title: The embodied and lived experiences of welfare and care for highly impaired, high performance para-sport athletes in Aotearoa New Zealand

authors: Lowry, Amanda

abstract: Aligning with calls in critical disability studies to bring the body and impairment into disability sport, this thesis examines the welfare and care experiences of highly impaired athletes in high-performance sport. While a focus on athlete welfare has gained some international prominence, and a duty of care is increasingly invoked as an organisational and coaching responsibility, these developments remain largely disconnected from disability.  
The research is centred around two main objectives. First, to amplify the lived and embodied experiences of highly impaired, high performance disabled athletes as they prepare for, train, and compete in sport, and those who support them. Second, to understand how sporting institutions and regulations (within the broader context of government funding and national health care provision) influence welfare and care practices for high performance disabled athletes. 
Crip methodologies and Indigenous Māori storytelling methodologies such as pūrākau centres lived experience as a site of resistance and knowledge production. Using a reflexive, qualitative approach, including semi-structured interviews, autoethnographic vignettes, and visual ethnography, I expose how impairment effects are managed in ableist sporting environments that valorise normative athlete ideals. I interviewed 11 high-performance paraathletes, seven organisational representatives and two support workers. 
The research highlights the material, emotional, and temporal labour of care in highperformance sport. Findings are organised around three core themes: the embodied labour of care, impairment effects and interdependence; the tension between crip time, care time, and performance time; the intersecting structural, institutional, and ableist barriers that shape and constrain highly impaired athletes’ participation in disability sport.  
The first theme shows how high-performance sport privileges autonomous, efficient, and normative bodies, while marginalising those whose messy, gritty embodied impairment effects demand more time, support, and interdependence. The findings bring to the fore biosocial, psycho-emotional costs of navigating care and its impact on athlete welfare. The second theme uncovers how the rhythms of highly impaired bodies disrupt the linear, clockbound time of high-performance sport, revealing the incompatibility between care time and high performance cultures. It highlights the vital yet invisible labour of support workers, ii unacknowledged in contemporary sporting discourse. The third theme addresses the barriers that highly impaired athletes face when navigating ableist institutional and organisational structures. It exposes the complexity of the ableist disability sporting landscape and the gap between duty of care rhetoric and practice. 
Ultimately, this thesis calls for a radical reimagining of disability sport, one that centres interdependence, affirms bodily difference, and addresses the structural failures that marginalise highly impaired athletes.

text: The embodied and lived experiences of welfare and care for highly impaired, high performance para-sport athletes in Aotearoa New Zealand Aligning with calls in critical disability studies to bring the body and impairment into disability sport, this thesis examines the welfare and care experiences of highly impaired athletes in high-performance sport. While a focus on athlete welfare has gained some international prominence, and a duty of care is increasingly invoked as an organisational and coaching responsibility, these developments remain largely disconnected from disability.  
The research is centred around two main objectives. First, to amplify the lived and embodied experiences of highly impaired, high performance disabled athletes as they prepare for, train, and compete in sport, and those who support them. Second, to understand how sporting institutions and regulations (within the broader context of government funding and national health care provision) influence welfare and care practices for high performance disabled athletes. 
Crip methodologies and Indigenous Māori storytelling methodologies such as pūrākau centres lived experience as a site of resistance and knowledge production. Using a reflexive, qualitative approach, including semi-structured interviews, autoethnographic vignettes, and visual ethnography, I expose how impairment effects are managed in ableist sporting environments that valorise normative athlete ideals. I interviewed 11 high-performance paraathletes, seven organisational representatives and two support workers. 
The research highlights the material, emotional, and temporal labour of care in highperformance sport. Findings are organised around three core themes: the embodied labour of care, impairment effects and interdependence; the tension between crip time, care time, and performance time; the intersecting structural, institutional, and ableist barriers that shape and constrain highly impaired athletes’ participation in disability sport.  
The first theme shows how high-performance sport privileges autonomous, efficient, and normative bodies, while marginalising those whose messy, gritty embodied impairment effects demand more time, support, and interdependence. The findings bring to the fore biosocial, psycho-emotional costs of navigating care and its impact on athlete welfare. The second theme uncovers how the rhythms of highly impaired bodies disrupt the linear, clockbound time of high-performance sport, revealing the incompatibility between care time and high performance cultures. It highlights the vital yet invisible labour of support workers, ii unacknowledged in contemporary sporting discourse. The third theme addresses the barriers that highly impaired athletes face when navigating ableist institutional and organisational structures. It exposes the complexity of the ableist disability sporting landscape and the gap between duty of care rhetoric and practice. 
Ultimately, this thesis calls for a radical reimagining of disability sport, one that centres interdependence, affirms bodily difference, and addresses the structural failures that marginalise highly impaired athletes.

year: 2025-10

title: Balancing openness with Indigenous data sovereignty: An opportunity to leave no one behind in the journey to sequence all of life

authors: Cartney, Ann M. Mc

abstract: The field of genomics has benefited greatly from its "openness" approach to data sharing. However, with the increasing volume of sequence information being created and stored and the growing number of international genomics efforts, the equity of openness is under question. The United Nations Convention of Biodiversity aims to develop and adopt a standard policy on access and benefit-sharing for sequence information across signatory parties. This standardization will have profound implications on genomics research, requiring a new definition of open data sharing. The redefinition of openness is not unwarranted, as its limitations have unintentionally introduced barriers of engagement to some, including Indigenous Peoples. This commentary provides an insight into the key challenges of openness faced by the researchers who aspire to protect and conserve global biodiversity, including Indigenous flora and fauna, and presents immediate, practical solutions that, if implemented, will equip the genomics community with both the diversity and inclusivity required to respectfully protect global biodiversity.

text: Balancing openness with Indigenous data sovereignty: An opportunity to leave no one behind in the journey to sequence all of life The field of genomics has benefited greatly from its "openness" approach to data sharing. However, with the increasing volume of sequence information being created and stored and the growing number of international genomics efforts, the equity of openness is under question. The United Nations Convention of Biodiversity aims to develop and adopt a standard policy on access and benefit-sharing for sequence information across signatory parties. This standardization will have profound implications on genomics research, requiring a new definition of open data sharing. The redefinition of openness is not unwarranted, as its limitations have unintentionally introduced barriers of engagement to some, including Indigenous Peoples. This commentary provides an insight into the key challenges of openness faced by the researchers who aspire to protect and conserve global biodiversity, including Indigenous flora and fauna, and presents immediate, practical solutions that, if implemented, will equip the genomics community with both the diversity and inclusivity required to respectfully protect global biodiversity.

year: 2022

title: Pyroclastic deposits and volcanic history of Mayor Island

authors: Buck, M.D.

subjects: pyroclastics

abstract: The emergent summit of Mayor Island, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand, is a peralkaline rhyolite volcano constructed by: a sequence of lava flows, the Tutaretare Rhyolite Formation(new); and pyroclastic deposits, the Oira Pyroclastite Formation (new). These 2 formations constitute the Mayor Island Group (new). The pyroclastic deposits mantle most of the outer slopes of the island, in places exceeding 100 m in thickness, and also occur interbedded with lava flows of the main cone. The pyroclastics have been informally assigned on the basis of their compositional, welding and textural, and sedimentary structural characteristics to one or other of 15 lithotypes which may be related to palrticular modes of eruption and emplacement, of both airfall (phreatic, phreatomagmatic, phreatoplinian, and plinian types) and pyroclastic flow (ignimbrite, nuee ardente, and base surge types) origins. A sixteenth lithotype comprises epiclastic deposits formed possibly by catastrophic overspill from an ancestral crater lake. Two new radiocarbon dates on logs from the pyroclastic deposits are recorded: (Wk105) 8000 ± 70 years B.P., and (Wk77) 6340 ± 190 years B.P. Recognition of the calcalkaline Rotoehu and possibly Rotoma Ashes on Mayor Island, together with the new radiocarbon dates, enables definition of 8 phases of major volcanic activity, each separated by relatively quiescent periods with erosion and paleosol formation. Volcanism commenced sometime prior to 42 000 years ago and has continued intermittently up to the eruption of the young dome lavas, possibly less than 1000 years ago. At present, only 1 Mayor Island-derived tephra has been identified on the mainland of the North Island, namely the Tuhua Tephra dated (Wk77) at source as 6340 ± 190 years B.P. However, the character and magnitude of several of the pyroclastic units on Mayor Island is such that recognition of other peralkaline tephras is anticipated in northern North Island. © 1981 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

text: Pyroclastic deposits and volcanic history of Mayor Island The emergent summit of Mayor Island, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand, is a peralkaline rhyolite volcano constructed by: a sequence of lava flows, the Tutaretare Rhyolite Formation(new); and pyroclastic deposits, the Oira Pyroclastite Formation (new). These 2 formations constitute the Mayor Island Group (new). The pyroclastic deposits mantle most of the outer slopes of the island, in places exceeding 100 m in thickness, and also occur interbedded with lava flows of the main cone. The pyroclastics have been informally assigned on the basis of their compositional, welding and textural, and sedimentary structural characteristics to one or other of 15 lithotypes which may be related to palrticular modes of eruption and emplacement, of both airfall (phreatic, phreatomagmatic, phreatoplinian, and plinian types) and pyroclastic flow (ignimbrite, nuee ardente, and base surge types) origins. A sixteenth lithotype comprises epiclastic deposits formed possibly by catastrophic overspill from an ancestral crater lake. Two new radiocarbon dates on logs from the pyroclastic deposits are recorded: (Wk105) 8000 ± 70 years B.P., and (Wk77) 6340 ± 190 years B.P. Recognition of the calcalkaline Rotoehu and possibly Rotoma Ashes on Mayor Island, together with the new radiocarbon dates, enables definition of 8 phases of major volcanic activity, each separated by relatively quiescent periods with erosion and paleosol formation. Volcanism commenced sometime prior to 42 000 years ago and has continued intermittently up to the eruption of the young dome lavas, possibly less than 1000 years ago. At present, only 1 Mayor Island-derived tephra has been identified on the mainland of the North Island, namely the Tuhua Tephra dated (Wk77) at source as 6340 ± 190 years B.P. However, the character and magnitude of several of the pyroclastic units on Mayor Island is such that recognition of other peralkaline tephras is anticipated in northern North Island. © 1981 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

year: 1981-07-01