Shifting Tides: The Potential and Limitations of Critical Mass to Change Discipline Research Habits

As we consider the future of Pacific scholarship in Aotearoa–New Zealand it becomes vital to consider what we wish that future to look like and how to get there. Part of that talanoa involves considering what the possible levers of change are and whether they are capable of fulfilling our desires for change. This article outlines the different national interventions that are being made to increase Pacific engagement in Aotearoa–New Zealand’s universities, and then considers whether these interventions are fulfilling our vision for our communities. In order to deepen conversations in this space, this article also draws on critical university studies literature to help unpack the current situation and to provoke some questioning around our current trajectory.

Developing Our Voices: Pacific Early Career Academics’ Journeys in Aotearoa New Zealand

The proportion of Pacific academics in permanent confirmation path positions at New Zealand universities (1.4 percent) continues to lag far behind the Pacific share of New Zealand’s population (7 percent). In this paper, we use a thematic talanoa to explore the experiences of Pacific early career academics (PECA) at the University of Auckland to highlight the key themes, challenges and features of our daily lives in the colonial, Western, and Pākehā institution that is the university. This paper sheds light on the systemic and structural barriers that impact PECA journeys through higher education and suggests actions that universities in New Zealand can take to further support, nurture, and develop PECA pathways into and upward through the academy.

New Zealand’s Responses to the 1916 Rising

When the Irish-born Archbishop of Melbourne heard that Michael Collins had been executed, he broke down weeping: “Michael they have shot him”. According to one of his biographers, Brenda Niall, “[s]omething in Daniel Mannix was released in the aftermath of the Easter Rising” and he was soon to play a decisive role in defeating two conscription referenda. The Australian Prime Minister, Billy Hughes, later complained to the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd-George, that the Irish had “killed conscription”.

Morganeering, Or, The Triumph of the Trust: A Satirical Burlesque on the Worship of Wealth

I’ll begin with a confession: before taking on this review, I’d never even heard of Alexander Bickerton, let alone his only novel, Morganeering. In my defence, he doesn’t rate a mention in the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature (he lies in the gap between “bibliography” and “Biggs, Bruce”), or even in Lawrence Jones’ encyclopaedic survey of the novel in the Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English. As Lyman Tower Sargent explains in his thorough introduction, Bickerton was well known during his lifetime, albeit for other reasons than his fiction. As the inaugural professor of physics at Canterbury College, where he taught from 1874 to 1902, he numbered Ernest Rutherford and Ettie Rout among his pupils.

Navigating Gendered Relational Spaces in Talanoa: Centring Gender in Talanoa Research Methodology

Talanoa is a research methodology that foregrounds Pacific cultural values and acknowledges the importance of the positioning of researchers and participants in the research space. Researchers are encouraged to consider how their social characteristics, such as their gendered social positioning, shape their interactions with participants. Scholarship that carefully examines the significance of positionality, and approaches research with Pacific people from a Pacific epistemological stance, provides critical conceptual and practical guidance. In this paper, as a married Samoan mother and early career researcher in the social sciences, I reflect on gendered relational spaces in one-on-one talanoa with Pacific mothers and fathers.

Poetic Deviances, Lessgo Deconstruct the Master’s Tools: Creatively Critical Talanoa Mālie and Critical Autoethnographic Defiance

Indigenous Pacific knowledges embody creative modes of expression and sensibilities as meaning–making. Academia, as a Western-oriented institution, however, privileges intellectualisations that favour abstract critical thinking through more objective lenses. As Moana–Pacific–Pasifika researchers, being creatively critical in higher education begins from our Indigenous concepts and creative practices such as poetry. Talanoa mālie provides a worldview of being–knowing–seeing–doing that we inhabit as Tongans within higher education beyond the boundaries of our ancestral fonua or whenua. Our critical autoethnographic reflections as early career academics are woven through and positioned within our wider talatalanoa, which ultimately seeks to defy, disrupt, and deconstruct dominant Western academic tools and practices within the university context in Aotearoa–New Zealand.

Disruptions, Decolonial Desire and Diaspora: A Provocation toward a Pacific Queer Worldmaking Scholarly Practice in Aotearoa–New Zealand

Pacific queer scholarship is underrepresented within Pacific research communities in Aotearoa–New Zealand. What does exist is either hypervisible or centres on narratives of oppression, both of which are archetypes that can deny the complexity of Pacific queer communities. As two queer Samoan scholars raised in the Aotearoa–New Zealand diasporic setting, we offer a provocation that tests the opportunities (and limits) queer theoretics provide for Pacific research. Through a combination of poetry, vignettes, and theory (queer and straight), as well as reflections, we intentionally and generatively transgress heteronormative, exclusionary and static boundaries that still exists within Pacific research in New Zealand.

“Guardians” of Signatures? Future Directions in Pacific History from a Pacific Early Career Academic in Aotearoa

As a Pacific early career academic sitting between history and Pacific studies, I see unresolved tension concerning the lack of prioritisation of Pacific voices in Pacific history. In this article I explore how Pacific voices are included in the writing and teaching of Pacific history to establish that this is a continuing and unresolved issue. To do this, I survey articles in the Journal of Pacific History between 2015 and 2020 to trace the inclusion and prevalence of Pacific voices through authorship and prioritisation of historical evidence, alongside analysis of the teaching of Pacific history in universities in Aotearoa.

Negotiating the Digital Vā: Emerging Pacific Scholars and Community Building on Twitter

Although the power of social media to bring people together across borders is acknowledged, very little has been written about the potential of social media sites for emerging Pacific scholars living transnationally across our region and beyond. We deploy thematic talanoa to demonstrate how emerging Pacific scholars engage Twitter as a platform where routes and relationships are established and teu/tauhi in the digital vā. Furthermore, we argue that emerging scholars of Pacific heritage are building an augmented reality founded on Pacific-specific ways of relationship building, forming external to, and in response to, marginalising dominant narratives inside and outside Pacific worlds.

Suʻifefiloi: A Samoan Methodology for Transdisciplinary Theorising in Cosmopolitan Worlds

As universities make moves toward transdisciplinary research, suʻifefiloi, the Samoan practice of sewing different parts together, offers a culturally grounded research methodology for transdisciplinary theorising by Pacific scholars. Pacific transdisciplinary actors working on theory within the cosmopolitan context requires, as Gordon writes, a willingness to go beyond discipline areas to produce knowledge. Theory work, as this paper argues, requires transdisciplinarity and a willingness to go beyond one’s discipline area to extend knowledge. Working with Tuhiwai Smith’s assertion on the importance of theory, this paper discusses the usefulness of suʻifefiloi in recent turns to transdisciplinarity.