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INTRODUCTION: This project aimed to identify the support needs of older people living in rural Central Otago, Aotearoa New Zealand and to ascertain if a pilot social work position was meeting these needs. METHODS: Data were collected during December 2019. Twelve semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with the social worker, referrers of the social worker’s clients, key community stakeholders, and the older rural residents supported by the social worker. FINDINGS: An interpretive analysis of the data identified two key thematics: 1) being older in Central Otago; and 2) providing aged social work services in this region. CONCLUSION: Despite the positive impact that the Age Concern Otago social work position is having for clients of the service, the need for social support for older rural people in Central Otago continues to grow. In addition to increasing social worker resourcing, better coordination and linking between the government and non-government agencies operating in this space would improve the effectiveness of aged social work services, as would improved visibility of these services within the community.

A move to residential care represents a significant transition for older people, between their former independent and autonomous lives, and dependence, frailty and death. The concept of transition is valuable in considering the quality of care. We argue that a successful transition to residential care is one measure of quality in care. We used an ethnographic approach that emphasises participant-observation and qualitative interviewing. Analysis of the transcripts revealed several themes, one of which, transition, is discussed in this paper. Transition theory, along with the concept of liminality, i.e. the betwixt and between status of the mostly unanticipated move from home to Residential Aged Care Facilities identifies and explains the complexities involved in the move into residential care for older people and their families.

Cosmopolitanism speaks to pan-nationalist and pan-human experience. How can this be reconciled with the lived political economies of care across the formal and informal sectors? How do the critical and interpretive medical anthropological commitments to cultural critique and social justice articulate with cosmopolitanism? We examine these thematics through the contributions of Australian and New Zealand anthropologists. In both countries, paid and unpaid care work occurs within a neoliberal capitalist economy characterised by growing inequity between wealthiest and poorest citizens, privileging of autonomy and individualism over collectivist regimes of social organisation and resource allocation, transfer of assets and capital from the public to the private sector, and a significant shift in the balance of power toward employers in the labour marketplace. Each article illustrates the ways in which disability and care are constructed and contested, and the degree to which care exemplifies cosmopolitanism.

In this essay I contend that the aged care sector not only constitutes a political economy, but is at the same time a moral economy containing multiple contested moral spaces, purposes and standpoints. Global processes of cosmopolitanisation contain moral agendas that link macro level structures with local communities, families, individuals, workplaces, and organisations. The aged residential care (ARC) facility as a moral economy exemplifies vernacular cosmopolitanisation. The State shapes the moral economy of the New Zealand aged care sector through enforceable policies and regulations, while organisations and facilities compete in a neoliberal consumption-oriented marketplace. Those employed in the sector such as nurses and careworkers seek a living. Residents must find home within ARC, while their families expect they receive quality care from ARC facilities.

Informal caregiving encompasses the motivations and practices of relatives in looking after family members of all ages with long-term illnesses and disabilities. Only recently has it been differentiated as a distinct role within the nurturance obligations of familial roles. As such, informal caregiving has been recognised through contemporary social movements in many countries, such as Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. At the same time, there is an increasing interest in caregiving in history which elucidates the care needed and offered at different historical moments. Our aim here is to examine the minutiae and intimacies of care practices between caregiver and the recipient of care in two different periods of time, seventeenth century England and colonial America. We suggest that these data support the notion that care is a fundamental social human dynamic, connecting caregivers from early to contemporary times. Caregivers can be viewed as a shared global community, transcending community and time; at the same time acts of caregiving represent the humanitarian ideals of cosmopolitanism.

Learning to be an anthropologist involves developing an anthropological perspective or way of seeing. This anthropological imagination is the key feature of the anthropological task of cultural critique. In this paper, I reflect on my experiences teaching anthropology in the context of a distance taught general practice postgraduate course in New Zealand. In this context, students begin to develop an anthropological perspective by practicing within academic and anthropological communities of practice. The model of legitimate peripheral participation within communities of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998) provides useful insights for exploring the teaching and learning of anthropology in this context.

This article is based on a qualitative study of modest scope that set out to gain a sense of the daily life of homeless people in a New Zealand regional city. We present our data in the form of an ‘impressionistic tale’ (van Maanen 2011) to convey a day in the life of a homeless person living rough on the streets. Our findings confirm what is already known; that homeless people occupy the crevices of urban spaces. Their daily work is driven by imperatives of finding food, clothing and shelter as well as alcohol and other substances, and keep- ing out of the way of the public and the police. Despite the hardship, some homeless people enjoy the freedom of being feral. We propose that re-housing homeless people requires addressing structural barriers that compound the harsh realities of homelessness such as anomalies in government and social agencies and the social stigma accrued from criminal records. It also requires overcoming the negative capital accumulated from adverse lifecourses, and improved government support for the social and health services that care for the most marginalised people in society.

In this paper we explore the relocation experiences of older people who were evacuated from damaged aged care facilities following a magnitude 6.3 earthquake on the 22nd February 2011 in Canterbury, New Zealand. Our analysis of older residents’ and staffs’ recollections of the chaotic aftermath of the earthquake and subsequent evacuation to host facilities in Dunedin shows that social capital in the form of social and community support plays a major role in the construction of resilience. This insight constitutes a highly pertinent contribution to both fields of disaster studies and the emergent literature on ageing and resilience. We used qualitative methods, with open-ended questions in semi-structured interviews of older people willing and able to discuss their experiences.