This chapter is the introductory chapter of this book, which starts with an overall historical view of what had happened in China from 1964 to 2000, and why this period is chosen to be re-analysed. The focus of this chapter, however, is on the limitations of the existing scholarship on China's social dynamics and change, which are found to be characterised by the evident absence of ordinary, but aspirational, people in the dichotomous paradigm of examining societal forces at work and possible subsequent changes to socio-economic and socio-political landscape and climate. Since this research aims to fill this knowledge and analytical gap, which has both theoretical and practical implications, the objective of this current chapter is to place the analysis in its historical and theoretical contexts.

As noted in the preface, over the past four or so decades a significant amount of research has studied a fast-changing China. The volume of this body of literature, in both English and Chinese, is such that many new and young researchers, and general readers as well, are often overwhelmed or may even be scared off this overheated research field. Careful review reveals, however, that past research has predominantly centred on either the ruling party or its outspoken opponents, and the so-called silent majority of China's large population is examined only sporadically, if at all. This dichotomous paradigm is reviewed in the second section of this chapter; however, two general epistemological, cognitive and methodological issues seem to be behind the research focus.

The first problem is that of ‘herd’ or ‘flocking’ behaviour in the academic research. This is a rather broad issue and beyond the scope of this analysis, but it is worth noting that modern-day academic fields and their practices have certain limits and biases. Flocking behaviour – defined by one French professor, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, as the tendency for a particular subject to ‘hog the attention of the scientific community while equally important subjects are neglected’ (Tirole 2017, 97) – is one such constraint. In a Chinese phrase, it might be termed renyun yiyun (echoing the views of others or repeating what someone has said). In the field of China studies, this herd behaviour refers to at least two types of issues.

In the past four or so decades, a significant amount of research has been undertaken into the rapid and constant social changes happening in China and the dynamics behind this process, resulting in a large body of literature on a wide range of issues and aspects of China's recent transformations. However, most such literature has focused either on political, ideological and policy problems at the macro level or on the different forms of spontaneous resistance and protest at the micro level, providing various perspectives for observing and interpreting what has happened in China. Less studied is the manner in which the majority of everyday Chinese people have reacted to and influenced changes in society over a long period of time. This gap limits our understanding of Chinese society, its societal dynamics and its changing trends to the perspectives of elites and their rivals. Drawing upon a novel perspective of competitive social repositioning, this book seeks to fill this analytical gap by re-analysing the societal dynamics driving social changes in China from 1964, when Mao publicly set out his successor selection criteria, to 2000, when Jiang Zemin promoted his Three-Represents Theory to modify the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) long-held ideology and practices.

The role of everyday Chinese people in making and influencing social reactions and actions in China is a puzzle that has fascinated me since my youth. I was forced a few years earlier than many teenagers to be a responsible family member and to pay attention to what was taking place in inner Beijing during the early weeks of the Cultural Revolution. A few weeks into the Mao-incited anarchy, a shooting incident that saw bullets fired from a neighbouring school through our house was a sharp awakening, bringing my childhood to an early and abrupt end. In contemporary Chinese political discourse, there is a famous saying that the cannon blast of the October Revolution of Russia delivered Marxism–Leninism to China. In my case, as I have occasionally joked, the shots striking our house shocked me out of my preteen mind. My family was soon relocated to a then-remote, and seemingly safe, university campus in the western outskirts of Beijing.

That was a ridiculous time full of strange things, very different from what I was taught at both home and school.

Introduction

This chapter develops a critique of recent approaches to managing migration in Aotearoa New Zealand (hereafter, Aotearoa) and reflects on possibilities for centring relational ethics and upending the dominance of settler colonialism in migration and migrant lives. Migration has become a focus of increasing state attention in Aotearoa over recent decades. Consecutive governments have looked to migration as a response to labour market gaps and a contributor to economic growth while also regulating the effects of migration to minimise its perceived negative consequences in society. This is particularly the case in relation to temporary migration programmes focused on labour and educational migrants, which is the primary focus of this chapter. As in other settler colonial (Roberston 2015; Vosko 2022) and labour migration (Yeoh 2022) regimes, temporary migration programmes in Aotearoa have differentiated social freedoms and rights and partitioned off access to public resources for all but the most desired migrants.

The ethics that underpin temporary migration programmes centre on economic calculus and minimalist human rights, sustaining basic standards in the maintenance of migrant lives without opportunities for transformation. These ethics reflect a consensus view of migrants as holding economic value that can be extracted to achieve national prosperity, even as concerns about migrant exploitation, fraud and exclusion have become widespread. As such, contemporary approaches to temporary migration in Aotearoa and other settler colonial contexts continue the legacy of settler colonialism which also involves the marginalisation or outright erasure of Indigenous peoples (Terruhn 2014). Leveraging off the focus on transformational politics in this collection and the disruptions engendered by the Covid-19 global pandemic, I bring forward the possibility of relational ethics and the significance of such ethics to work against settler colonialism's imprint on migration. In doing so, the chapter contributes to current international discussion of ethics in migration (Tedeschi 2021; Vosko 2022; Yeoh 2022) by making a case for understandings of and approaches to migration that prioritise interdependence, mutual empowerment and reciprocity as substitutes for the control, marginalisation and exclusion which dominate the current consensus around migration management.

I develop the argument in this chapter from my position as a Pākehā migration researcher who is a descendant of White settler migrants who arrived in Aotearoa in the nineteenth century. My ancestors came primarily from Ireland; some came in families and some as individuals. They were encouraged to come.

The approach to paid parental leave (PPL) policy design and rollout in Australia has been complex and slow when compared internationally. Australia was one of the last OECD nations to adopt a government-funded national scheme in 2011 and it remains one of the least generous in terms of both the length and the amount of paid leave. After more than a decade of inaction to modernise and adequately fund PPL, Australia's scheme has not kept pace and now lags significantly behind the majority of other OECD nations. Consequently, the impact is felt across our economy and society.

Australia's progress on women's economic participation and opportunity is regressing, according to the World Economic Forum. We have a very gendered division of labour by international standards. Australia's current parental leave provisions are no longer considered adequate or fit for purpose.

This insightful paper brings to the fore an extensive exploration of the ‘untold story’ of Australia's parental leave history and its impacts. The paper matches historical movements with specific laws highlighting the intricacies of how Australia compares and contrasts between Canada, Germany and Sweden and why reform is needed.

It provides a solid baseline from which policymakers can apply international research and evidence to design a competitive, world-class PPL scheme for Australia into the next decade. At whilst there is a renewed appetite by the current federal government to further invest in paid parental leave and childcare with new policies coming into effect by 2024, fundamentally, this paper begs the question, will it be enough?

This paper asks: ‘who cares about the next generation?’, a crucial question that both government and business must confront and rise to meet in a post- Covid economy – the act of care-giving and role of caregivers in our society has never been more exposed as under-valued and under-invested in.

The beneficiaries of well-funded, accessible, gender-equal PPL are not only women and children, in terms of improved health and economic security. It also facilitates greater workforce inclusion and normalises men's ability to contribute to caregiving responsibilities, strengthening family relationships and driving greater economic output. The evidence is clear, PPL is good for families, businesses and our overall economic growth.

Elias and Education

Norbert Elias seemed willing to pursue any topic within the purview of sociology, and, indeed, several academic disciplines beyond. For this reason, it is surprising that he never systematically engaged with the sociology of education, pedagogy or educational studies generally. As my recent book argued, however, Elias did provide scattered thoughts and clues as to what this analysis might look like (Lybeck 2019). Meanwhile, the field of figurational sociology of education is slowly become a thriving body of research despite the challenges of filling in considerable gaps in historical, empirical and theoretical detail. Consider this chapter as an invitation to contribute to and join this emerging conversation – this growing ‘social fund’ of knowledge.

One reason scholars are turning to Elias could be the oversaturation of Bourdieusian approaches in the field of sociology of education. Figurational approaches could secure the most valuable aspects of Bourdieu, Foucault and Abbott's sociology while avoiding some of their pitfalls (Abbott 2016; Bourdieu 1988; Foucault 2002). In the case of Bourdieu, I particularly drew on Elias's sociology of knowledge to challenge the French sociologist’s idea of a ‘cultural arbitrary’ so common in contemporary education studies. In part, these studies – often linked to the analysis of social mobility issues and educational inequalities – misrepresent Bourdieu's original position, but nonetheless, the consensus today appears to be that symbolic and cultural content taught in schools is largely the product of symbolic domination – and, hence, arbitrary. Elias not only demonstrated the genuine power and value of certain forms of knowledge – for example, in his essay on the maelstrom (where second-order knowledge of whirlpools enables one of the fishermen to escape) (Elias 2007, 105–78); he also provided a fully social ontology of knowledge such that the traditional forms of epistemology and education we are used to in ‘modern’ liberal societies become far too individualistic in contrast (Elias 2007; see Hughes and Mennell chapter two, this volume). Combining these observations with an integration of Elias's symbol theory should provide us with a novel interpretation of the social function of education as being centrally concerned with the intergenerational transfer of knowledge; knowledge being a collective, social fund, not any one individual's property.

Symbol Theory

We can begin with Elias's sociology of knowledge, which, unlike his sociology of education, was well-developed and collated by Elias himself.

The Collected Works of Norbert Elias 18 volumes. University College Dublin Press (2006–2014)

Volume 1

Early Writings (UCD Press, 2006)

• 1 Three-day excursion to the Riesengebirge (1914)

• 2 On seeing in nature (1921)

• 3 Idea and individual: A critical investigation of the concept of history (1922)

• 4 Idea and individual: A contribution to the philosophy of history (1924)

• 5 Anecdotes (1924)

• 6 Contribution to the debate on Karl Mannheim: The importance of competition in the intellectual field (1929)

• 7 On primitive art (1929)

• 8 The sociology of German anti-Semitism (1929)

• 9 The kitsch style and the age of kitsch (1935)

• 10 The expulsion of the Huguenots from France (1935)

• Appendix: The emergence of the modern natural sciences (c. 1925–1926)

Volume 2

The Court Society (UCD Press, 2006)

Volume 3

On the Process of Civilisation: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (UCD Press, 2012)

Volume 4

The Established and the Outsiders, Norbert Elias and John L. Scotson (UCD Press, 2008)

Volume 5

What is Sociolog y? (UCD Press, 2012)

Volume 6

The Loneliness of the Dying AND Humana Conditio (UCD Press, 2009)

Volume 7

Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilising Process, Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning (UCD Press, 2008)

Volume 8

Involvement and Detachment (UCD Press, 2007)

Volume 9

An Essay on Time (UCD Press, 2007)

Volume 10

The Society of Individuals (UCD Press, 2010)

Volume 11

Studies on the Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (UCD Press, 2013)

Volume 12

Mozart, and Other Essays on Courtly Art (UCD Press, 2010)

• 1 The Fate of German baroque poetry (1987)

• 2 Watteau's Pilgrimage to the Island of Love (1983)

• 3 Mozart: The Sociology of a Genius (1991)

Volume 13

The Symbol Theory (UCD Press, 2011)

Volume 14

Essays I: On the Sociolog y of Knowledge and the Sciences (UCD Press, 2011)

• 1 Sociology of knowledge: New perspectives (1971)

• 2 Dynamics of consciousness within that of societies (1970)

• 3 On nature (1986)

• 4 The sciences: Towards a theory (1974)

• 5 Theory of science and history of science: Comments on a recent discussion (1972)

• 6 Introduction to Scientific Establishments and Hierarchies, Norbert Elias and Richard Whitley (1982)

• 7 Scientific establishments (1980)

• 8 On the creed of a nominalist: Observations on Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1971)

• 9 Science or sciences? Contribution to a debate with reality-blind philosophers (1985)

Norbert Elias (1897–1990) has often been acclaimed as the ‘last great classical sociologist’. Zygmunt Bauman (1979, 117) recognised Elias as ‘the great sociologist of our time, who long ago anticipated solution to problems with which all sociologists all over the world keep trying (in vain) to come to grips’. While a great deal has changed, Bauman's assertion retains its currency. Elias broached apparently intractable problems that continue to haunt twenty-first century sociology. Across a long scientific life, Elias attempted to integrate empirically founded sociological knowledge with insights afforded by psychology and history. Yet for a long time, Elias was consigned to the margins of sociology. When broader recognition for his achievement arrived in the last three decades of the twentieth century, it was subject to misrepresentation, sometimes naive and sometimes gratuitous, as peddling a superannuated evolutionary or Eurocentric tradition. Against the activist temper of post-68 sociology, Elias's historical sense of sociological prudence smacked for some as the quietist apologetics of an aloof mandarin.

Despite Elias's legendary outsider status, the past four decades have witnessed an ascending curve of recognition by English-speaking scholars. This trajectory has been consolidated by the authoritative scholarly English edition of The Collected Works of Norbert Elias (UCD Press, 2006–14). Running to eighteen volumes, including three volumes of collected essays, fourteen books and a volume of interviews, the Collected Works amply demonstrates the scope and consistency of Elias's determination to reorientate sociology that he sustained, refined and distilled over more than six decades (see Appendix for a list of publications available in English). Elias's published output increased significantly after he retired from full-time teaching duties. Alongside the Collected Works as a fundamental resource for scholars, previously unpublished work, lectures and drafts have more recently been made available that allow us to look over Elias’s shoulder as he engaged in the creative process of further developing his model of sociology.

A Decolonising Lens to Migration

Current events around the globe, such as the Covid-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements, have all played a part in shining a spotlight on global struggles for social and racial justice. Locally, in Aotearoa New Zealand (hereafter, Aotearoa), recent events such as the Ōtautahi Christchurch mosque attacks and the Migrant Lives Matter movement have echoed these sentiments. Such events overall have also highlighted the pre-existing issues of differential inclusion, exclusion and precarity faced by migrant communities in host nations.

Aotearoa, in particular, is a nation built on migration, beginning with the arrival of Māori, through to the arrival of and colonisation by European settlers, and continuing on to the contemporary immigration of multi-ethnic communities from across the globe (Wynyard, Chapter One). Over time, these arrivals have shaped the landscape of migration in Aotearoa, where today, the politics of migration involve a legacy of settler colonialism comprising unequal attributions of privilege and the resultant minoritisation of certain groups (Collins, Chapter Two; Kaloti, Commentary, Part Two; Terruhn, Chapter Three), alongside the outright erasure of tangata whenua (Indigenous people of the land) in migration-related decision making (Wynyard, Chapter One; Collins, Chapter Two).

Importantly, the current system disregards Te Tiriti o Waitangi (The Treaty of Waitangi) as the founding document of Aotearoa, and undermines Māori self-determination as equal Tiriti partners. A decolonising lens to migration forces us to uphold and legitimise Te Tiriti o Waitangi as the nation's founding document, and pertinently, as the nation's first migration policy document, where Māori are actively involved in immigration decision making as equal Tiriti partners (Kukutai and Rata 2017). A Tiriti-based approach to migration, then, also concedes that the state needs to work in genuine partnership with Māori to develop such an approach.

A number of government departments in Aotearoa have articulated their commitment to Te Tiriti through various policies, plans and strategies, yet leading Māori scholars point out that these initiatives are often merely symbolic gestures (Kukutai et al. 2021). Rather, a Tiriti-based approach to migration in Aotearoa should move beyond symbolism, to actively develop and operationalise a transformed politics of migration alongside Māori. Such an approach further allows the state (including both Māori and the Crown) to act as true ‘hosts’ who welcome immigrants as ‘guests’ onto this whenua (land) through values such as manaakitanga (host responsibility, care, kindness) and whakawhanaungatanga (relationship building).

One of many sets of confusing, illogical and self-contradictory discourses in contemporary China is that, although in the post-Mao period there had been some efforts to change, the ruling party has almost always defined itself as a revolutionary party (Dickson 1997; Zhao 2006). The insistence on defining itself as a revolutionary party may serve the CCP's political need for reminding everyone that they established the PRC – the new state power – at the cost of the lives of millions of its supporters, and that they own the state power. This political understanding in Chinese is called da tianxia, zuo tianxia or da jiangshan, zuo jiangshan (those who fought to win the state power rule the country) (Watson 1992; Huang 2000). It is historically true that this thinking has been part of the traditional Chinese political logic regarding the dynastic changes over a couple of thousand years. However, the new leaders, if not rulers, have failed to understand that there are hardly any intelligent rulers of past dynasties who would back and advocate a rebellious spirit and discourse after seizing the ruling state power. For several generations after the late Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), Chinese left-wing intellectual and political elites have acted differently, paying excessive attention to revolutionary ideas, including imported Marxism. They have hardly pondered upon why the rulers of the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), a far more successful state system than almost all the other later nation-states, decided as early as in 136 BCE to relinquish all other schools of thought but maintain and venerate Confucianism only (Yao 2003). The latter had been endorsed by all later Chinese dynasties to generate and uphold a non-rebellious socio-political order after dynastic changes.

What was worse in the case of China in the 1960s was that the whole society was not only confused by the numerous new sets of revolutionary discourse but also devastatingly troubled by its post-revolution internal fight. As noted in Chapter one, the internal fight within the CCP erupted in 1959, which was followed by the nationwide famine from 1959 to 1961. This was a disastrous start of the second decade of the PRC's rule, which was very different from the 1950s and its socio-political order introduced after 1949, following the nationwide armed revolution of a few decades.

Introduction

Power and inequality are perennial social and sociological concerns that continue to be a major point of discussion and debate in the social sciences. In this chapter, we centrally consider how Elias and other process sociologists have examined such issues through an engagement with how differences in power chances and inequality develop across time and space in tandem with other wider social processes. Here, processes of ‘functional democratisation’ and related shifting balances of power between different social groups form the principal foci of our concern. Our central argument is that these ‘figurational’ approaches to power and inequality offer particular utility for apprehending an apparent paradox of contemporary societies: how it is that inequalities between certain groups (chiefly those associated with a social class) are increasing, while inequalities between other groups (principally those associated with gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality, formerly colonised and former colonisers, Western states and the ‘rest’ of the world) appear to be reducing.

The ostensible reduction in such inequalities can be seen to relate to a broadening array of ‘equalisation conflicts’ such as those that find expression in the hard-won expansion of legal rights for women and associated rise of feminist movements over the past two centuries, including most recently the #MeToo movement; the succession of movements relating to the rights of non-white groups, including the Civil Rights movement in the United States and, more latterly, Black Lives Matter; the anti-colonial movements of the twentieth century; and the integration struggles of a range of marginalised groups, especially those associated with LGBTQ+ groups. Such processes, it should be noted from the outset, are here approached as entailing overall shifts in the character and degree of inequalities between historically hegemonic and subjugated groups, but are understood as shifts that by no means mark the end or eradication of inequalities, nor as processes that are securely guaranteed to continue. Moreover, as we have suggested, our concern is with how these shifts towards reductions in inequality in relation to some axes of social differentiation have arisen in tandem with growing inequalities in relation to others.

We commence this chapter with a brief outline of the ‘paradox of inequalities’ alluded to above through a consideration of global trends data from the UN.

Introduction

Pinker's stark remark can introduce an everyday topic that in long-term processes is a permanent source of contention in relations between the sexes, in political or business life as well as in romantic or sex life. In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker (2013) very convincingly states that in Western societies we can observe a decline of violence. He uses long-term data to demonstrate that over the long-run violence has, astonishingly, declined in human civilisation in spite of wars, terrorism and genocide. Besides men, who he implies are the aggressors, women especially are conceived as central to this process; a gendered process that is worth reconstructing, not only because Pinker's thesis is rather simplistic, but because Western gender orders are subject to wide social, national and historical variations. So, although at first impression this remark seems very convincing, a more detached approach shows its narrowness. Firstly, for centuries it was mostly women who had to pay the price, with extreme self-control and subordination in marriage and public life, as the very precondition of the (male) civilising processes. Secondly, life for educated and non-educated men and women differed in many ways, as not everybody had the right to marry. Thirdly, constructing women as the ‘peaceful angels of civilisation’ neglects her story with its ups and downs of increasing and decreasing power chances. And last but not least, this construction completely ignores diverse forms of sexual orientation that took place outside of the marriage unit. This could be a first, more or less, feminist reaction to Pinker’s statement focusing on its male bias. Moreover, to argue from modern gender research, we see that gender relations have become flexible throughout the last 40 years and that traditional patriarchal gender orders have been eroded (Walby 1997; McRobbie 2009). For example, the shock of the sudden Covid-19 health crisis, at first sight, seems to have been managed in favour of the traditional model of production and reproduction that was believed to have been overcome.

Introduction

Aotearoa New Zealand (hereafter, Aotearoa) is a multicultural society, in which roughly one in four people are disabled (Statistics New Zealand 2014). The country is not unique in this regard, and yet globally, ‘migration theory grows without the disabled person, disability studies without the migrant, and practice without the disabled migrant’ (Pisani and Grech 2015, 421).

As Trotter (2012, 30) highlights, ‘Being a migrant affects the experience of being disabled but being disabled also alters the experience of migration.’ This is especially true when policies use medical or disability criteria to restrict entry, as is common among English-speaking settler colonial societies (Burns 2019; Gothard 2021), but in Aotearoa, scant attention has been paid to such intersecting experiences within migration or disability research.

We, the authors of this commentary, are four disabled immigrants to Aotearoa. In the context of te ao Māori (the Māori world) migration values and practices, and colonial immigration requirements, we lay out the country's current health and disability-related immigration settings, interrogating them in relation to domestic and international human rights law. We then highlight how Aotearoa's discriminatory immigration policy is reflected in our lived experiences. Next, we offer an alternative example, demonstrating how Canada's once similar immigration policy is taking steps towards abolishing the health criteria. In conclusion, we suggest a more equitable path forward for Aotearoa, grounded in a te ao Māori perspective.

Aotearoa's Health and Disability Immigration Policies

Prior to colonisation, protocols based on Māori customary laws and principles meant that internal migration within Aotearoa took place on a relational basis (Quince 2021). Newly arrived residents took on obligations and respected the tangata whenua (local people of the territory). By extension, Te Tiriti o Waitangi (The Treaty of Waitangi), the country's foundational document signed by Māori chiefs and the Crown, has since 1840 offered a blueprint for the relationships between Māori and settler people (Quince 2021). However, its principles have not been upheld by the settlers, with Pākehā (settlers of Anglo-European origin) governing administrations continually excluding te ao Māori perspectives from policy and legislation (Mikaere 2011).

In te ao Māori, disability is situated as a ‘collective endeavour of both the individual and the whānau (family) as a whole’ (Hickey and Wilson 2017, 87). This is because disability is understood in relation to the need for support with certain situations or actions that are necessary in life.

Introduction

On 13 May 2021, hundreds of migrants on temporary visas and their supporters gathered in front of the Parliament in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington to protest the country's migration policies during the Covid-19 outbreak. In the beginning of 2020, Aotearoa/New Zealand introduced one of the strictest border closure regimes in the world to address the pandemic. It stopped processing visas for offshore migrants and severely limited the entry of migrants who already possessed work visas to only allow a few migrants deemed to be conducting essential work (Henrickson 2020). Temporarily, the New Zealand Government, similar to Australia, even introduced a number of travel bans for returning citizens and residents from particular countries, such as India (Jefferies, McAdam and Pillai 2022). Many of the individuals protesting at the Parliament experienced job losses, separation from their families, lack of access to unemployment benefits and long delays in residency applications, and, therefore, urged the incumbent Labour Government to act. One of the organisers of this rally, the Federation of Aotearoa Migrants, asked the Government to process residency visas for those on temporary work visas who would normally be eligible for residency and demanded phased re-entry of people stuck overseas. Other participants of the rally expressed that the Government's decision to freeze residency applications put them in limbo – for example, by preventing them from purchasing a home and applying for a credit card – and that they were living ‘an empty and meaningless life’ without their family members who remained overseas unable to return to Aotearoa/New Zealand (Radio New Zealand 2021).

The then Immigration Minister Kris Faafoi listened to the crowd's concerns with full attention yet responded with a disappointing message: ‘I can’t, today, bring you the news that you want to hear. … We are acutely aware of the disruption that this is causing’ (Wade 2021). The protesters interrupted the minister's speech with shouts of ‘Shame’ and ‘Not good enough!’ This rally was part of a wave of activism (including protests, petitions and collaborations launched by different migrant support organisations) that began when pandemic-related mobility restrictions exposed the precarity of temporary visa holders in Aotearoa/New Zealand. The day before this demonstration, hundreds had held similar protests in Auckland, Christchurch, Hamilton and Queenstown. The Government's temporary ban on travel for those travelling from India in April 2021 also caused backlash among Aotearoa/New Zealand's substantial migrant population (Peters 2021).

The installation depicted on the book cover is entitled A Place at the Kauri Table and represents a metaphorical ‘Kauri table’ with six place settings, each comprising personal artefacts either created or found by six migrant women. Some were brought from their country of origin, and some were an expression of their experience in Aotearoa.

In 2019, the first installation of A Place at the Kauri Table was performed in the Whanaungatanga symposium art exhibition at the Eastern Institute of Technology (EIT), Hawkes Bay. The creative works, artefacts and recorded stories were intended to reflect on the impact of Aotearoa arts education for a group of six migrant women graduates, a synthesis of their emotions, lived experiences and thoughts: drawn from my roles as visual artist, lecturer, curator and researcher. The idea of kinship formed around identifying a feminist table setting to tell our stories and to recognise the impact of Aotearoa immigration drawing on each art or teaching practice. The audience grasped that concept well, with seats to welcome each new or past migrant story. The transformations experienced by those six members of wia2020 (women immigrant artists 2020) seated at the metaphorical kauri table was collectively documented and developed in over three years of interactions.

To our delight, the metaphorically tabled works have been seen and heard widely and helped to raise awareness of the political and social impact of immigration on feminists, artists and generations of settled migrant groups in Aotearoa. The meaning of A Place at the Kauri Table is in its transformative power on the participants: all of us have experienced this affecting change in Aotearoa through uncertain times.

Moreover, wia2020 members and gallery audiences with intergenerational migrant links and NZ citizen status were duly reminded of being treated, on arrival, as aliens/others or outsiders. The new immigrants formally shared a perception of fewer civil rights and needed support to overcome scarce resources, halted education, loss of ethnic family ties and personal sacrifices as some of the challenges to be overcome while in their new host country.

The ‘insider outsider’ effect portrayed as intertextual immigrant experiences told by each member seated at the Kauri Table, as whanaunga (relations) or extended family. Central motives for immigration represented by art and artefacts through storytelling became a shared focus under the spotlight of arts installation and short film.

As in other disciplines, Elias's work made a late impact in the field of International Relations (IRs), particularly in the English-speaking world. This happened mainly in the early 2000s when IR scholars were stuck in a theoretical deadlock after the publication of Wendt's seminal book Social Theory of International Politics in 1999. At the time, Elias’s sociology was an avenue few thinkers explored to overcome the sterile structure – agency debate. Not only did Elias's ontology based on social interdependences represent a promising way forward, but his sociology was also particularly well-suited for the move from international (and more often than not, interstate) relations to global studies. The Eliasian perspective, anchored in long-term processes, helps make sense of a troubled and rapidly changing world. Elias's theory which focuses so much on violence – a major feature of IRs – is useful for IR thinkers insofar as it is grounded in a general theory of the (de-)civilising processes in which emotions are not overlooked. Moreover, Elias's sociology contributes to a re-integration of the human, the social as well as the emotional into the discipline, thus avoiding the state-centrism and static nature of most IR thinking. This chapter proposes firstly, to examine the introduction of figurational sociology into different national IR landscapes, and to highlight Elias's contribution to a renewed research programme that echoes earlier insights of the English School. Secondly, this chapter explores how Elias's conceptual toolbox (namely, figurations, the (de-)civilising process and habitus) can contribute to reframing IR ways of thinking. Lastly, this chapter will probe what a Global Sociology could look like and how it could help us think about the challenges posed to humanity.

The Introduction of Elias to the Discipline of International Relations

Elias's work experienced various trajectories depending on national disciplinary landscapes. For example, the English-speaking academic world took a long time before appreciating Elias's contribution to the social sciences. If he is seen there mainly as a sociologist, several political scientists specialising in IRs, which contributed to his discovery in this field of inquiry.