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V? and Veitapui as Decolonial Potential: Ongoing Talatalanoa and Re-imagining Doctoral Being and Becoming
Although abject physical forms of colonization may no longer be visible, white privilege and cultural colonization continue to fester in university structures, knowledge and disciplinary architectures, curriculum design, as well as research and pedagogical practices. This chapter takes an Indigenous Moana approach, the talatalanoa of whiteness and its impact on whenua-based education praxis through vā-decoloniality, an analytical frame that confronts ethico-relational-onto-epistemological meaning-making in Aotearoa-New Zealand higher education. Adopting e–talanoa as a method within talatalanoa practice, the chapter utilizes the authors’ online interactions through digital modes to capture their ongoing conversations of whiteness and its implications on education praxis on Aotearoa-New Zealand whenua. Embracing the “difficult histories at sites of colonial violence” in higher education is a shift towards the intentional privileging of Indigenization practices, and the creation of safe and generative spaces that visibilize and confront the perpetual oppression and marginalization of Indigenous knowledge and practices.
Higher education is a site where diverse cultures and knowledges intersect. Engaging in complex conversations is necessary for educators and academics to confront and negotiate differences, especially in areas they may not be overly familiar with. Negotiating complex conversations is difficult, time consuming, risky, yet rewarding, particularly if shifts in the understanding or valuing of relational engagement and practice. In this article, as a Tongan teacher educator and Pāpālangi (of European heritage/s) educator, we critically reflect on our work in transforming learning and engagement contexts that predominantly ignore expressions of Pacific Indigenous knowledge and Tongan ways of being. Through our collaborative talatalanoa (ongoing conversations) we demonstrate the value of negotiating complex conversations in higher education and particular aspects to consider when instigating them.
My article privilege Indigenous relationality within the context of school leadership in Aotearoa. The Pacific concepts of vā, tauhivā and vātamaki are engaged as cultural alternatives to shifting the school system in Aotearoa. School leaders who engage cultural relational approaches in their practice are responsive to raising student outcomes for all students. In order to shift systems of domination and oppression, we must look within the source of Indigenous knowledge systems for solutions and strength to advance Indigenous concerns. My article is a personal and tauhivā reflection of a Tongan school leader who constantly navigates harmonious and disharmonious relations in their practice. It may be useful in thinking about how a cultural approach to leadership through relationality can enhance the theoretical and practical application of leadership practice in schools.
Being Indigenous and operating in an institution such as a university places us in a complex position. The premise of decolonizing history, literature, curriculum, and thought in general creates a tenuous space for Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples to confront a shared colonial condition. What does decolonization mean for Indigenous peoples? Is decolonization an implied promise to squash the tropes of coloniality? Or is it a way for non-Indigenous people to create another paradigm or site for their own resistance or transgression of thinking? What are the roles of Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in this space of educational potential, this curriculum called decolonization? This article presents a multi-vocal reflection on these and related questions.
When considering higher education, the unheard voices and experiences of minority researchers is often absent. Within educational research in particular, the voices and cultural realities of minority teachers are rarely valued and are often ignored. This paper is my attempt to ‘be heard’, particularly when it involves the education of Tongan males in Aotearoa. I am a Tongan teacher/ researcher, and through the autoethnographical approach, I have discovered a way in which to tell my story and, in doing so, legitimise my knowledge. This paper unfolds some of the competing discourses and articulates the relevance, appropriateness and usefulness of autoethnography as a valid method to understand my experiences as a Tongan male teacher and researcher within higher education.
This paper takes us into the Writing Borderlands, an ambiguous in-between space borrowed from Anzaldúa's concept of Borderlands, where we as PhD students are in a constant state of transition. We argue that theorising from a decolonial position consists of not merely using concepts around coloniality/decoloniality, but also putting its core ideas into practice in the ‘doing’ aspect of research. The writing is a major part of this doing. We enact epistemic disobedience by challenging taken-for-granted conventions of what ‘proper’ academic writing looks like. Writing from a universal standpoint — the type of writing prescribed in theses formats, positivist research methods and ‘proper’ academic writing — has been instrumental in promoting the zero-point epistemologies that prevail through Northern artefacts of knowledge. In other words, we write to de-link from the epistemological assumption of a neutral and detached observational location from which the world is interpreted. In this paper, we discuss the journey we take as PhD students as we attempt to delink and decolonise our writing. Traversing the landscape of the Writing Borderlands, different features arise and fall. Along the way, we come across forks in the road between academic training and the new way we imagine writing decolonially.
Pasifika social science researchers in Pacific contexts are encouraged to use research methods that reflect the lived realities of their participants, rather than reproduce what are seen as Western methods of research. As a Pasifika process, talanoa has become a popular research method, often likened to narrative interviews. It has been defined as an open, informal conversation between people in which they share their stories, thoughts and feelings (Vaioleti, 2006). This paper is a critique of how talanoa as a research method is represented in the literature, based on an account of the difficulties I have encountered as a beginning researcher grappling with the idea and practice of talanoa in my own research practice. I argue that improving the practice and understanding of talanoa requires open discussion about the practical dilemmas sometimes experienced by researchers attempting to use this approach.
Hegel's master and slave is a significant archetype for graduate research supervision. The master—slave relation vividly exemplifies the hierarchical bond that ties supervisor and student together. Such a confronting view of supervision provides a counterbalance to contemporary emphases on equality between supervisor and student. In what follows, I use Zali Gurevitch's interpretation (`Dialectical dialogue', 2001, British Journal of Sociology) of Hegel's master and slave (Phenomenology of Spirit, 1807) to analyse an extract of supervision dialogue between a supervisor and a Masters student in the Humanities. My analysis shows the mundaneness of the master—slave relation in action. This mundaneness derives from supervision's institutional underpinnings and contributes to the relative invisibility of the master—slave relation as an influential dynamic. In closing, I argue that this investigation usefully draws our attention to the third player in supervision, the thesis, and that master—slave dynamics may have both disturbing and helpful effects for supervisor and student.
Indigenous researchers must move beyond merely assuming an Indigenous perspective on non-Indigenous research paradigms. An Indigenous paradigm comes from the fundamental belief that knowledge is relational, is shared with all creation, and therefore can not be owned or discovered. Indigenous research methods should reflect these beliefs and the obligations they imply. (SV)
The institutional ethics application such as the one all postgraduate students have to consider for the purposes of research does not and cannot begin to address nor offer solutions on the various and diverse issues one encounters in the field. This is especially true when researching your own people. This paper addresses some of the ethical issues from the Samoan cultural perspective by describing my own Master's research. It argues that whilst institutional ethics is a suitable requirement, in the Fa'aSamoa¹ protocol, culture has had its own ethical processes and boundaries already defined by the ‘va tapuia’ concept of sacred space of ‘feagaiga’ (the covenant relationship of brother and sister). Its validity is judged not by the institution, but by participants. The research is used to illustrate the process and its significance.
This article explores how care and space shape doctoral becoming. We extend previous higher education research that has critically examined the spatial arrangements of postgraduate study to explore how doctoral students negotiate both study from home and care-work responsibilities. The article draws on collaborative autoethnographic texts created by the authors to understand the ways in which care shaped their decisions about study spaces. We identify both exclusions and disadvantage in these accounts, at the same time as we discern wilfulness in the ways the contradictory positions of postgraduate student and caregiver were negotiated. We conclude the article by arguing that educational spaces are involved in the maintenance of academic norms that position care-work as invisible and out-of-place/space. Despite this, the creation of productive home spaces that facilitate both care and doctoral work remain possible.
Tongans, the native people of the Kingdom of Tonga in the South Pacific, are a highly mobile indigenous group. Like their seafaring ancestors, they are constantly on the move across ta (time) and va (space). Carrying their traditions with them, Tongans living in Maui, Hawai’i, actively mediate those dimensions by extending the time-space structure of certain activities and places in order to practice tauhi va–the marking of time to sustain harmonious relations and create beautiful sociospatial relations. In Marking Indigeneity, Tevita O. Ka’ili examines the conflicts and reconciliation of indigenous time-space within the Tongan community in Maui, as well as within the time-space of capitalism. Using indigenous theory, he provides an ethnography of the social relations of the highly mobile Tongans. Focusing on tauhi va, Ka’ili notes certain examples of this time marking: the faikava gatherings that last from sunset to sunrise, long eating gatherings, long conversations (talanoa), the all-night funeral wakes, and the early arrival to and late departure from meetings and celebrations. Ka’ili also describes the performing art of tauhi va, which creates symmetry through the performance of social duties (fatongia). This gives rise to powerful feelings of warmth, elation, and honor among the performers. Marking Indigeneity offers an ethnography of the extension of time-space that is rooted in ancient Moana oral traditions, thoughtfully illustrating the continuation of these traditions.
Indigenous Education and the Metaphysics of Presence: A worlded philosophy explores a notion of education called ‘worldedness’ that sits at the core of indigenous philosophy. This is the idea that any one thing is constituted by all others and is, therefore, educational to the extent that it is formational. A suggested opposite of this indigenous philosophy is the metaphysics of presence, which describes the tendency in dominant Western philosophy to privilege presence over absence. This book compares these competing philosophies and argues that, even though the metaphysics of presence and the formational notion of education are at odds with each other, they also constitute each other from an indigenous worlded philosophical viewpoint. Drawing on both Maori and Western philosophies, this book demonstrates how the metaphysics of presence is both related and opposed to the indigenous notion of worldedness. Mika explains that presence seeks to fragment things in the world, underpins how indigenous peoples can represent things, and prevents indigenous students, critics, and scholars from reflecting on philosophical colonisation. However, the metaphysics of presence, from an indigenous perspective, is constituted by all other things in the world, and Mika argues that the indigenous student and critic can re-emphasise worldedness and destabilise presence through creative responses, humour, and speculative thinking. This book concludes by positioning well-being within education, because education comprises acts of worldedness and presence. This book will be of key interest to indigenous as well as non-indigenous academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of philosophy of education, indigenous and Western philosophy, political strategy and post-colonial studies. It will also be relevant for those who are interested in philosophies of language, ontology, metaphysics and knowledge.
In this paper I explore the emotional geographies of Australian universities which tend to (re)produce higher education spaces as ‘child-free’. Drawing on Butler's theoretical tool of performativity and Ahmed's conceptual use of emotion, I seek to examine how educable sole parent students are constituted in university spaces largely prescribed as child-free. By examining some experiences of sole parent postgraduates, I aim to demonstrate some of the ways emotions work to reinscribe and regulate academic recognisability through boundary maintenance of university spatial arrangements. The sole parent postgraduate experiences I draw from in this paper illustrate that educational spaces are not passive; they are productive and regulatory. Speech acts that (re)produce university spaces as ‘child-free’ have particular implications for sole parent postgraduates who often experience un-relenting responsibilities of child-care. Sole parent postgraduates in this study shared their experiences of emotional bonds with their children as often in conflict with their sense of belonging and engagement with university spaces and practices. Butler's theory of performativity is useful to examine some of the ways the conflict between sole parent childcare and postgraduate education is experienced and the potential for productive manoeuvres by sole parents to disrupt and re-work the emotional geographies within Australian higher education spaces.
In the tradition of contemporary Western discourse, I begin with definitions of culture and education, since my own socialization in a small Pacific island kingdom may have caused me to see things differently than most readers. For the purposes of this paper, I define culture as the way of life of a discrete group of people. It includes language together with an associated body of accumulated knowledge, understandings, skills, beliefs and values. I regard culture, therefore, as central to our understanding of human relationships, particularly cross-cultural relationships. I define education as an introduction to worthwhile learning, and distinguish among formal, non-formal and informal education. Formal education is organized and institutionalized learning, such as that which occurs in schools and universities; non-formal education is organized but non-institutionalized learning; and informal education is unorganized and non-institutionalized learning. The first type of education was introduced to most of our islands in Oceania in the early part of the nineteenth century. My definition of culture is inclusive of the education system of a people because, for most of the indigenous communities of Oceania, culture is something that is lived and continually demonstrated as a matter of behaviour and performance. Oceanic peoples--variously described by Western scholars as Melanesian, Polynesian or Micronesian--generally have cultural identities and world-views which emphasize place and their links to the vanua/fonua/ples (inadequately translated into English as 'land'), as well as networks of exchange and/or reciprocal relationships.
There is a current consensus in the literature and policy documents on postgraduate supervision that positions mentoring as the most effective supervision strategy. Authors suggest that this approach to supervision overcomes some of the problematic, hierarchical aspects embedded in supervision as a pedagogical practice. They portray supervision as an innocent and collegial pedagogy between autonomous, rational supervisors and students. However, mentoring is a powerful form of normalization and a site of governmentality. Therefore, I argue that rather than removing issues of power from the supervision relationship, describing effective supervision as mentoring only serves to mask the significant role played by power in supervision pedagogy. I have applied Devos' investigation of mentoring to postgraduate supervision to highlight the work that mentoring does as a form of academic and disciplinary self-reproduction that can have paternalistic impulses located within it. In particular, I argue that supervisors need to be conscious of the operations of power in postgraduate supervision despite their best intentions. I have also begun to explore what implications this more nuanced understanding of supervision might have for people such as me, who are charged with the responsibility of providing academic development programs on supervision.
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