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"​

Informal Session: Trust and Care in Pacific Health Systems

Organizers: Dr. Mike Poltarak, Jessica Hardin, Tarryn Philips, and John Taylor  


In this session we ask, how does trust impact how Pacific Islanders access various forms of care across the region---from biomedicine, ethnomedicine, religious healing and family support. Drawing on anthropological and public health scholarships on trust, we ask how distinct cultural models of trust intersect with local forms of social difference. Conceptually, we question what trust means in various healthcare contexts in the Pacific. Through this discussion we aim to understand the conditions required for people to develop and maintain trust in a healer or mode of healing, with an ultimate aim to track health outcomes with trust attitudes. Specifically, we consider how issues of trust shape the simultaneous experience of chronic non-communicable disorders and communicable disorders ranging from complications related to NCDs to infectious disease outbreaks like that of measles or COVID-19.

Ultimately, we are inspired by collaborative, participative and decolonizing research approaches and invite broad submissions and contributions to the theme. We support a diversity of written and artistic submissions to address multiple positionalities and experiences. Our ultimate intention is twofold: 1) to generate knowledge for stakeholders to improve care and outcomes for people living with illness and metabolic diseases such as diabetes across the Pacific. 2) to generate ways of understanding trust in healthcare that is both culture- and power-sensitive, which is scalable to other contexts globally.

For more information, please contact Jessica Hardin, Rochester Institute of Technology, <jahgss@rit.edu>, Tarryn Philips, La Trobe University, <Tarryn.Phillips@latrobe.edu.au>, John Taylor, La Trobe University, <John.Taylor@latrobe.edu.au>, and Mike Poltorak, University of Kent,  <msp@kent.ac.uk>