Charting Pacific (Studies) Waters: Evidence of Teaching and Learning

In this article, I chart my experience of learning and teaching in the awe-inspiring waters of the Pacific and of Pacific studies. I begin by articulating the philosophy that underpins my approach as a teacher. One of the bedrocks of my philosophy is that a teacher must continue to be a learner in order to be of any lasting benefit to themselves or their students. I have used both the canoe and the ocean as metaphors to articulate my deliberate pursuit of a cooperative learning model for Pacific studies and my desire to encourage deep rather than surface learning about the Pacific. I focus now on two other tenets of my teaching and learning philosophy: one deals with the diversity of students’ learning positionalities, and the other anticipates the students’ potential learning trajectories. I present some illustrations of my practice, including narrations about some innovations in teaching and learning in Pacific studies; student evaluations of my teaching and rates of course completion in Pacific studies and graduate successes; my pursuit of professional development and attainment of further qualifications in higher education learning and teaching; and responses from students in the form of reflections and testimonials. I conclude by reflecting on the broader context of higher education in New Zealand in which Pacific studies is situated and some of its ongoing challenges

Towards framing the global in Global Development: prospects for development geography

This paper examines data in the public sphere on the global scope of geography’s UKRI Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) projects. Building on decolonial critiques of development research, I argue that geography should frame ‘the global’ of global research as a sphere of ethical choices in research design and practice. The distribution of funded projects in the UKRI Gateway data suggests geographers succeed where they extend on the more worthy aspects of the discipline’s Area Studies legacy. The discipline’s engagements with Early Career Researchers, international colleagues, and the development sector, however, have potentially been reshaped by GCRF and thus need closer examination. While the UK government has brought the GCRF programme to a close, further work on these themes should inform the next iteration of global research. The ethical choices which make research global will remain fundamental to equitable design and impact in Global Development projects, thus scholars in development geography should prepare to make their projects more transparent and accountable

Gendered representations in Hawai‘i’s anti-GMO activism

The aim of this article is to analyse some of the representations of intersectional gender that materialise in activism against genetically modified organisms (GMOs). It uses the case of Hawai‘i as a key node in global transgenic seed production and hotspot for food, land and farming controversies. Based on ethnographic work conducted since 2012, the article suggests some of the ways that gender is represented within movements against GMOs by analysing activist media representations. The article shows how gender, understood intersectionally, informs possibilities for movement-identification, exploring how themes of motherhood, warrior masculinities and sexualised femininities are represented within these movements. The article suggests that some activist representations of gender invoke what could be considered as normative framings of gender similar to those seen in other environmental, food and anti-GMO movements. It is suggested that these gendered representations may influence and limit how different subjects engage with Hawai'i anti-GMO movements. At the same time, contextual, intersectional readings demonstrate the complex histories behind what appear to be gender normative activist representations. Taken together, this emphasis on relative norms of femininities and masculinities may provide anti-GMO organising with familiar social frames that counterbalance otherwise threatening campaigns against (agri)business in the settler state. Understood within these histories, the work that gender does within anti-GMO organising may offer generative examples for thinking through the relationships between gendered representations and situated, indigenous-centred, food and land-based resistances

bikinis and other s/pacific n/oceans

This paper addresses tourist and militarist notions of the Pacific by discussing the bikini bathing suit and its connection to nuclear testing. The paper begins with an account of nuclear testing on Pacific islarids, focusing longest on Bikini Atoll, and ends with a description of the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement. The body of the paper is a discussion of the politics of the bikini bathing suit in terms of what it simultaneously reveals and conceals. The bikini reveals the female body in order to depoliticize it and symbolically conceals the bodies of Pacific Islanders in order to depoliticize them. Feminist, psychoanalytic, and Marxist theories are used to argue that the bikini both commodifies a nasty colonial reality and appropriates the female body to divert attention from the indigenous decolonizing efforts. However, while the bikini was created to celebrate nuclear power, s/pacific bodies have survived in spite of nuclear destruction and continue to resist tourist and militarist notions of who they should be

L(o)osing the Edge

In this paper, I reflect on the evolution of Native Pacific Cultural Studies with a partial professional history of Pacific conferences over the last ten years. I ask what constitutes the edge for each of the components of Native, Pacific, Cultural Studies and whether such an aggregate is viable. There are unresolved tensions and conflicts between each of the components—Native and Pacific studies, Native and Cultural studies, Pacific and Cultural studies—which are highlighted in the paper. I situate my own work in this history and in these tensions, and discuss the changes in direction in my intellectual and theoretical approach to the Pacific