Susan Wardell
Biographic Data
| ID | 3652181 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Susan Wardell |
| GIVEN NAMES | Susan |
| FAMILY NAME | Wardell |
| SIGNATURE | WARDELL S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Otago |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 7 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 16 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Worlds on fire
Getting the crowd to care
Campaigns for personal health expenses make up the largest and fastest-growing segment of donation-based crowdfunding. Set against the backdrop of retrenchment and disinvestment in public healthcare systems across the global North, health-related crowdfunding is a way to navigate increasingly marketised systems of social reproduction. Despite high profile success stories, campaigns vary significantly in their ability to capture the hearts, and ul…
A critical analysis of trans-visibility through online medical crowdfunding
In contexts where many people face barriers to accessing gender-affirming care through public systems, some turn to online crowdfunding to fundraise for private care pathways. Crowdfunding platforms invite people to share personal information, stories, and photos publicly, in order to elicit donations. In this article we draw on empirical data from a multimethodological three-year study of medical crowdfunding in Aotearoa New Zealand, with a focu…
The Glass Witness
Donation-based crowdfunding platforms invite people to tell stories of unmet health needs in a hybrid form-using both words and images-but research to date has not addressed the role of visual practice in this setting, in any detail. In this Photo Essay I present an art installation responding to this gap and informed by empirical data from a three-year study of medical crowdfunding in Aotearoa New Zealand. Through a feminist new materialist lens…
Fat and deserving
Medical crowdfunding is an individualizing and privatizing response to healthcare inequalities, in which citizens use online platforms to share (written and visual) stories about health-related needs in order to elicit donations. We present data from a study of medical crowdfunding in Aotearoa New Zealand, drawing on critical theory and fat studies to analyze weight-loss-related campaigns, with a focus on visibility and visuality. We highlight th…
To wish you well
Crowdfunding platforms apply a marketized, competitive logic to healthcare, increasingly functioning as generative spaces in which worthy citizens and biopolitical subjects are produced. Using a lens of biopower, this article considers what sort of biopolitical subjectivities were produced in and through New Zealand crowdfunding campaigns during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown. It focuses on a discursive and dialogical analysis of 59 online medical cr…
Southern // Cross
This poem was written for the University of Otago 2020 ‘Writer’ competition, and was awarded first place (Staff Poetry category) by judge Dr. Sue Wootten. The poem responds to the competition prompt ‘Only Connect...’, which is the epigraph from E. M. Forster’s novel, Howards End (1910). Given this prompt, and given the timing of the competition (shortly after New Zealand’s major national COVID-19 lockdown), I aimed to use poetic language and meta…
We're All Watching Each Other’
Restrictions implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in Aotearoa New Zealand changed the space and sociality of supermarkets significantly. Personal management strategies such as handwashing, social distancing, and the use of facemasks transformed the lived experience of supermarket workers, making them a part of the emergency infrastructure of Aotearoa New Zealand’s public health response. This small qualitative study uses interviews a…
Dialogical Sense-Making in the Digital Public Sphere
This article explores the contested public discourses of citizenship and care surrounding national media coverage of the news story of ‘Baby Leo’, a New Zealand baby born overseas in 2015. Baby Leo’s diagnosis of Down Syndrome soon after his birth, precipitated the mother’s alleged abandonment of the child, the expat New Zealand father then fundraising for the child’s (and his) rapid return to New Zealand via a virally successfully crowdfunding c…
Threshold Concepts in Social Anthropology
This article considers what UK-based higher education researchers Jan Meyer and Ray Land describe as “threshold concepts,” asking how these concepts might apply to the field of social/cultural anthropology. This is explored in relation to the practical pedagogical project of constructing a curated online resource kit to support students who are “bridging” into social anthropology from other disciplines. In this article, we review the literature o…
Dividing the Light
Images can be powerful – and the choices that go into their making, both revealing and obscuring. In 2019 I undertook to make a stained-glass window, based on a photo I had taken ten years prior at a missionary base in South Sudan. I use reflections on this art project to highlight the idea of memory as practice, with a focus on the slippery and sometimes problematic ethics of ethnographic representation as a positioned, porous, and ‘becoming’ su…
Naming and framing ecological distress
We are living in a time of massive anthropogenic ecological and climatic shifts. Awareness of these changes and their effects on human lives is increasing, with recognised impacts on mental health. At present, a variety of different terms exist to describe ecological change-related distress. They range from the philosophical to the clinical, and are already beginning to form part of professional practice, as well as popular discourse, with prescr…
Psychometrics as moral labour
This ethnography-based research article explores the negotiation of well-being and subjectivity for youth workers in a Faith-Based Organisation (Canterbury Youth Services [CYS]) in Christchurch, New Zealand. We highlight the emergent significance of the Clifton StrengthsFinder psychometric assessment as a biopolitical mechanism, operating to actualise vocational identities and optimise ‘life and health’ of CYS leaders, in response to burnout and …
Weaving Together
This essay, pitched at a general (non-academic) audience, won the Maxim Institute Essay Competition in July 2019. It responded to a brief asking entrants to address the role of aroha and manaakitanga as frameworks for New Zealand’s long-term policy and cultural response to the Christchurch Mosque attack. The essay is presented below, with added (theoretical, methodological, pedagogical, and applied) discussion questions for social anthropologists…
A Stranger in the Name of Jesus
This article uses the author’s ethnographic case study of a Christian youth work community in Uganda to inform a discussion around the theoretical relationship between cosmopolitan ideologies and Christian care ethics. Fieldwork conducted among the youth workers of ‘Moment of Truth Evangelistic Ministries’ (MOTEM), in Kampala, Uganda, between 2012 and 2014 highlighted a moral obligation to care. Two points of similarity are shown between this and…
Fetal genetic difference and a cosmopolitan vernacular of the right to choose
Naming and framing ecological distress
We are living in a time of massive anthropogenic ecological and climatic shifts. Awareness of these changes and their effects on human lives is increasing, with recognised impacts on mental health. At present, a variety of different terms exist to describe ecological change-related distress. They range from the philosophical to the clinical, and are already beginning to form part of professional practice, as well as popular discourse, with prescr…
A critical analysis of trans-visibility through online medical crowdfunding
In contexts where many people face barriers to accessing gender-affirming care through public systems, some turn to online crowdfunding to fundraise for private care pathways. Crowdfunding platforms invite people to share personal information, stories, and photos publicly, in order to elicit donations. In this article we draw on empirical data from a multimethodological three-year study of medical crowdfunding in Aotearoa New Zealand, with a focu…
Fat and deserving
Medical crowdfunding is an individualizing and privatizing response to healthcare inequalities, in which citizens use online platforms to share (written and visual) stories about health-related needs in order to elicit donations. We present data from a study of medical crowdfunding in Aotearoa New Zealand, drawing on critical theory and fat studies to analyze weight-loss-related campaigns, with a focus on visibility and visuality. We highlight th…
Dialogical Sense-Making in the Digital Public Sphere
This article explores the contested public discourses of citizenship and care surrounding national media coverage of the news story of ‘Baby Leo’, a New Zealand baby born overseas in 2015. Baby Leo’s diagnosis of Down Syndrome soon after his birth, precipitated the mother’s alleged abandonment of the child, the expat New Zealand father then fundraising for the child’s (and his) rapid return to New Zealand via a virally successfully crowdfunding c…
Fetal genetic difference and a cosmopolitan vernacular of the right to choose
A Stranger in the Name of Jesus
This article uses the author’s ethnographic case study of a Christian youth work community in Uganda to inform a discussion around the theoretical relationship between cosmopolitan ideologies and Christian care ethics. Fieldwork conducted among the youth workers of ‘Moment of Truth Evangelistic Ministries’ (MOTEM), in Kampala, Uganda, between 2012 and 2014 highlighted a moral obligation to care. Two points of similarity are shown between this and…
Psychometrics as moral labour
This ethnography-based research article explores the negotiation of well-being and subjectivity for youth workers in a Faith-Based Organisation (Canterbury Youth Services [CYS]) in Christchurch, New Zealand. We highlight the emergent significance of the Clifton StrengthsFinder psychometric assessment as a biopolitical mechanism, operating to actualise vocational identities and optimise ‘life and health’ of CYS leaders, in response to burnout and …
Weaving Together
This essay, pitched at a general (non-academic) audience, won the Maxim Institute Essay Competition in July 2019. It responded to a brief asking entrants to address the role of aroha and manaakitanga as frameworks for New Zealand’s long-term policy and cultural response to the Christchurch Mosque attack. The essay is presented below, with added (theoretical, methodological, pedagogical, and applied) discussion questions for social anthropologists…
Naming and framing ecological distress
We are living in a time of massive anthropogenic ecological and climatic shifts. Awareness of these changes and their effects on human lives is increasing, with recognised impacts on mental health. At present, a variety of different terms exist to describe ecological change-related distress. They range from the philosophical to the clinical, and are already beginning to form part of professional practice, as well as popular discourse, with prescr…
Dividing the Light
Images can be powerful – and the choices that go into their making, both revealing and obscuring. In 2019 I undertook to make a stained-glass window, based on a photo I had taken ten years prior at a missionary base in South Sudan. I use reflections on this art project to highlight the idea of memory as practice, with a focus on the slippery and sometimes problematic ethics of ethnographic representation as a positioned, porous, and ‘becoming’ su…
Southern // Cross
This poem was written for the University of Otago 2020 ‘Writer’ competition, and was awarded first place (Staff Poetry category) by judge Dr. Sue Wootten. The poem responds to the competition prompt ‘Only Connect...’, which is the epigraph from E. M. Forster’s novel, Howards End (1910). Given this prompt, and given the timing of the competition (shortly after New Zealand’s major national COVID-19 lockdown), I aimed to use poetic language and meta…
We're All Watching Each Other’
Restrictions implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in Aotearoa New Zealand changed the space and sociality of supermarkets significantly. Personal management strategies such as handwashing, social distancing, and the use of facemasks transformed the lived experience of supermarket workers, making them a part of the emergency infrastructure of Aotearoa New Zealand’s public health response. This small qualitative study uses interviews a…
Dialogical Sense-Making in the Digital Public Sphere
This article explores the contested public discourses of citizenship and care surrounding national media coverage of the news story of ‘Baby Leo’, a New Zealand baby born overseas in 2015. Baby Leo’s diagnosis of Down Syndrome soon after his birth, precipitated the mother’s alleged abandonment of the child, the expat New Zealand father then fundraising for the child’s (and his) rapid return to New Zealand via a virally successfully crowdfunding c…
Threshold Concepts in Social Anthropology
This article considers what UK-based higher education researchers Jan Meyer and Ray Land describe as “threshold concepts,” asking how these concepts might apply to the field of social/cultural anthropology. This is explored in relation to the practical pedagogical project of constructing a curated online resource kit to support students who are “bridging” into social anthropology from other disciplines. In this article, we review the literature o…
To wish you well
Crowdfunding platforms apply a marketized, competitive logic to healthcare, increasingly functioning as generative spaces in which worthy citizens and biopolitical subjects are produced. Using a lens of biopower, this article considers what sort of biopolitical subjectivities were produced in and through New Zealand crowdfunding campaigns during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown. It focuses on a discursive and dialogical analysis of 59 online medical cr…
Getting the crowd to care
Campaigns for personal health expenses make up the largest and fastest-growing segment of donation-based crowdfunding. Set against the backdrop of retrenchment and disinvestment in public healthcare systems across the global North, health-related crowdfunding is a way to navigate increasingly marketised systems of social reproduction. Despite high profile success stories, campaigns vary significantly in their ability to capture the hearts, and ul…
A critical analysis of trans-visibility through online medical crowdfunding
In contexts where many people face barriers to accessing gender-affirming care through public systems, some turn to online crowdfunding to fundraise for private care pathways. Crowdfunding platforms invite people to share personal information, stories, and photos publicly, in order to elicit donations. In this article we draw on empirical data from a multimethodological three-year study of medical crowdfunding in Aotearoa New Zealand, with a focu…
The Glass Witness
Donation-based crowdfunding platforms invite people to tell stories of unmet health needs in a hybrid form-using both words and images-but research to date has not addressed the role of visual practice in this setting, in any detail. In this Photo Essay I present an art installation responding to this gap and informed by empirical data from a three-year study of medical crowdfunding in Aotearoa New Zealand. Through a feminist new materialist lens…
Fat and deserving
Medical crowdfunding is an individualizing and privatizing response to healthcare inequalities, in which citizens use online platforms to share (written and visual) stories about health-related needs in order to elicit donations. We present data from a study of medical crowdfunding in Aotearoa New Zealand, drawing on critical theory and fat studies to analyze weight-loss-related campaigns, with a focus on visibility and visuality. We highlight th…
Worlds on fire
Sociology (14 works) · Political science (10 works) · Law (8 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Aotearoa (5 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Gender Studies (5 works) · Politics (5 works) · Psychology (5 works)