La Jurisprudencia en la Constitución de

The impact of dominant social structures on agency

Group members told stories of their contact with government departments, health and social service organisations and within the employment and commercial sectors. This began to reveal the multi-layered nature of the barriers to self-determination they faced within the New Zealand context. These barriers were multi-layered due to their status as Pacific peoples, women, immigrants and as low-income people. Through hearing these stories it became obvious that, in addition to facing the practical kinds of barriers to self-determination such as language, education, money or adequate housing, group members were also confronted by other obstacles. These obstacles were primarily about the ways in which they were viewed and treated as 'other' by many of the organisations and people they came into contact with. Group members talked about the racist behaviours of people within the private rental accommodation sector and their experiences of the institutionalised discriminatory practices of government based orga.nisations. Women in the group also talked about how they felt 'blamed' and ' singled out' as low-income people by the media and within day to day situations. They also talked about how such everyday encounters affected the way they felt about themselves (field notes C I -C2 and theoretical question one).

Agency, culture and identity

The decision to focus on culture and identity within the story-telling marked an important conceptual shift within the research. The concepts of poverty/disempowennent (and so the flip side wealth/empowerment) began to take on a new meaning to me theoretically and empirically (field notes B I -B3). While previously empowerment had been seen as having subjective elements (confidence, self-esteem, sense of belonging, social support, networks and social cohesiveness) as well as objective elements (control over resources), culture came much more into play. What did cultural dominance, or Western hegemony, mean at the subjective level of power (the lived and felt experiences of people) and at the more objective level 'of power (structures and institutions both within NZ and world wide), and what was the interplay between these different levels?

The influence of colonising, capitalist and Christian discourses on the subjectivities of the research communities

As I talked with other group members, I also became increasingly aware of the historical and present impacts of European colonisation on our lives. The colonisation process was a complex interweaving of capitalism, industrialisation, Christianity and Eurocentrism that impacted both on their material and subjective experiences. This tended to manifest itself in their expressed reverence for industrialisation and modem technologies, western based knowledge systems and church clergy that was expressed many times within the group. (See theoretical question number one, chapter eight).

Tongan and Samoan cultural values and the social action and research process

I also became aware of the importance of particular cultural values such as respect for elders, service to the group, Christianity and adherence to established orders in relation to role, h ierarchy, authority and place. These cultural values, reflected over and over in conversation and action were to become more significant as the advocacy research project progressed. The centrality of these cultural values within the investigation is elaborated on shortly.

Issues of cultural transition

Another emergent theme was cultural transition and the tensions WAG members experienced in attempting to continue their cultural traditions in Aotearoa. Culture can be an important sense of strength for all of us and its successful adaptation to new contexts is critical for health, well­ being and agency of those who are part of it. [t became evident that, the research participants and their communities faced some important choices with regard to expressions of their culture and their implications for agency within New Zealand society:

I 'm thinking of the fa 'a Samoa ... there 's a real tension ... if there 's a funeral that comes up, well automatically the families [are} expected to give in money . . . . sometimes they just cannot afford it, so they have to be brave enough to really say 'No, I've got to feed my children first '. And that can be a really big struggle, because there 's a whole {expectation} (WAG#4).

Continuing dissonance between theory and practice

I continued to grapple with the dissonance between my own values, what the community development and PAR literature said about my role and my actual experience ' in the field'. The literature referred to extensive participation, collaboration and reciprocal education processes between researcher and community within a climate of equitable power relations. As the research progressed, dissonance was expressing itself in relation to the themes of participation, authority and leadership (field notes B l -C2).

Processes of empowerment and their relationship to culture

The story-tel ling activities emphasised agency processes in two ways. Firstly telling one's l ife story with its emphasis on culture and identity was a very powerful means of building individual and group agency through shared experiences as Tongan and Samoan immigrant women and as human beings. Group narratives and connections were built around shared cultural experiences as Pacific peoples and as women. Secondly, it became evident that exposure to cultural differences and associated life experiences was an important means of opening up new possibilities for roles and ways of being in the world. Given the right attention to existing structural power relations and group dynamics, exposure to different cultures (particularly at the micro levels of human relating) could increase agency. (See theoretical question three).

A post-modern analysis of power

My experiences of power relations within the research served as one of the first leve!s of my data collection that seemed to speak to a post-modern/structuralist experience of power relations at the local level. Within this framework, interpersonal and group relationships of agency tended to be con figured by the relational dynamics of the more micro aspects of power such as personal power, networks, personal connections and those cultural systems represented within that context. I was experiencing power as being much more multi-faceted and as changing between people and groups from situation to situation and context to context. I noticed that the power­ culture relations that were active within a particular context shaped the 'agency capacity' of others and myself. Agency would be configured in different ways that was largely dependent on the cultural systems and social structures that were operational within that particular context. This post-modern experience of power was stil l tempered by dominant social structures that