Symposia

• Jean Guiart: L’ethnographie comme marathon d’une vie/Ethnography as Life’s Marathon​​

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Working Sessions

• 2022-2032 International Decade of Indigenous Languages: Pacific Languages
• Being and Belonging: Technologies of Reproduction
• Decolonising Sea of Islands 
• Growing Old in the Pacific
• Mana Moana: Protecting Sacredness
• Proliferation of Models
• Race and Power in Oceania
• Rethinking Decolonization in Papua New Guinea
• "The Soul and the Image": The Story of Film in the Pacific
• Vā Moana: Space and Relationality in Pacific Thought and Identity​

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​​Informal Sessions

• Being Pacific Islander Pasifika, Māori, Indigenous Australian during the Era of Black Lives Matter 
• Complexities of Collaboration on Climate Change
• Documentation as Relation: Experiments with and Challenges to Knowledge
• Dogs and Their Humans
• Ends of Oblivion: Continuities and Discontinuities in Oceania’s Pasts
• Food Sovereignty in the Pacific
• Museums and Repatriation
• Pacific Island Politics, Populism, and Democracy
• Pacific Perspectives: The Fluidity of Time, Space and Relations
• Possessing the Pacific City: A Comparative Dispossessions Working Group
• Slouching towards Christian Theocracy in Western Polynesia
• Trust and Care in Pacific Health Systems
• Talanoa on "The Healer and the Psychiatrist"​

Working Session: Decolonising Sea of Islands 

Organizers: Nuhisifa Williams and Tevita O Ka‘ili​

Jules Dumont d'Urville (1790 - 1842) was a French explorer credited with the division of the islands in the Pacific Ocean into three distinct regions - Melanesia (black islands), Polynesia (many islands) and Micronesia (small islands). D’Urville based his divisions on his observations of the characteristics of the people and their social structures as well as the geography of the islands. The three regions were hierarchically ordered with Polynesians judged the most civilized in terms of their socio-political institutions whilst Melanesians were the least civilized and considered barbaric in nature. 

These classifications were useful boundaries that underpinned the science of Pacific ethnology and the study of the Pacific islands and its people, and to carve up the Pacific between colonial powers of the US, France and Great Britain. 

Significantly, these divisions gave rise to new formations of identity that still exist today and which are problematic socially and culturally, politically and economically. This informal session explores the impact of the “imaginary lines across the sea… that confined ocean peoples to tiny spaces” and whether there is a case for ocean peoples to critically reflect on our “sea of islands', rather than islands in the sea” (Hauofa, 1993).
 

For more information, contact Nuhisifa Williams <williams346@slingshot.co.nz>