Priya Kurian
Biographic Data
| ID | 169722 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Priya Kurian |
| GIVEN NAMES | Priya |
| FAMILY NAME | Kurian |
| SIGNATURE | KURIAN P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Waikato |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8138-4602 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 92 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Reimagining “Public” Outreach on Environmental Issues: Interrogating the Hegemonic Foundations of Public Engagement/Participation/Relations
Public outreach is now ubiquitous in environmental decision-making processes. However, institutionally-led engagement often retains power in the hands of the elite to decide the agenda and process. This creates a disconnect between the goal of strengthening democratic processes and actual outcomes, perpetuating inequalities between colonizing elites and Indigenous peoples in addressing environmental crises. We argue that public outreach for bette…
He Rau Ringa: A Te Tiriti-led democratic imaginary for ethnic communities in Aotearoa
The idea of democracy as a system of governance "of the people, by the people, for the people" (Lincoln, 1863) has been tainted by the skewed structures of representation that systematically shut out minority and subaltern groups from being part of what is constituted as "the people."Most recently, this has been exacerbated by the rise of populism in different parts of the world where democracy has been hijacked by majoritarian groups claiming to…
Settler colonial bordering and post-pandemic futures: Disrupting the nation state in Aotearoa/New Zealand
In Aotearoa/New Zealand, the relative safety offered by border regime closures during Covid-19 promised to ease uncertainty surrounding perilous futures, yet it did so by extending nation building into more intimate areas of life, exacerbating existing lines of discrimination. While justified in terms of crisis management, state expressions of citizen care during the pandemic were largely modelled in terms of a particular conflation of nature, so…
Women of many “firsts”: Novelty framing by news media of ethnic minority women politicians in Aotearoa New Zealand
There is a significant scholarship on media framing of women politicians in the context of western liberal democracies. However, much less academic attention has been directed at an intersectional analysis of the interface of race/ethnicity and gender media framing of ethnic minority women politicians (EWPs). This article undertakes a comparative analysis of mainstream and ethnic news media’s framing of EWPs in Aotearoa New Zealand (AoNZ) in term…
The circular economy in Aotearoa New Zealand: A critical evaluation of policy and its current prospects
Between 2017 and 2023, the circular economy was increasingly referenced by the Ministry for the Environment (MfE) and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) as a guide to more sustainable production and waste systems. It became an overarching idea for how to address many environmental challenges. MfE and MBIE statements refer to embedding circular principles into the economy and the role of central government in stewarding cir…
Culture and politics in overlapping frames for the future: Multi-dimensional activist organizing and communicating on climate change in Aotearoa New Zealand
Responding to climate change requires us to reimagine not only our future on a planet that is rapidly changing, but also how we organize to create political change. The climate movement and those involved in climate activism frame action on climate change in a diverse manner, articulating multiple possibilities for, and means to achieve, a different society. This article explores the ways in which activist groups in Aotearoa New Zealand work with…
Cultures in the laboratory: Mapping similarities and differences between Māori and non-Māori in engaging with gene-editing technologies in Aotearoa, New Zealand
Public engagement on rapidly advancing gene-editing technologies requires attention not merely to science and economics, but also to culture. In focusing on the similarities and differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives on new and emerging genetic technologies, this article reports on a national survey in Aotearoa New Zealand among a stratified random sample of an equal number of Māori and non-Māori participants. Identifying …
Evidence, interests and argumentation: An environmental policy controversy in a small New Zealand town
This article examines interactions between different forms of authoritative knowledge and evidence in a public dispute over an environmental problem. It draws on a case set in a small coastal town in New Zealand where the local community had expressed concern over the degradation of a river-mouth estuary caused by catchment management works built in the 1950s to support the farming sector. The estuary historically had been an important economic a…
The cultural politics of climate change adaptation: An analysis of the tourism sector in Aotearoa New Zealand
A huge number of climate change adaptation projects are underway to manage risk and minimise vulnerability for communities and businesses. Yet, adaptation processes are often ineffective because of deeply entrenched structures of power and different value systems leading to conflicting priorities for action. This paper draws on the notion of cultural politics to understand climate change adaptation in the tourism sector of Aotearoa New Zealand, a…
Centering Culture in Public Engagement on Climate Change
Much of the communication efforts on climate change has focused on disseminating scientific projections of climate change to galvanize people into responding to the physical, natural, and biological changes being wrought on the planet by human actions. Yet, this dominant approach of public engagement has been limited because groups of people experience climate change in different ways and have very different approaches to respond to its impacts a…
Public Relations and Sustainable Citizenship: Representing the Unrepresented
"This book examines how public relations might re-imagine itself as an instrument of "sustainable citizenship" by exploring alternative models of representing and building relationships with and among marginalised publics that disrupt the standard discourses of public relations. It argues that public relations needs to situate itself in the larger context of citizenship, the values and ethics that inform it and the attitudes and behaviours that c…
The Media and the Major Emitters: Media Coverage of International Climate Change Policy
News media outlets are crucial for the dissemination of information on climate change issues, but the nature of the coverage varies across the world, depending on local geopolitical and economic contexts. Despite extensive scholarship on media and climate change, less attention has been paid to comparing how climate change is reported by news media in developed and developing countries. This article undertakes a cross-national study of how elite …
Mobilising culture against domestic violence in migrant and ethnic communities: Practitioner perspectives from Aotearoa/New Zealand
Studies on domestic violence in ethnic minority communities highlight that social norms, family structures and cultural practices are among the key triggers of violence against women. Not surprisingly, most anti-violence interventions in these communities aim to redeem women from the oppressive features of these cultures. More recently, however, emergent scholarship advocates mobilising, rather than erasing, culture within existing anti-violence …
Socio-economic and political barriers to public participation in EIA: Implications for sustainable development in the Maldives
Environmental impact assessment (EIA) is a policy process that can lead to more sustainable development by preventing or mitigating the negative impacts of development projects. Public participation in the EIA process, especially one based on the ideals of deliberative democracy, is essential to deliver on the goal of sustainable development that is arguably the primary objective of EIA. This article specifically focuses on a study of public part…
Redesigning the architecture of policy-making: Engaging with Māori on nanotechnology in New Zealand
Although there is an extensive literature on public engagement on the use of new and emerging technologies such as nanotechnology, there is little evidence of the participation of marginalised indigenous communities in processes of such engagement. How do particular cultural values and worldviews shape the perceptions of new technologies among such indigenous peoples? This article addresses this question through an analysis of the deliberations o…
Public engagement for environmental sustainability in a technological age: Introduction to a symposium
Contextualizing Disaster
of the two such as "neoliberal globalization," has produced both wealth and inequality at an unprecedented scale.Following the demise of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, capitalism has emerged as the dominant economic paradigm, expressed as triumphalism, as found in Fukuyama's phrase "End of History" ( ) or in Margaret Thatcher's declaration, "There is no alternative."Social science research has debated the contours of the transformation of sta…
Expanding critical space: Public intellectuals, public relations, and an “outsider” contribution
Sustainable citizenship as a methodology for engagement: Navigating environmental, economic, and technological rationalities
Sustainable citizenship for a technological world: Negotiating Deliberative Dialectics
Incorporating the notion of sustainability is the biggest challenge for citizenship in a technological era. Existing conceptions of citizenship have not been able to grapple with compounded ecological, economic, cultural, and moral threats facing modern technology-infused societies. Nor has increased public participation, engagement, and dialogue resolved polarized positions on issues such as what constitutes quality of life or what is meant by t…
Science, governance, and public participation: An analysis of decision making on genetic modification in Aotearoa/New Zealand
The acceptance of public participation in science and technology governance in liberal democratic contexts is evident in the institutionalization of a variety of mechanisms for participation in recent decades. Yet questions remain about the extent to which institutions have actually transformed their policy practice to embrace democratic governance of techno-scientific decision making. A critical discourse analysis of the response to public parti…
Denial and Distancing in Discourses of Development: Shadow of the ‘Third World’ in New Zealand
Anxieties about development in New Zealand show up in a deep-rooted fear of the ‘Third World’ in the country. We examine how the term ‘Third World’ is deployed in media discourses in economic, social and environmental contexts and how this deployment results in a ‘discursive distancing’ from anything associated with the ‘Third World’. Such distancing demonstrates a fragile national identity that struggles with the contradictions between the natio…
On the Edges of Development: Cultural Interventions
Introduction: From the Edges of Development Kum-Kum Bhavnani, John Foran, Priya Kurian and Debashish Munshi Part 1: Refusing Representations of Development 1. October 17, 1961 Moustafa Bayoumi 2. Ode to Quasheba: Resistance Rituals Among Higgler Women in Jamaica Hume N. Johnson 3. Plural Economies and the Conditions for Refusal: Gendered Developments in Bangkok Ara Wilson 4. Dancing on the Edge: Women, Culture, and a Passion for Change Kum-Kum Bh…
Ecological modernization versus sustainable development: The case of genetic modification regulation in New Zealand
Ecological modernization and sustainable development are the two dominant paradigms in environmental policy. This paper assesses the implications of competing understandings of ecological modernization and sustainable development using the case of genetic modification regulation in New Zealand. Although the New Zealand regulatory framework embraces the symbolic language of sustainability, it ultimately adheres to a narrow notion of ecological mod…
A map of the nanoworld: Sizing up the science, politics, and business of the infinitesimal
The Theory of Environmental Impact Assessment: Implicit models of policy making
English In spite of its manifest policy importance, environmental impact assessment (EIA) has been the focus of very few explicit attempts at theoretical understanding. Writing about EIA has been guided by assumptions and models that have been implicitly assumed rather than explicitly and systematically explored, formulated, or articulated. How EIA is understood to work, how much policy significance is attributed to it, and the meaning it has in …
Contextualizing Disaster
of the two such as "neoliberal globalization," has produced both wealth and inequality at an unprecedented scale.Following the demise of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, capitalism has emerged as the dominant economic paradigm, expressed as triumphalism, as found in Fukuyama's phrase "End of History" ( ) or in Margaret Thatcher's declaration, "There is no alternative."Social science research has debated the contours of the transformation of sta…
The Media and the Major Emitters: Media Coverage of International Climate Change Policy
News media outlets are crucial for the dissemination of information on climate change issues, but the nature of the coverage varies across the world, depending on local geopolitical and economic contexts. Despite extensive scholarship on media and climate change, less attention has been paid to comparing how climate change is reported by news media in developed and developing countries. This article undertakes a cross-national study of how elite …
Mobilising culture against domestic violence in migrant and ethnic communities: Practitioner perspectives from Aotearoa/New Zealand
Studies on domestic violence in ethnic minority communities highlight that social norms, family structures and cultural practices are among the key triggers of violence against women. Not surprisingly, most anti-violence interventions in these communities aim to redeem women from the oppressive features of these cultures. More recently, however, emergent scholarship advocates mobilising, rather than erasing, culture within existing anti-violence …
Tense Borders: Culture, Identity, and Anxiety in New Zealand's Interweaving Discourses of Immigration and Genetic Modification
Immigration and genetic modification (GM) are two contentious sociocultural issues that have attracted considerable academic, political, and public attention in New Zealand. Although seemingly disparate, the discourses around the two issues share common anxieties about the protection and breaching of a range of boundaries, particularly national, cultural, political, and genetic ones. This article argues that the issues of immigration and GM epito…
Ecological modernization versus sustainable development: The case of genetic modification regulation in New Zealand
Ecological modernization and sustainable development are the two dominant paradigms in environmental policy. This paper assesses the implications of competing understandings of ecological modernization and sustainable development using the case of genetic modification regulation in New Zealand. Although the New Zealand regulatory framework embraces the symbolic language of sustainability, it ultimately adheres to a narrow notion of ecological mod…
A map of the nanoworld: Sizing up the science, politics, and business of the infinitesimal
Sustainable citizenship for a technological world: Negotiating Deliberative Dialectics
Incorporating the notion of sustainability is the biggest challenge for citizenship in a technological era. Existing conceptions of citizenship have not been able to grapple with compounded ecological, economic, cultural, and moral threats facing modern technology-infused societies. Nor has increased public participation, engagement, and dialogue resolved polarized positions on issues such as what constitutes quality of life or what is meant by t…
Generating power: Gender, ethnicity and empowerment in India's Narmada Valley
Current analyses of issues relating to ethnicity and empowerment are silent about the significance of the environment in shaping and being shaped by human relations. For its part, environmental policy research, with few exceptions, has also ignored the dynamics of identity construction and cultural values that inform human relationships with the environment and thus affect environmental sustainability. I address this gap in the scholarship throug…
Sustainable citizenship as a methodology for engagement: Navigating environmental, economic, and technological rationalities
Lateef, Shahida, Muslim Women in India: Political and Private Realities
The Theory of Environmental Impact Assessment: Implicit models of policy making
English In spite of its manifest policy importance, environmental impact assessment (EIA) has been the focus of very few explicit attempts at theoretical understanding. Writing about EIA has been guided by assumptions and models that have been implicitly assumed rather than explicitly and systematically explored, formulated, or articulated. How EIA is understood to work, how much policy significance is attributed to it, and the meaning it has in …
Generating power: Gender, ethnicity and empowerment in India's Narmada Valley
Current analyses of issues relating to ethnicity and empowerment are silent about the significance of the environment in shaping and being shaped by human relations. For its part, environmental policy research, with few exceptions, has also ignored the dynamics of identity construction and cultural values that inform human relationships with the environment and thus affect environmental sustainability. I address this gap in the scholarship throug…
Engendering the Environment? Gender in the World Bank's Environmental Policies
Part 1 Theoretical perspectives: theorizing gender - a framework of analysis a gender evaluation of EIA theories women, development and environment - implications for EIA. Part 2 A case study of the World Bank: the rhetoric of gender, gendered rhetoric - EIA in the context of the World Bank's social policies the World Bank's EIA policy the Sardar Sarovar Project - history and politics EIA in practice revisiting gender and EIA
Tense Borders: Culture, Identity, and Anxiety in New Zealand's Interweaving Discourses of Immigration and Genetic Modification
Immigration and genetic modification (GM) are two contentious sociocultural issues that have attracted considerable academic, political, and public attention in New Zealand. Although seemingly disparate, the discourses around the two issues share common anxieties about the protection and breaching of a range of boundaries, particularly national, cultural, political, and genetic ones. This article argues that the issues of immigration and GM epito…
A map of the nanoworld: Sizing up the science, politics, and business of the infinitesimal
On the Edges of Development: Cultural Interventions
Introduction: From the Edges of Development Kum-Kum Bhavnani, John Foran, Priya Kurian and Debashish Munshi Part 1: Refusing Representations of Development 1. October 17, 1961 Moustafa Bayoumi 2. Ode to Quasheba: Resistance Rituals Among Higgler Women in Jamaica Hume N. Johnson 3. Plural Economies and the Conditions for Refusal: Gendered Developments in Bangkok Ara Wilson 4. Dancing on the Edge: Women, Culture, and a Passion for Change Kum-Kum Bh…
Ecological modernization versus sustainable development: The case of genetic modification regulation in New Zealand
Ecological modernization and sustainable development are the two dominant paradigms in environmental policy. This paper assesses the implications of competing understandings of ecological modernization and sustainable development using the case of genetic modification regulation in New Zealand. Although the New Zealand regulatory framework embraces the symbolic language of sustainability, it ultimately adheres to a narrow notion of ecological mod…
Science, governance, and public participation: An analysis of decision making on genetic modification in Aotearoa/New Zealand
The acceptance of public participation in science and technology governance in liberal democratic contexts is evident in the institutionalization of a variety of mechanisms for participation in recent decades. Yet questions remain about the extent to which institutions have actually transformed their policy practice to embrace democratic governance of techno-scientific decision making. A critical discourse analysis of the response to public parti…
Denial and Distancing in Discourses of Development: Shadow of the ‘Third World’ in New Zealand
Anxieties about development in New Zealand show up in a deep-rooted fear of the ‘Third World’ in the country. We examine how the term ‘Third World’ is deployed in media discourses in economic, social and environmental contexts and how this deployment results in a ‘discursive distancing’ from anything associated with the ‘Third World’. Such distancing demonstrates a fragile national identity that struggles with the contradictions between the natio…
Sustainable citizenship for a technological world: Negotiating Deliberative Dialectics
Incorporating the notion of sustainability is the biggest challenge for citizenship in a technological era. Existing conceptions of citizenship have not been able to grapple with compounded ecological, economic, cultural, and moral threats facing modern technology-infused societies. Nor has increased public participation, engagement, and dialogue resolved polarized positions on issues such as what constitutes quality of life or what is meant by t…
Expanding critical space: Public intellectuals, public relations, and an “outsider” contribution
Sustainable citizenship as a methodology for engagement: Navigating environmental, economic, and technological rationalities
Socio-economic and political barriers to public participation in EIA: Implications for sustainable development in the Maldives
Environmental impact assessment (EIA) is a policy process that can lead to more sustainable development by preventing or mitigating the negative impacts of development projects. Public participation in the EIA process, especially one based on the ideals of deliberative democracy, is essential to deliver on the goal of sustainable development that is arguably the primary objective of EIA. This article specifically focuses on a study of public part…
Redesigning the architecture of policy-making: Engaging with Māori on nanotechnology in New Zealand
Although there is an extensive literature on public engagement on the use of new and emerging technologies such as nanotechnology, there is little evidence of the participation of marginalised indigenous communities in processes of such engagement. How do particular cultural values and worldviews shape the perceptions of new technologies among such indigenous peoples? This article addresses this question through an analysis of the deliberations o…
Public engagement for environmental sustainability in a technological age: Introduction to a symposium
Contextualizing Disaster
of the two such as "neoliberal globalization," has produced both wealth and inequality at an unprecedented scale.Following the demise of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, capitalism has emerged as the dominant economic paradigm, expressed as triumphalism, as found in Fukuyama's phrase "End of History" ( ) or in Margaret Thatcher's declaration, "There is no alternative."Social science research has debated the contours of the transformation of sta…
The Media and the Major Emitters: Media Coverage of International Climate Change Policy
News media outlets are crucial for the dissemination of information on climate change issues, but the nature of the coverage varies across the world, depending on local geopolitical and economic contexts. Despite extensive scholarship on media and climate change, less attention has been paid to comparing how climate change is reported by news media in developed and developing countries. This article undertakes a cross-national study of how elite …
Mobilising culture against domestic violence in migrant and ethnic communities: Practitioner perspectives from Aotearoa/New Zealand
Studies on domestic violence in ethnic minority communities highlight that social norms, family structures and cultural practices are among the key triggers of violence against women. Not surprisingly, most anti-violence interventions in these communities aim to redeem women from the oppressive features of these cultures. More recently, however, emergent scholarship advocates mobilising, rather than erasing, culture within existing anti-violence …
Centering Culture in Public Engagement on Climate Change
Much of the communication efforts on climate change has focused on disseminating scientific projections of climate change to galvanize people into responding to the physical, natural, and biological changes being wrought on the planet by human actions. Yet, this dominant approach of public engagement has been limited because groups of people experience climate change in different ways and have very different approaches to respond to its impacts a…
Public Relations and Sustainable Citizenship: Representing the Unrepresented
"This book examines how public relations might re-imagine itself as an instrument of "sustainable citizenship" by exploring alternative models of representing and building relationships with and among marginalised publics that disrupt the standard discourses of public relations. It argues that public relations needs to situate itself in the larger context of citizenship, the values and ethics that inform it and the attitudes and behaviours that c…
Evidence, interests and argumentation: An environmental policy controversy in a small New Zealand town
This article examines interactions between different forms of authoritative knowledge and evidence in a public dispute over an environmental problem. It draws on a case set in a small coastal town in New Zealand where the local community had expressed concern over the degradation of a river-mouth estuary caused by catchment management works built in the 1950s to support the farming sector. The estuary historically had been an important economic a…
The cultural politics of climate change adaptation: An analysis of the tourism sector in Aotearoa New Zealand
A huge number of climate change adaptation projects are underway to manage risk and minimise vulnerability for communities and businesses. Yet, adaptation processes are often ineffective because of deeply entrenched structures of power and different value systems leading to conflicting priorities for action. This paper draws on the notion of cultural politics to understand climate change adaptation in the tourism sector of Aotearoa New Zealand, a…
Cultures in the laboratory: Mapping similarities and differences between Māori and non-Māori in engaging with gene-editing technologies in Aotearoa, New Zealand
Public engagement on rapidly advancing gene-editing technologies requires attention not merely to science and economics, but also to culture. In focusing on the similarities and differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives on new and emerging genetic technologies, this article reports on a national survey in Aotearoa New Zealand among a stratified random sample of an equal number of Māori and non-Māori participants. Identifying …
Culture and politics in overlapping frames for the future: Multi-dimensional activist organizing and communicating on climate change in Aotearoa New Zealand
Responding to climate change requires us to reimagine not only our future on a planet that is rapidly changing, but also how we organize to create political change. The climate movement and those involved in climate activism frame action on climate change in a diverse manner, articulating multiple possibilities for, and means to achieve, a different society. This article explores the ways in which activist groups in Aotearoa New Zealand work with…
Political science (28 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Law (18 works) · Politics (15 works) · Gender Studies (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Aotearoa (10 works) · Economics (10 works) · Environmental ethics (10 works) · Climate Change Communication and Perception (7 works)