand

ABSTRACT

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.

Disclosure of potential conflict of interest

We have no known conflict of interest or financial benefit to disclose.

Notes

1. The measurement utilized to determine household crowding is the Canadian National Occupancy Standard.

2. A study conducted in 2007 amongst 1,224 Pasifika mothers designed to test the index and perception of household crowding. The study highlighted the deployment and perpetuation of the racist narrative that Pasifika families choose to live in high levels of crowded household living situations due to customary practises. Instead, these living situations were created out of economic urgency (Schulter et al., 2007).

3. Aotearoa New Zealand government provider of social housing, also currently known as Kāinga Ora.

4. Whānau is the Māori word for family. Participants have used Whānau to encompass their extended family when sharing their experiences during C19 lockdown.