Pasifika girls resisting the schooling regime of safety

ABSTRACT

In the last few decades, the word ‘safety’ has become silently but increasingly pervasive in educational policies and debates, gaining a new momentum with the pandemic. Our intention in this article is to problematise what is done in schools in the name of safety by delving into the safety policy discourses of a New Zealand school and the narratives of resistance employed by a group of female Pasifika students during the Covid-19 crisis. This critical ethnographic inquiry explores how safety at schools operates as a mechanism to oppress their fights and reproduce inequalities in an era of apparent ‘racism without racists’.

KEYWORDS:

• Safety discourses
• narratives of resistance
• Pasifika girls
• New Zealand schools
• racism

Introduction

In Aotearoa New Zealand, children’s and youth safety is at the core of several educational policies and debates. Safety has not only permeated discussions about physical and health education (Sullivan 2014), bullying (Boyd and Barwick 2011) and child abuse (Keddell 2018), but also cultural and civic debates related to the inclusion of Māori¹ and Pasifika² students (e.g., Cavanagh et al. 2012). During Covid-19, the invocation of safety become particularly widespread. There has, however, been limited discussion on what is accepted as truth when talking about safety in education contexts. As Smith (2014) noted, the idea of safety appears to take on an almost sacred quality in educational debates, producing a ‘regime of truth’ (Foucault 1980) that establishes certain rules and defines who is included and excluded from the desirable safe society. In schools, the discourses of safety and its calls for responsible behaviour might be producing a particular ‘regime of conviviality’ (Hernando-Lloréns 2020, 1) where risks and conflicts are displaced in favour of protection and security.

Our intention in this article is to problematise what is undertaken in schools in the name of safety during Covid-19. We start the article by questioning the increasing confluence of safety and wider educational debates and the citizen subjectivities that this discourse shapes and excludes (e.g., the citizens at risk who are in need of safety or who pose a potential danger). We then introduce the critical ethnographic inquiry that enabled us to delve into the safety policy discourses of a New Zealand school and the narratives of resistance employed by seven Pasifika female students. Drawing upon the work of Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua (2017) and Haunani-Kay Trask (1993), we show the nuanced ways in which the ‘regime of safety’ was used to discredit and silence their opposition. In the discussion section, we explore how safety in schools can operate as a mechanism to reproduce inequalities in an era of apparent ‘racism without racists’ (Bonilla-Silva 2006, 4).

Problematising the confluence of safety and citizenship in educational discourses

In the last few decades, the word ‘safety’ has become silently but increasingly pervasive in educational policies and debates (Powell et al. 2021; Sullivan 2014), gaining a new momentum with the pandemic. The use of this word, however, has not just been restricted to issues related to disaster preparedness, physical education or student wellbeing. It has progressively gained ground in cultural and civic debates. In Aotearoa New Zealand, for instance, providing culturally safe environments for Indigenous populations and other minority groups is at the core of several educational policies and programmes such as the Action Plan for Pacific Education (2020–2030) aimed at ‘confront[ing] systemic racism and discrimination in education’ against Pasifika students. Another example is the frequent call to keep children and young people safe in digital education debates (e.g., Kim and Choi 2018). This intersection between issues of cultural and racial understanding coupled with youth online participation illustrates how the concept of safety in education has become entangled with discourses of citizenship.

Despite a wide body of literature highlighting the socially constructed nature of this concept (e.g., Beck 1992; Giddens 2002), there has been limited discussion on what safety in educational contexts means (Sullivan 2014; Smith 2014). Even during the pandemic when several public discussions have arisen about the tensions between freedom and security, the use of the word ‘safety’ in educational contexts has remained unquestioned, if not idealised (e.g., Browning and Romer 2020). A few educational scholars have problematised this notion by contrasting adults’ and children’s views of the concept (e.g., Moore et al. 2015; Smith 2014) and by challenging the paternalistic approaches that underlie claims for children’s safety (Warrington and Larkins 2019). The widespread use of the word ‘safety’ in the field of education seems to connect with the so-called ‘soft’ pedagogies, based on the Rousseauian motif of protecting childhood innocence from the risks of society (Romero and Luis 2005).

In other fields, the discourses of safety have been critiqued for silently framing social control in positive ways, hiding processes of exclusion through the desirable objectives of ‘safety’ (e.g., Fischer and Poland 1998; Packer 2008; Vandenbeld Giles 2012). The discourses of safety generate exclusion by constructing particular kinds of ‘at-risk’ subjects and by privileging particular solutions to the problems of safety defined by the perceived risks (Tierney 2015). As Beck (1992, 49) explains, if safety is the utopia, risk management –and, therefore, regulation– becomes the objective. Paradoxically, these discourses became paramount in neoliberal societies where calls for economic deregulation coexist with calls for personal security as a manifestation of the individualisation of social risk (Beck 1992; Fischer and Poland 1998; Vandenbeld Giles 2012).

Pasifika young people as citizens at risk

Particularly since the 1960s, Pasifika peoples have faced strong discrimination in Aotearoa New Zealand, being frequently considered as ‘cheap immigrant labour’ (Loto et al. 2006, 100) with ‘disadvantaged youth at risk of exclusion’ (Fitzpatrick 2011). This discrimination is also evident in the education system that seems to reproduce the inequalities that Pasifika communities face in current New Zealand society (Salesa 2018). Statistics show a large percentage of Pasifika students who experience educational underachievement and disengagement with the educational system (Ministry of Education 2012). Researchers (e.g., Ferguson et al. 2008; Hunter et al. 2016; Maquiso 2019) have attributed this failure to inequitable schooling practices with a long history in the New Zealand education system such as a Western-biased curriculum, deficit theorising or disciplinary removal mechanisms.

To improve the educational achievement of both Māori and Pasifika young people, several scholars, educators and policy makers have claimed the importance of providing culturally safe environments for these students so that they can have the freedom ‘to be who and what they are’ (Macfarlane et al. 2007, 65) and ‘where their knowledges are acceptable and legitimate’ (Bishop et al. 2007, 32). This idea has become central in culturally responsive pedagogies that are at the core of governmental initiatives such as the Action Plan for Pacific Education 2020–2030 and Tapasā Cultural Competencies Framework for Teachers of Pacific Learners (2018). As stated by the Ministry of Education (2020):

To advance Pacific student success, the Ministry co-designed the Action Plan for Pacific Education with communities over a series of fono to help Pacific learners and their families feel safe, valued and equipped to achieve their education aspirations (13)

In this article, we problematise this good-intentioned idea because it implicitly defines: (a) Pasifika students as ‘citizens at risk’ of cultural marginalisation that need to be saved and (b) cultural safety as the solution for their inclusion. An example of what Popkewitz (2020, 2) calls ‘the paradox of the good intentions of inclusion’ that exclude and abject.

Safety in education, as a fluid concept increasingly permeated in citizenship discourses, contributes to define the ‘citizen at risk’ who is in need of safety. The portrayal of the citizens at risk hinders us from analysing how young Pasifika respond to instances of racial discrimination at school. In fact, there has been little research exploring how Pasifika students fight racism in school contexts, even though Pasifika activism³ – particularly the movement of the Polynesian Panthers and, more recently, the activist groups of 4 Tha Kulture and Pacific Climate Warriors– has awakened the interest of several scholars (e.g., Anae, Tamu, and Iuli 2015; Ritchie 2021; Shilliam 2012). Overcoming traditional views of political participation, some studies have explored how young Pasifika resist, ignore or contest the logics of institutional racism outside of school contexts. Okeroa’s (2012) study, for example, shows how youth Pasifika’s responses to racism do not only take place in public spaces through conventional forms of activism but also in the private sphere, particularly for Pasifika women who often create networks of solidarity to challenge racism within their communities. The research conducted by Breheny et al. (2021) found that Pasifika women’s responses to messages of racial discrimination take different shapes across the life course from using humour through to challenging teachers’ low expectations. However, the day-to-day responses of Pasifika young people to instances of racial discrimination at school still remain largely unknown. This occurs even though several studies have shown Pasifika students are very critical about the discrimination on the basis of their ethnicity that they face at schools (Breheny et al. 2021; McGregor and Webber 2019). The lack of research on how Pasifika students respond to instances of racial injustice at school is probably one of the consequences of the pervasive frame of safety and the citizens at risk.

The idea of safety in cultural education initiatives do not only define the ‘citizen at risk’ (who is in need of safety), but also the subjects positioned as responsible for the safety of the citizens at risk (solution). Cultural safety becomes, using Popkewitz’s words (2020, 3), a ‘salvation theme’. As the last quote of the previously cited Action Plan for Pacific Education (2020–2030) states, ‘A child will feel safe if they are wrapped in their culture’ (52). The problem with this salvation theme is not only that it entails a double process of victimisation and paternalism, but also that it diverts attention from other material needs that no longer constitute the central discussion. As Beck (1992) and Vandenbeld Giles (2012) argue, the objective of neoliberal societies within the frame of safety becomes to minimise risk rather than meet material need. In Vandenbeld Giles’ (2012) words:

The social production of risk has become the dominant discourse of the neoliberal era, penetrating all forms of political, economic and social consciousness and creating a hegemonic prioritization of the arbitrary above the material (112).

In the safety discourse of cultural education debates, reducing the anxiety of risk (by having the freedom to be who and what Pasifika students are) becomes a priority over other material needs (e.g., eradication of poverty). This occurs despite statistical data providing clear evidence that Pasifika students disproportionately experience material hardship more than any other ethnic group (Duncanson et al. 2020). To be precise, one in four or 40,600 Pasifika children in comparison to 72,700 of their European descendant peers experienced material hardship in 2019, which means living in households that lack ‘basic/essential child-specific items because of cost’ (Duncanson et al. 2020, 17). This situation has been aggravated during Covid-19 (Mutch 2021). Ministry of Education (2020) school roll data also illustrates how Pasifika students disproportionately attend schools from lower socioeconomic backgrounds (38%). These material needs, however, are ignored by the cultural safety discourse, which seems to operate as a neoliberal ‘politics of distraction’ that place Pasifika students in a competition for time and attention.

Resistance at school

The fact that the safety discourse has attracted so much attention, particularly when talking about minoritised students, does not imply that these students have welcomed the logics of safety in schools. In this article, we examine how the discourses of safety operate in a New Zealand school by exploring its safety policy discourses and the ways in which a group of Pasifika female students resisted these discourses during Covid-19. Their narratives of resistance not only dismantle the idea of Pasifika students as citizens at risk and reveal the material inequalities they face, but also show the nuanced ways in which safety at school operates as a mechanism to oppress their fights and divert attention from their material realities.

From neo-Marxist perspectives in education, resistance theorists have shown the complex dynamics of accommodation/resistance embedded in the social and cultural (re)production that takes place in schools, beyond dualisms between agency and structure (e.g., Giroux 1983; McLaren 1985; Willis 2017). These theorists frame resistance, or the refusal to be dominated, as evidence of how the mechanisms of social reproduction are never complete. Rather, schools are contested spaces where students navigate the institution’s various constraints and impositions, actively contesting logics that relegate them –and relegating them– to positions of subordination and political defeat (Giroux 1983; Willis 2017). This critical educational scholarship on resistance, however, has been criticised for privileging class over other systems of oppression (ethnicity, gender, age, etc.) that form different complex patterns and hierarchies (Johansson and Lalander 2012).

The feminist philosopher María Lugones (2010) builds upon these theories, connecting individual and collective acts to social and economic structures, and moves away from them, elucidating the lived experience of resistive ontology. Her concept of resistant sociality refers to the everyday efforts of minoritized people to challenge the gendered, racialized, and patriarchal norms of dominant culture. In her research with LGBTQ street youth movements, Cruz (2014) asserts that resistant sociality is not ‘about the destruction of a system of oppression. It is a deviation from the overwhelming logic of domination, a fissure in the monolithic space of oppression’ (411). This concept is not based on an understanding of resistance as the product of individual agency, but rather as ‘collective, peopled and intersubjective’; that is, with a set of histories and communities that contribute to how young people share and assess their options (Cruz 2014, 414). Resistant sociality is a key concept for examining the ways in which minoritized students negotiate the scrutiny and containment of the logics of school. This perspective not only allows to better appreciate the role of a collective sense of oppression in their responses, but also to pay closer attention towards everyday forms of resistance such as offstage practices (Scott 1990) or the style (Hebdige 1981). The former refers to those dissident practices that take place underneath the surveillance of authorities. The latter is the umbrella term that Hebdige (1981) uses in his analysis of the relationship between ethnicity and social class in youth resistance to describe the aesthetic, behavioural, linguistic, and symbolic signifiers of subversion that differentiate a subculture from the hegemon. To the institution, style is a ‘crime against the natural order’ even if

the deviation may seem slight indeed – the cultivation of a quiff, the acquisition of a scooter or a record or a certain type of suit. But it ends in the construction of a style, in a gesture of defiance or contempt, in a smile or a sneer. It signals a Refusal (3).

A look into resistance from the above perspective does not idealise its power to transform the socioeconomic and cultural structures that make it possible. Indeed, scholars such as Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua (2017) and Haunani-Kay Trask (1993) have deeply explored the discredit, paternalism and neglect that Pacific people face when resisting the status quo in postcolonial societies.

A critical ethnography into a New Zealand school during Covid-19

The data reported on in this article are drawn from a larger research project on young people’s ‘acts of citizenship’ (Isin 2009) during Covid-19 in Aotearoa New Zealand. The study constitutes a critical ethnographic inquiry (Fitzpatrick 2011; Madison 2005; Yon 2000) into the safety policy discourses and narratives of resistance of a group of Pasifika female students from a New Zealand school during lockdowns. Critical ethnography as a mode of inquiry aims to uncover power relationships through in-depth involvement in a research setting. As argued by Madison (2005), critical ethnography ‘disrupts the status quo and unsettles both neutrality and taken-for-granted assumptions by bringing to light underlying and obscure operations of power and control’ (5).

The study began after the lockdown that took place in Auckland in August 2020, yet most of the participants’ experiences were focused on the previous (longer and stricter) lockdown that started on March 25. During this period, schools were closed for a month and then restrictions eased, and students began returning to school with social distancing and other safety measures. When the study took place, there were no Covid-related restrictions as no community cases were detected in the country.

The school where the study was conducted is a co-educational, multi-cultural secondary school located in South Auckland, a sub-region of Auckland with the largest concentration of Pasifika people in the country. In the media and popular imagination, South Auckland is a ‘brown’ place with high rates of crime (Allen and Bruce 2017, 231). Over the last decades, South Auckland has also developed a strong sense of identity (Borell 2005). The study was conducted in two classes of this high school with a total of 33 senior students and two teachers. In this article, we focus on the data related to seven Pasifika female students who were part of an optional course centred on social movements.

This inquiry has important ethical implications, particularly when considering the power relationships and cultural differences that frame the research (Fitzpatrick 2011; Madison 2005). For this reason, building mutually respectful relationships between the researcher who was involved in the setting (a recent migrant from Spain) and the Pasifika students became paramount. At the first visit to the school, the researcher asked about the relevant cultural protocols to ensure that they would conduct their research with cultural sensitivity (Hudson et al. 2010). In a second visit to the school and in collaboration with one of the teachers, the researcher introduced herself to the potential participants by sharing her journey of becoming politically active as a teenager in feminist and pro-migrant groups through to her current work as a young academic. The sharing of this personal experience helped to break the image of the researcher as a stranger, as the identity of the researcher as a migrant woman partly resonated with the students’ own and family experiences. The participants were all from first- or second-generation Pacific migrant families. During this second visit, the researcher also explained the aim and procedures of study and the rights of the participants. From the beginning, the students were very interested in the study and willing to participate. This trusting environment was also partly motivated by the close relationship that they had with the teacher with whom they were used to openly (and, according to them, exceptionally) discuss social justice issues. In a third visit, the researcher held a focus group with all the participants. The discussion revolved around their life during lockdown (experiences, difficulties and strategies) and their acts of citizenship during this period (motivation, challenges and opportunities). This focus group was particularly suited to discussing experiences of racism as participants shared detailed stories and encouraged others to share their similar or contrasting accounts (Breheny et al. 2021). The issue of the school’s practices of ‘safety’ emerged during this focus group, which triggered a more detailed analysis of the school documents in this regard. More targeted questions were addressed in the second round of in-depth interviews that took place in the fourth stage of the study. During these interviews, the participants shared some of the posts and artefacts that they created as part of their acts of citizenship. They also shared the websites of the groups that they belong to, along the lines of a subject-centred interview (Campbell 2018). The fieldwork extended for a period of uninterrupted three months. Over this period, the researcher also followed on social media the news of the school.

Methods for data collection consisted of focus groups, in-depth interviews, field notes, artefact analysis of participants’ productions, informal conversations with two teachers and analysis of school public documents, newsletters and social media posts.

To analyse the data, we draw from the work of critical race scholars such as Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua (2017) and Haunani-Kay Trask (1993) who have examined the processes of discredit, paternalism and neglect that Pacific people face in postcolonial societies, especially when they agitate for their rights. In particular, we analysed how these processes of discredit, paternalism and neglect operated through the discourses of safety in school contexts. This examination allowed us to distinguish two portrayals of the participants’ fights against discrimination (as a risk for the school and as a public danger) that justify, in the name of safety, negligent actions and restrictions on their participatory rights.

Findings

Policy discourses of safety

As explained earlier, the word safety has become increasingly present in New Zealand educational policies. An illustrative example of this is the No. 1 priority of the recently passed Statement of National Education and Learning Priorities (2020), which is to ‘ensure [that] places of learning are safe, inclusive and free from racism, discrimination and bullying’ (1). In the explanation of this priority, the ‘citizens at risk’ who are in need of safety are clearly defined: ‘create a safe and inclusive culture where diversity is valued and all learners/ākonga and staff, including those who identify as LGBTQIA+, are disabled, have learning support needs, are neurodiverse, or from diverse ethnic communities, feel they belong’ (2). At least formally, part of the school’s official discourse aligns with the Ministry’s approach relating the idea of safety with issues of (cultural) diversity, sense of belonging and well-being. An example of how the idea of safety intermingles with celebrations of cultural diversity and sense of belonging in the school’s official rhetoric could be seen in the school’s promotional video. The video starts with students performing a haka and greetings in more than 10 different languages. Shortly after this introduction, one of the students proudly states the following: ‘At [this school] we have four whānau (extended families) and it’s just a really good way of feeling that you have a safe place and a place to belong in the school’. This comment refers to the main cultural safety policy of the school. As explained on the prospectus of the school, this policy divides students in four whānau to ‘ensure that every student is cared for in a sensitive and positive environment’. All students are part of a whānau class supervised by two leaders, who ‘take a special interest in the attendance, welfare and progress of each of their students’. As reported by the Education Review Office⁴ in 2019, ‘The whānau structure [of this school] enables strong relationships between students, and with their teachers and leaders in each whānau’. This structure is particularly used for inter-whānau competitions in sports and cultural events (e.g., Samoan Day), which are at the centre of most website news and social media posts. To mention an example, these competitions represented more than 40% of the total Facebook posts during the period between March and November 2020.⁵ In this sense, competition seem to be a key aspect in the development of that alleged sense of belonging and celebration of cultural diversity.

‘Safety’, as a floating signifier, also took other forms in the public documents of the school. The term is particularly present in one of the official documents of the school aimed at providing a ‘safe, secure and friendly environment for all students’. The document consists of six school’s norms, plus some notes about the school’s uniform (e.g., where to acquire it and how to wear it ‘in a manner which brings credit’ to the student and the school). The first norm requires students to behave in a ‘positive’ (non-violent) manner; the second refers to the use of ‘polite and friendly language’, including non-discriminatory language; the third encourages students to be ‘positive digital citizens’; the fourth talks about respect for other people and their property; the fifth refers to the need of being ‘fair to others’; and the last norm declares the school free of harmful substances. The term ‘safety’ here relates with ideas of responsible citizen behaviour (offline and online) and implicitly portrays the ‘dangerous citizen’ as a safety-rule breaker. At the beginning of the year, parents receive an information booklet in which the previous norms are included along with the expected ֥attitudes to learning’ (e.g., be punctual, look tidy and clean in uniform, etc.) and a brief clarification of what is not allowed in the school (‘extreme hairstyles’, ‘facial hair’, etc.) that clearly shows the disciplinary character of these norms. During Covid-19, these norms along with others related to distance learning and sanitary measures were frequently reminded via newsletters and social media posts. For instance, a ‘Covid-19 expectations’ announcement released in May 2020 included a list of expectations related to attendance, electronic devices, access to school, etc. and a reminder that all students should wear the uniform, be clean shaven and that no jewellery is allowed.

Resistance, discredit and control

Our conversations with the seven Pasifika students –contrasted with other data sources (field notes, official communications to parents and students, informal conversations with teachers, etc.)– revealed another layer of what is undertaken in the school in the name of safety. They uncovered processes of discredit and control.

Discredit: a risk for the school and a public danger. During lockdowns, the seven participants were engaged in different actions against racial discrimination. One of these actions was an inter-school peace march that took place in Auckland. For these girls, the march represented a way to fight against ethnic stereotypes and the public image of South Auckland. Indeed, the poster of the march used an image of a past protest with signs of the Polynesian Panther movement. Participating in the march granted the participants a sense of power and dignity:

It was like a school march for protesting against school violence because of the stereotypes that South Auckland faces because they are always seen as hood rats and gang members and that they’re really bad, dirty and all they do is fight and so students, not even from South Auckland, came together and we’re trying to prove everybody wrong.

The participants’ involvement in this march had to face different forms of discredit and condemnation. The official reasoning behind such disapproval was that their participation represented a risk for the health of the school and New Zealand society. When asked about the school’s response to the march in an informal conversation in the staff room, one of the teachers vaguely remembered: ‘yeah, I think the school didn’t support it because of Covid’ (field notes, 18th November 2020). The march, however, took place at the end of July, when no Covid-related restrictions were in place in the country as there was no evidence of community transmission at that time (The New Zealand Herald 2020). For the participants, the opposition they faced was not only related to health concerns, but also to a more generalised view of young Pasifika as a danger for (the image of the) school. The following quote from a participant is particularly illustrative of the perceived risk for the school’s image posed by Pasifika students and the role played by ‘safety’ in the discredit of their participation in the march:

They [teachers] didn’t really want to support the march. They just disregarded it because they thought it was gonna be bad and they didn’t really want a bad representation for the college. They didn’t want our school uniform to be seen on the news with a bunch of rat kids. I feel like that’s what they thought. They don’t really see the movement as important. There was an incident when I was helping one of the girls put up posters. And one of the teachers asked: ‘Are you sure you want to be putting those up? Is this a safe thing to be going to?’

The idea of Pasifika students as a danger to the school (reputation) was recurrent in the interviews. As the participants explained, Pasifika students were frequently accused of threatening the school’s image with inappropriate appearance and behaviour, and harmful substances. The school’s efforts to safeguard its reputation were clear through the insistence of dress codes and ‘appropriate’ student behaviour. As seen in the following quote, for the participants, the whānau leaders acted as guarantees of the school’s safety norms:

One of my first cousins, he comes to school with us, he’s in our year group, and every day is just stopped by the principal, assistant principals, whānau [family grouping] leaders, all the teachers and the people in power at our school, he’s stopped because of his uniform, because of his incorrect shoes, because of his facial hair, which is a school rule, we aren’t allowed facial hair. And he’s constantly asked where he was, what he’s doing, where he’s supposed to be going, if he was doing something unsafe. Sometimes they ask him to search his bag for drugs or alcohol, anything that’s banned from our school.

In the focus group, the participants denounce the idea that ‘dangerous’ Pasifika students are encouraged to dropped out of the school: ‘Some of the teachers here ask them to drop off. Yeah, they really push that’. This was one of the motivations that drove some of the participants to create the group Pacific Warriors. As one of the girls explained, ‘It’s something that’s never really addressed, but that’s going to change. We, me and my friends, have something in the making – Pacific Warriors’. From being involved in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and the peace march, three participants decided to create this group to address the educational inequalities faced by Pasifika students and that were exacerbated by the pandemic:

From this movement [BLM], we all started assessing what was happening there [in the US] and comparing it to what is happening here. So me and my friends, we’re just starting our Pacific Warriors group here […] It was really hard coming back [to school after lockdown], because a lot of the Pasifika families were low income, and we survive on one pay-check. I mean, a lot of the children, when they’re old enough, they just go out into factory work or any job that they could get really just to provide money and put food on the table […] But, during Covid-19, it made it a lot harder for Pasifika students here […] We’re trying to start this group where we can offer the support that they need, because they’re not getting it from the teachers.

This girl also recognised that some teachers tried to dissuade them from getting involved in this group for their own safety/mental health:

Some teachers warned us that we will burnout with this because it’s not as easy as we think; that we need to look after ourselves and all that, but I feel that’s just because they don’t really care, they don’t want to do anything to support Pasifika students.

Discouragement and discredit towards the participants’ fight against discrimination in the name of safety not only came from the school, but also from the wider adult society. As a girl reported in relation to the march, ‘We had a lot of restrictions, we almost couldn’t go along with the march because of Covid. The march almost did not get to go along’. Again, however, these restrictions were not seen as a mere result of health concerns. They were also the product of a widespread view of young Pasifika as a public danger:

Any other march that had gone on, like the one against Covid […] did not need police officers or anyone to lead them. […] I found it [having police officers in the march] really offensive because it was like that was how they thought of us. That’s how they had thought that we would react.

Paternalism and neglect in the name of safety. The narratives of resistance of the Pasifika girls provide examples of how the portrayals of them, and their opposition to causes that matter to them, were used to justify different forms of repression, control and negligence because they were viewed as a risk for the school and a public danger. One of the most obvious examples was the presence of police officers in the interschool march. According to the participants, the school also attempted to stop the students from attending the march. For these girls, the school’s decision of not supporting the march became, more than a passive choice, an act of censorship in the name of safety. A participant explained that she wanted to bring the issue to the school assembly, but she was not allowed:

I talked to the principals here to see if I could talk about everything. And they kind of shut me down, they’re like, we have some other things to talk about. But at the end of that assembly, there was more time. And that kind of upset me because it kind of showed that there was time for me to speak, they just didn’t want me to.

The students were also banned from putting up posters of the march in the school. As a girl explained, one student asked for permission to put up the posters of the march, but it was denied because it was not safe: ‘He had asked to put up posters and they [whānau leaders] said no, they said it was not safe’. When one of the teachers was asked about this incident in an informal conversation, the teacher replied:

I didn’t know that they were told off for putting up the posters, but I think that the students were not really aware of the risks of Covid. I saw [one of the participants] rolling her eyes when the principal concluded the assembly like clearly not happy because they didn’t talk about the march but, you know, Covid was there, it was scary, the school couldn’t support something like that (field notes, 18th November 2020).

During the interviews and focus groups, the girls insisted that they were also concerned about the spread of the virus and, therefore, the physical safety of their communities. In fact, they all recognised being particularly scared of Covid-19 given their socioeconomic circumstances:

My family, even I, we’re working as essential workers. So we continued to work during lockdown with the added precautions of being at home and taking care of your family as well. Thinking of their safety along with yours is kind of nerve-wracking at times.

These ‘risks’, however, were surprisingly neglected by the schools. The Remote Learning guidelines and timetable sent to the parents in April 2020 showed little sympathy with the different family and material circumstances experienced by the students. As stated in these guidelines, ‘For most students there are five one-hour learning slots per day. Students will follow their normal school timetable each day’ [from 8 am to 3.30 pm with two breaks in the middle] and they had to mark their daily attendance in their Whānau Class Notebook. The following quote from one of the girls is well representative of the educational experience of lockdown of most participants and how their material realities –that constitute the focus of their fights against discrimination– were ignored by the school:

I found that hard when we started school again and lockdown. Because when the lockdown started, we ended the term early. It was like a holiday, but our teachers were emailing us like thousands of emails, telling us all we had, do this assessment, do another assessment. And it was just so hard to just do my schoolwork at home because like, I don’t know, my household just … I live in a really small house, so it was really hard to get work done with my family there.

Discussion: Safety as a regime

This study explores some of the uses of safety in the educational context of a New Zealand school by examining the policy discourses and narratives of resistance of a group of Pasifika female students. At a policy level, the discourses of safety define the safe ways of being a good citizen and participating in school life, combining –without any problematisation– inclusive aspirations full of benign overtones with calls for ‘proper’ behaviour based on values of discipline, competition and obedience. The narratives of resistance of the participants reveal some of the nuances of this apparently contradictory combination that portrays them as both citizens at risk who are in need of safety and who pose a potential danger. Both portrayals led to intervention practices aimed at restricting and controlling in the name of safety.

The participants experienced the most restrictive and controlling aspects of the discourses of safety when they embarked on fights against racial discrimination at school fuelled by the sociality (Lugones 2010) of the BLM movement and a collective sense of oppression. The participants confronted the safety discourses through different acts of resistance. Some of these acts could be considered as traditional forms of political participation (e.g., attending a march), yet the majority took place in offstage spaces (Scott 1990): sharing their indignation with their friends, quietly eye-rolling in reaction to a principal’s decision or supporting their mates’ ‘inappropriate’ styles (Hebdige 1981). The narratives of resistance of the participants not only challenge the idea that they needed to be saved, but also show the discredit, paternalism and neglect that, in the name of safety, these Pasifika students faced when they fought against racial discrimination. As previously highlighted by Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua (2017) and Trask (1993), the Indigenous Pacific struggles for social justice are often devalued and dismissed, through different strategies, under the values of Western societies. In the context of this study, safety becomes one of these values. In the name of safety, the fights of the Pasifika students –that connect with a longer history of Polynesian activism and identification with the Black Power movement (Anae, Tamu, and Iuli 2015; Shilliam 2012)– were portrayed as a potential danger for the image, health, security or wellbeing of the school community. This portrayal justified paternalistic interventions that silenced their claims. This is not the first time the discourses of safety privilege social control measures, while framing it in positive ways (Fischer and Poland 1998; Packer 2008; Vandenbeld Giles 2012).

In the school, the idea of safety defines the boundaries of the normal (safe) and pathological (unsafe) in student participation, ordering a certain way of behaviour and, therefore, operating as a regime. When entangled with discourses of responsible citizenship, ‘safety’ produces a ‘regime of truth’ (Foucault 1980), similar to what Hernando-Lloréns (2020, 1) calls a ‘regime of conviviality’, in which anything that threatens the idea of safety (e.g., risk, conflict and dissent) is displaced from the civic culture of the school. As Smith (2014) warns, the ‘binding truths’ (527) that are constituted and reconstituted in discourses of childhood and youth safety often constrain their participation rights. In Warrington and Larkins’ (2019) words, the false juxtaposition between safety and youth participation avoids us ‘recognising the latter (information, expression and influence) as a necessary component of protection’ (134). The constriction of the Pasifika students’ participatory rights takes place despite their physical presence in decision-making processes, which illustrates that this issue is not only a matter of having greater Pasifika representation in governance roles (Maquiso 2019).

This critical ethnographic inquiry allowed us to observe that the idea of safety in the school not only operated as a way to safeguard the unequal relations of power between the students and the principals or teachers, but also as a possible perversive way to perpetuate racial inequalities. As Packer (2008) argues, discourses of safety are frequently ‘used as a means of maintaining the unequal relations of power that have worked against women, youth, the working class, and people of colour’ (268). In this study, the schooling practices conducted in the name of safety, as ‘colour-blind’ (Bonilla-Silva 2006, 2), are likely to reproduce the educational inequalities that disproportionally affect Pasifika students (Ministry of Education 2012), particularly during Covid-19 (Estellés, Bodman, and Mutch 2022; Mutch 2021). These educational racial inequalities were reproduced through different actions (e.g., school disciplinary removals, biased teacher behaviour or focus on a deficit discourse), previously denounced by other scholars (e.g., Ferguson et al. 2008; Hunter et al. 2016; Maquiso 2019).

The ‘regime of safety’ seems to also contribute to reproduce educational racial inequalities by ignoring the Pasifika students’ socioeconomic circumstances that were aggravated during Covid-19: students dropping out of school to put food on the table, living conditions during lockdowns that hindered schoolwork and/or parents working in essential but underpaid jobs. The infiltration of the safety discourse within the culture of the school has led to a prioritisation of mitigating the risks posed by dangerous students, rather than addressing their material needs. These material needs, which constituted the focus of the students’ fights and were seen by the participants as major risks, become irrelevant in the safety discourse. Similar results were obtained by Vandenbeld Giles (2012) when examining the permeation of the risk discourse within the Ontario child welfare system. Safety as a foundation of school life seems to favour and suppress certain behaviours and dispositions that safeguard racial interests ‘without sounding racist’ (Bonilla-Silva 2006, 4).

Finally, we would like to conclude with a call to examine the promises, tensions and forms of resistance derived from the use of terms, such as safety and conviviality, that aim to govern school life intermingling with discourses of citizenship under ubiquitous meanings and ‘salvationist overtones’ (Itçaina 2006) in pro of social harmony and inclusion. This study’s narratives show how the consciousness raising activism of Pasifika girls often comes into conflict with the normative logics which define safety in New Zealand schools. Practices like dissuading students from participating in community work and stymying their efforts to engage in peaceful protest hint at a hidden curriculum in which questioning established norms is deemed unacceptable and unsafe. Such acts may indeed be unsafe, but only when they take place in contexts that depend upon the perpetuation of the status quo.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Spencer Foundation [grant number 202200161].

Notes

1 Māori are the Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand.

2 Pasifika people constituted 8.1% of the total New Zealand population in 2018 (Stats 2018). Pasifika is defined as a ‘collective term used to refer to people of Pacific heritage or ancestry who have migrated or been born in Aotearoa New Zealand’ (Ministry of Education 2012, 3).

3 From the late 1960s, Aotearoa New Zealand has had an intense history of Pasifika activism (Anae, Tamu, and Iuli 2015; Shilliam 2015) with the Polynesian Panthers Movement, the Black Power Gang and the Black Women’s Movement that took place in the 70s and 80s influenced by the US Black Power Movement (e.g., Okeroa 2012; Shilliam 2012, 2015).

4 The Education Review Office is the New Zealand government’s external evaluation agency.

5 For a reference, Covid-related posts represented 10% of the total posts.