Introduction: Charting Provocations and Exploring New Directions for Pacific Research in Aotearoa–New Zealand from Pacific Early Career Academic (PECA) Perspectives

“Uplifting Moana Perspectives: Emerging Pacific Researchers and New Directions in New Zealand-Based Pacific Research” presents a shared vision for the future of Pacific research by Pacific early career academics (PECA) primarily based in Aotearoa–New Zealand. The task of charting new directions in imagining possibilities for Pacific research is a critical one, which speaks to our communities’ long and storied history in Aotearoa: a reality incongruent with the lack of Pacific scholars employed in permanent positions in New Zealand universities.[i] This special issue challenges the idea that there is a dearth of Pacific research, asserting rather that our underrepresentation in academia is a structural issue, not necessarily one of scarcity. As special issue editors, we intentionally draw in a cross-section of emerging Pacific researchers in our country to confidently write with emerging Pacific scholars on the other side of our Moana-Oceania region, writing back to the exclusionary nature of conventional disciplinary norms and divides that we are forced to navigate. In doing so, our contributors challenge and transcend disciplinary boundaries and push against the Eurocentrism of our tertiary education system. This work is crucial, as the ability to build an academy that prioritises and centres our ways of knowing, doing, relating, and being is a key component of addressing cultural safety and inclusiveness in university lecture theatres, curriculums, and epistemological norms for both PECA and Pacific students in Aotearoa–New Zealand. &nbsp

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

Moana cosmopolitan imaginaries : toward an emerging theory of Moana art

A thesis submitted to Auckland University of Technology in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD).This thesis uses a theoretical approach to examine the way a digital native generation of Moana artists with connections to Aotearoa, and part of global worlds today, imagine their subjectivities, their cultures and their places in the world through contemporary art. Using the methodology of su'ifefiloi, which allows for the combination of many parts, this research works toward the emerging theory of Moana Cosmopolitan Imaginaries to consider today’s global condition of overwhelming interconnectivity as experienced by Moana people. Moana Cosmopolitan Imaginaries offers an analytical framework to understand how these lived realities have impacted art made between 2012 and 2020 by a generation of Moana artists, between the last significant exhibition of contemporary Moana art in Aotearoa—Home AKL (Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2012)—and the Covid-19 Pandemic, which has shifted today’s global condition in ways we are yet to fully understand. In this thesis, I argue that a digital native generation of Moana artists have positioned themselves away from the narratives of displacement and non-belonging featured in the Moana art of previous generations, imagining their subjectivity in globally routed, yet locally rooted, ways. Diasporic subjectivities are those which require constant reproduction and rearticulation. Most recently diasporic subjectivities can be understood through the acceptance of the cosmopolitan character of Moana life today, or Moana Cosmopolitanism, which empowers a complex sense of place. Thus, these artists engage in another kind of work, which employs radical imagination to imagine other ways of being and making concerned with the decolonial, deep time, Vā Moana, mau and su'ifefiloi as part of Moana Cosmopolitan Imaginaries. By closely analysing this period of art making, common concerns and artistic strategies are revealed. Pairing these commonalities with a cosmopolitan character of Moana life allows this research to work toward an emerging theory of Moana art, which centres the work and experiences of Moana artists

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