Increasingly, a new generation of health communication scholars are drawing our attention to the performative nature of health communication. In our experiences of health and illness; in our interactions with our loved ones in a variety of health contexts; in our interactions with healers and health care providers; in our sharing of our stories of health, illness, healing, and dying with others in our communities; in our participation in social and political processes that seek to address issues of healthcare, we continually perform ourselves. Performance in this sense is both public and private. We perform our selves in health communication interactions; and perform often for others, for the purposes of understanding, sharing, creating community and bringing about change. It is through our performances that we co-construct stories of health that articulate the violence inflicted by oppressive social structures, and suggest avenues for social change.
The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and the solidarities we have yet to build Mohan Jyoti Dutta I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to think. Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit. The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It ...