Symposia

• Rethinking Decolonization in Papua New Guinea

Working Sessions

• 2022-2032 International Decade of Indigenous Languages: Pacific Languages
• 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
• Trust and Care in Pacific Health Systems

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​​Informal Sessions

• Archiving, Preserving and Sharing Ethnographic Research for the Future
• The After/lives of Pacific Plantations
• ​Complexities of Climate Change
• ​Misinformation, Social Media, and the Anthropocene
• Museums and Repatriation
• Pacific Biculturalities​
• Pacific Sisters at the Crossroads of Discrimination
• Possessing the Pacific City: A Comparative Dispossessions Working Group
• "The Soul and the Image": The Story of Film in the Pacific​
• Stories about Birth, Cultural Celebrations, Cultural Observations
• What Matters Now? Navigating Uncertain Futures from Climate Change to Careers

Working Session: Trust and Care in Pacific Health Systems

Organizer: Mike Poltorak, University of Kent (M.S.Poltorak@kent.ac.uk)


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. In the shift from informal to working session, we also expand our interest in trust and care in research on the above themes.

Ultimately, we are inspired by collaborative, participative and decolonizing research approaches and invite broad submissions and multi-authored contributions to the theme. ANU E-press have expressed interest in a E-book that would 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.