Sylvia Nissen
Biographic Data
| ID | 140942 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sylvia Nissen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sylvia |
| FAMILY NAME | Nissen |
| SIGNATURE | NISSEN S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Lincoln University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5236-9860 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 43 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Convergence, absence, capture
Scientific developments in genetic modification (GM) are rapidly forging ahead, bringing both calls to enable their possibilities, but also concerns of potential harm. At a time of technological and regulatory change, we analyse thirty years of public debate on GM in Aotearoa New Zealand to better understand the trajectory of public discourse. Drawing on analysis over 1,648 texts, primarily media articles, from the early 1990s to the present, we …
Reflexive insiderness in peer research
This article critically reflects on the experiences of a research team of 11 peer researchers (PRs) and three principal investigators who conducted a large-scale qualitative study on multilingual disaster communication during the COVID-19 pandemic in New Zealand. The project relied on PRs’ (perceived) insiderness to recruit and interview participants from within linguistic minority communities. However, PR involvement sometimes complicated – and …
Intergenerational environmental justice in Aotearoa New Zealand’s environmental policy
Decisions made today will profoundly impact the lives of present young people and future generations, including with irreversible biodiversity loss and climate change. It raises questions of how intergenerational environmental justice is integrated within domestic environmental policy. To this end, this paper examines how young people and future generations are framed across four decades of environmental policy in Aotearoa New Zealand, spanning 4…
“The Visa Situation Was Far More Stressful Than Covid”
This study explores the experiences of temporary migrants in Aotearoa New Zealand during the COVID‐19 pandemic, situating their narratives within broader regional and global patterns of mobility restriction and migrant precarity. Drawing on 85 in‐depth interviews with participants from linguistic minority backgrounds in Christchurch—including 29 temporary migrant visa holders—we investigate how visa‐related insecurity, family separation, restrict…
I felt overlooked”
The public health communication strategies of the Aotearoa New Zealand government during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic have been widely commended; however, for linguistic minorities, experiences of this communication were conflicted. We examine these experiences by drawing on 85 in-depth interviews conducted in 14 languages, showing that, while participants widely appreciated the clear visuals and regular COVID-19 updates in the Eng…
Engagement for genetic modification technologies in conservation
Questions of engagement loom large for the use of genetic modification technologies in conservation. As scientific teams rapidly move towards implementing changes that will fundamentally alter entire species, concerns are regularly raised that associated engagement activities are inadequate. It is therefore vital to take stock of recent social research that critically examines how engagement is being enacted: who is engaged and by whom, how and o…
Isolated from a ‘single source of truth’
This paper explores the formats and sources of COVID‐19 information that 85 linguistic minority participants in Christchurch, New Zealand, engaged with during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Based on in‐depth interviews conducted in 13 minority languages and English, our findings highlight varied information consumption patterns and the importance of both written and audio/audiovisual information formats. Local news, governmental sources, and personal net…
The unfinished implications of ‘finished’ land reform
The Philippines’ Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) involved major land redistribution from 1988 to 2014. The program sought to alleviate poverty, promote rural development and social justice through land redistribution. Through qualitative inquiry, this research highlights farmer’s voice and experiences throughout the implementation of CARP. Our research draws on 75 in-depth interviews and field observations on the island of Leyte in 2…
Employers and Education Providers as Sources of Support for Former Refugee and Migrant Workers and Students During the Covid ‐19 Pandemic
The paper contributes to the literature on social support theory by considering the social support offered by employers and education providers to former refugee and migrant workers and students during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with 85 former refugees and migrants in Aotearoa New Zealand—74 of whom were engaged in work or study during the early phase of the pandemic—this study explores how employers and education provi…
Panic activism or crisis solidarity? Reworking crisis narratives in climate activism through the Covid‐19 pandemic
A bstract Crisis narratives have long been a prominent feature of the climate movement to spur system change. The COVID‐19 pandemic brought to the fore the complexities of navigating climate action through the overlapping crises of the Anthropocene. While crisis is seen to offer possibilities for transformational change, it also threatens to prioritise urgency over justice. It is therefore important to understand how climate activists, in practic…
Towards a tika political science
This article is a rejoinder to two previous articles about the political science discipline in Aotearoa New Zealand published in The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education: Annie Te One and Maria Bargh's "Towards a Fairer and More Tika Political Science and Politics: Are Political Science Programs Equipping Students Adequately for Aotearoa Realities?" (vol. 52, no. 2) and Jack Vowles's "Fairness, Tika and Political Science in Aotearoa New Zea…
What is generated through rupture
Our commentary explores the contested possibilities of rupture, disaster, and emergency, and reflects on growing fears around political extremism. Rupture as theorised by Mahanty et al. captures the generative potential that arises through the conditions of the Anthropocene. We emphasise the political ambiguity of these processes and their potential to spur progressive possibility as well as political change that leans towards oppression and viol…
Framing post-disaster collective action as ‘good news’
This article examines the development and implications of positive news media coverage of a crisis volunteer group across a decade of disaster responses. We investigate the case of the Student Volunteer Army in Aotearoa New Zealand, a group that has been positioned as a potential blueprint for youth-led disaster response. Drawing on in-depth interviews and news media sources, we trace how a distinct framing of the group as ‘good news’ consolidate…
The civic legacies of disaster for youth political agency
Disasters are considered pivotal in young people's lives, yet their civic legacies have been neglected. We examine how youth political agency is shaped through experiences of disaster, drawing on in-depth interviews with young people over a decade of successive disasters in Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. Our study demonstrates that the legacies of disaster for youth agency extend well beyond the narrow spatial-temporal boundaries that often …
Ripples from an earthquake
The Student Volunteer Army was formed following the earthquake sequence of 2010–2011 in Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand, and has since been widely celebrated as a youth-led volunteer disaster response. More than ten years after the mobilisation, we trace the legacies of this action through in-depth interviews. Our findings demonstrate that informal disaster volunteerism can generate numerous legacies that span the biographical, social and inst…
The ability to change stuff up
In this context, there is a need to examine how young people experience participation as volunteers within established organisations. Drawing on 25 in-depth interviews with young volunteers in the Canterbury region of Aotearoa New Zealand, our findings demonstrate that volunteering in established organisations can be a conflicted participatory space for young people. We identify three aspects young people negotiate in their participation: ‘what t…
Emergent Spaces of Emergency Claims
Climate emergency declarations have become a prominent mechanism within the environmental movement to emphasise the urgency of the climate crisis, with this activism prompting numerous declarations from governments. Embedded in these declarations are claims of emergency, which hold representations of how different actors make sense of the present political moment and imagine trajectories of change. We analyse the contested meanings of public emer…
Navigating the politics of recognition in volunteering
This paper examines young volunteer’s perspectives of recognition in Aotearoa New Zealand. There is a politics of recognition to navigate with the rise of formalized practices of recognition that award and reward volunteer efforts. Many of these practices draw on a neoliberal logic that centre the individual and apply instrumental motivations to their engagement, which we describe as ‘accolades’. Drawing on in-depth interviews with young people, …
‘Spontaneous’ volunteers? Factors enabling the Student Volunteer Army mobilisation following the Canterbury earthquakes, 2010–2011
Retrofitting an emergency approach to the climate crisis
In the last year, hundreds of climate emergency declarations have been made by local and national governments around the world. Instigated through grassroots activism, these declarations have become a focus of aspirations for radical climate action. However, concerns have also raised been about the desirability of emergency declarations in responding to the climate crisis, including at a local scale. In this paper we consider the enactment of eme…
Gaining ‘authority to operate
There is growing expectation that local volunteers will play a more integrated role in disaster response, yet emergent volunteer groups are often ‘outsiders’ to crisis management. Questions have been raised, therefore, about how emergent groups can forge relationships with established response agencies. This paper analyses how the Student Volunteer Army, as an emergent group, gained ‘authority to operate’ after the earthquakes in Canterbury, New …
Children and young people’s climate crisis activism – a perspective on long-term effects
The year 2019 witnessed the gathering pace of a global climate movement, with millions of young people striking for climate action. While the contours of this activism are just beginning to emerge, the scale of the mobilisations to date suggest their consequences are likely to be profound – for participants, communities and the wider political environment. This paper looks to the literature on social movement consequences to consider the possible…
Ethics in context
Existing literatures have discussed both ethical issues in visual research with young people, and the problems associated with applying ‘universal’ ethical guidelines across varied cultural contexts. There has been little consideration, however, of specific issues raised in projects where visual research is being conducted with young people simultaneously in multiple national contexts. This paper contributes to knowledge in this area. We reflect …
Student debt and wellbeing
With levels of student debt unprecedented and rising in many democracies, growing attention has been given by academics and practitioners to its possible effects for student wellbeing. This article makes three contributions to this debate. First, it offers a critical review of literature that considers the relationship of student debt and wellbeing to open up discussion about the dimensions, limitations and possibilities of the field. Second, the…
Indebted
Book review
Indebted
Book review
Children and young people’s climate crisis activism – a perspective on long-term effects
The year 2019 witnessed the gathering pace of a global climate movement, with millions of young people striking for climate action. While the contours of this activism are just beginning to emerge, the scale of the mobilisations to date suggest their consequences are likely to be profound – for participants, communities and the wider political environment. This paper looks to the literature on social movement consequences to consider the possible…
Retrofitting an emergency approach to the climate crisis
In the last year, hundreds of climate emergency declarations have been made by local and national governments around the world. Instigated through grassroots activism, these declarations have become a focus of aspirations for radical climate action. However, concerns have also raised been about the desirability of emergency declarations in responding to the climate crisis, including at a local scale. In this paper we consider the enactment of eme…
What is generated through rupture
Our commentary explores the contested possibilities of rupture, disaster, and emergency, and reflects on growing fears around political extremism. Rupture as theorised by Mahanty et al. captures the generative potential that arises through the conditions of the Anthropocene. We emphasise the political ambiguity of these processes and their potential to spur progressive possibility as well as political change that leans towards oppression and viol…
Emergent Spaces of Emergency Claims
Climate emergency declarations have become a prominent mechanism within the environmental movement to emphasise the urgency of the climate crisis, with this activism prompting numerous declarations from governments. Embedded in these declarations are claims of emergency, which hold representations of how different actors make sense of the present political moment and imagine trajectories of change. We analyse the contested meanings of public emer…
Gaining ‘authority to operate
There is growing expectation that local volunteers will play a more integrated role in disaster response, yet emergent volunteer groups are often ‘outsiders’ to crisis management. Questions have been raised, therefore, about how emergent groups can forge relationships with established response agencies. This paper analyses how the Student Volunteer Army, as an emergent group, gained ‘authority to operate’ after the earthquakes in Canterbury, New …
Framing post-disaster collective action as ‘good news’
This article examines the development and implications of positive news media coverage of a crisis volunteer group across a decade of disaster responses. We investigate the case of the Student Volunteer Army in Aotearoa New Zealand, a group that has been positioned as a potential blueprint for youth-led disaster response. Drawing on in-depth interviews and news media sources, we trace how a distinct framing of the group as ‘good news’ consolidate…
Ethics in context
Existing literatures have discussed both ethical issues in visual research with young people, and the problems associated with applying ‘universal’ ethical guidelines across varied cultural contexts. There has been little consideration, however, of specific issues raised in projects where visual research is being conducted with young people simultaneously in multiple national contexts. This paper contributes to knowledge in this area. We reflect …
Isolated from a ‘single source of truth’
This paper explores the formats and sources of COVID‐19 information that 85 linguistic minority participants in Christchurch, New Zealand, engaged with during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Based on in‐depth interviews conducted in 13 minority languages and English, our findings highlight varied information consumption patterns and the importance of both written and audio/audiovisual information formats. Local news, governmental sources, and personal net…
Panic activism or crisis solidarity? Reworking crisis narratives in climate activism through the Covid‐19 pandemic
A bstract Crisis narratives have long been a prominent feature of the climate movement to spur system change. The COVID‐19 pandemic brought to the fore the complexities of navigating climate action through the overlapping crises of the Anthropocene. While crisis is seen to offer possibilities for transformational change, it also threatens to prioritise urgency over justice. It is therefore important to understand how climate activists, in practic…
Student debt and wellbeing
With levels of student debt unprecedented and rising in many democracies, growing attention has been given by academics and practitioners to its possible effects for student wellbeing. This article makes three contributions to this debate. First, it offers a critical review of literature that considers the relationship of student debt and wellbeing to open up discussion about the dimensions, limitations and possibilities of the field. Second, the…
Children and Environment
Interdisciplinary studies of children and the environment have progressed rapidly in recent years, offering new understanding of the experiences of approximately half of the planet's 7 billion people who are now aged 25 years or younger. Children first emerged as a distinct subject of study in contemporary human geography in the 1950s in relation to research into human spatial awareness and map‐making. By the 1990s, children and the environment h…
Ethics in context
Existing literatures have discussed both ethical issues in visual research with young people, and the problems associated with applying ‘universal’ ethical guidelines across varied cultural contexts. There has been little consideration, however, of specific issues raised in projects where visual research is being conducted with young people simultaneously in multiple national contexts. This paper contributes to knowledge in this area. We reflect …
Student debt and wellbeing
With levels of student debt unprecedented and rising in many democracies, growing attention has been given by academics and practitioners to its possible effects for student wellbeing. This article makes three contributions to this debate. First, it offers a critical review of literature that considers the relationship of student debt and wellbeing to open up discussion about the dimensions, limitations and possibilities of the field. Second, the…
Children and young people’s climate crisis activism – a perspective on long-term effects
The year 2019 witnessed the gathering pace of a global climate movement, with millions of young people striking for climate action. While the contours of this activism are just beginning to emerge, the scale of the mobilisations to date suggest their consequences are likely to be profound – for participants, communities and the wider political environment. This paper looks to the literature on social movement consequences to consider the possible…
‘Spontaneous’ volunteers? Factors enabling the Student Volunteer Army mobilisation following the Canterbury earthquakes, 2010–2011
Retrofitting an emergency approach to the climate crisis
In the last year, hundreds of climate emergency declarations have been made by local and national governments around the world. Instigated through grassroots activism, these declarations have become a focus of aspirations for radical climate action. However, concerns have also raised been about the desirability of emergency declarations in responding to the climate crisis, including at a local scale. In this paper we consider the enactment of eme…
Gaining ‘authority to operate
There is growing expectation that local volunteers will play a more integrated role in disaster response, yet emergent volunteer groups are often ‘outsiders’ to crisis management. Questions have been raised, therefore, about how emergent groups can forge relationships with established response agencies. This paper analyses how the Student Volunteer Army, as an emergent group, gained ‘authority to operate’ after the earthquakes in Canterbury, New …
Ripples from an earthquake
The Student Volunteer Army was formed following the earthquake sequence of 2010–2011 in Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand, and has since been widely celebrated as a youth-led volunteer disaster response. More than ten years after the mobilisation, we trace the legacies of this action through in-depth interviews. Our findings demonstrate that informal disaster volunteerism can generate numerous legacies that span the biographical, social and inst…
The ability to change stuff up
In this context, there is a need to examine how young people experience participation as volunteers within established organisations. Drawing on 25 in-depth interviews with young volunteers in the Canterbury region of Aotearoa New Zealand, our findings demonstrate that volunteering in established organisations can be a conflicted participatory space for young people. We identify three aspects young people negotiate in their participation: ‘what t…
Emergent Spaces of Emergency Claims
Climate emergency declarations have become a prominent mechanism within the environmental movement to emphasise the urgency of the climate crisis, with this activism prompting numerous declarations from governments. Embedded in these declarations are claims of emergency, which hold representations of how different actors make sense of the present political moment and imagine trajectories of change. We analyse the contested meanings of public emer…
Navigating the politics of recognition in volunteering
This paper examines young volunteer’s perspectives of recognition in Aotearoa New Zealand. There is a politics of recognition to navigate with the rise of formalized practices of recognition that award and reward volunteer efforts. Many of these practices draw on a neoliberal logic that centre the individual and apply instrumental motivations to their engagement, which we describe as ‘accolades’. Drawing on in-depth interviews with young people, …
What is generated through rupture
Our commentary explores the contested possibilities of rupture, disaster, and emergency, and reflects on growing fears around political extremism. Rupture as theorised by Mahanty et al. captures the generative potential that arises through the conditions of the Anthropocene. We emphasise the political ambiguity of these processes and their potential to spur progressive possibility as well as political change that leans towards oppression and viol…
Framing post-disaster collective action as ‘good news’
This article examines the development and implications of positive news media coverage of a crisis volunteer group across a decade of disaster responses. We investigate the case of the Student Volunteer Army in Aotearoa New Zealand, a group that has been positioned as a potential blueprint for youth-led disaster response. Drawing on in-depth interviews and news media sources, we trace how a distinct framing of the group as ‘good news’ consolidate…
The civic legacies of disaster for youth political agency
Disasters are considered pivotal in young people's lives, yet their civic legacies have been neglected. We examine how youth political agency is shaped through experiences of disaster, drawing on in-depth interviews with young people over a decade of successive disasters in Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. Our study demonstrates that the legacies of disaster for youth agency extend well beyond the narrow spatial-temporal boundaries that often …
Indebted
Book review
Panic activism or crisis solidarity? Reworking crisis narratives in climate activism through the Covid‐19 pandemic
A bstract Crisis narratives have long been a prominent feature of the climate movement to spur system change. The COVID‐19 pandemic brought to the fore the complexities of navigating climate action through the overlapping crises of the Anthropocene. While crisis is seen to offer possibilities for transformational change, it also threatens to prioritise urgency over justice. It is therefore important to understand how climate activists, in practic…
Towards a tika political science
This article is a rejoinder to two previous articles about the political science discipline in Aotearoa New Zealand published in The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education: Annie Te One and Maria Bargh's "Towards a Fairer and More Tika Political Science and Politics: Are Political Science Programs Equipping Students Adequately for Aotearoa Realities?" (vol. 52, no. 2) and Jack Vowles's "Fairness, Tika and Political Science in Aotearoa New Zea…
Engagement for genetic modification technologies in conservation
Questions of engagement loom large for the use of genetic modification technologies in conservation. As scientific teams rapidly move towards implementing changes that will fundamentally alter entire species, concerns are regularly raised that associated engagement activities are inadequate. It is therefore vital to take stock of recent social research that critically examines how engagement is being enacted: who is engaged and by whom, how and o…
Isolated from a ‘single source of truth’
This paper explores the formats and sources of COVID‐19 information that 85 linguistic minority participants in Christchurch, New Zealand, engaged with during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Based on in‐depth interviews conducted in 13 minority languages and English, our findings highlight varied information consumption patterns and the importance of both written and audio/audiovisual information formats. Local news, governmental sources, and personal net…
The unfinished implications of ‘finished’ land reform
The Philippines’ Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) involved major land redistribution from 1988 to 2014. The program sought to alleviate poverty, promote rural development and social justice through land redistribution. Through qualitative inquiry, this research highlights farmer’s voice and experiences throughout the implementation of CARP. Our research draws on 75 in-depth interviews and field observations on the island of Leyte in 2…
Employers and Education Providers as Sources of Support for Former Refugee and Migrant Workers and Students During the Covid ‐19 Pandemic
The paper contributes to the literature on social support theory by considering the social support offered by employers and education providers to former refugee and migrant workers and students during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with 85 former refugees and migrants in Aotearoa New Zealand—74 of whom were engaged in work or study during the early phase of the pandemic—this study explores how employers and education provi…
Convergence, absence, capture
Scientific developments in genetic modification (GM) are rapidly forging ahead, bringing both calls to enable their possibilities, but also concerns of potential harm. At a time of technological and regulatory change, we analyse thirty years of public debate on GM in Aotearoa New Zealand to better understand the trajectory of public discourse. Drawing on analysis over 1,648 texts, primarily media articles, from the early 1990s to the present, we …
Reflexive insiderness in peer research
This article critically reflects on the experiences of a research team of 11 peer researchers (PRs) and three principal investigators who conducted a large-scale qualitative study on multilingual disaster communication during the COVID-19 pandemic in New Zealand. The project relied on PRs’ (perceived) insiderness to recruit and interview participants from within linguistic minority communities. However, PR involvement sometimes complicated – and …
Intergenerational environmental justice in Aotearoa New Zealand’s environmental policy
Decisions made today will profoundly impact the lives of present young people and future generations, including with irreversible biodiversity loss and climate change. It raises questions of how intergenerational environmental justice is integrated within domestic environmental policy. To this end, this paper examines how young people and future generations are framed across four decades of environmental policy in Aotearoa New Zealand, spanning 4…
“The Visa Situation Was Far More Stressful Than Covid”
This study explores the experiences of temporary migrants in Aotearoa New Zealand during the COVID‐19 pandemic, situating their narratives within broader regional and global patterns of mobility restriction and migrant precarity. Drawing on 85 in‐depth interviews with participants from linguistic minority backgrounds in Christchurch—including 29 temporary migrant visa holders—we investigate how visa‐related insecurity, family separation, restrict…
Political science (18 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · Aotearoa (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Disaster Management and Resilience (9 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Public relations (7 works)