2021 AAPS Postgraduate and Early Career Researchers’ Symposium

**Please note that there may need to be some changes made to this between now and the Symposium. We’ll try and keep these to a minimum, but please do treat this as a draft. A full program, including the final timetable and abstracts for all papers, will be available on the 5 April. **

Registration for the Symposium is available through Eventbrite, until 4 April. To register click here.

In focusing our 2021 gathering on the work of our postgraduate and early career members, we recognise the particular challenges that many of them have faced during the past 12 months of the pandemic, including the effects of lockdown and travel restrictions on fieldwork, as well as on opportunities for conference travel and participation in wider scholarly networks. Above all, we hope that the symposium will be an opportunity for AAPS’ postgraduate and early career scholars to connect with one another and the wider AAPS community in a supportive and friendly forum, to share their work, and to celebrate together the richness and creativity of Pacific Studies scholarship and community.

We warmly invite all other AAPS members to also attend the symposium, to learn from and support the work being done by our postgraduate and ECR members, and to join in the discussions that follow. 

The two-day symposium will also feature a keynote panel, “Decolonisation and the Trans-Pacific Academy – Indigenous Perspectives”, featuring Paola Balla, Melinda Mann, and Lefaoali’i Dion Enari in conversation with Associate Professor Alice Te Punga Somerville (Waikato University, Aotearoa), as well the AAPS Annual General Meeting.

 In her ground-breaking book, Decolonisation and the Pacific: Indigenous Globalisation and the Ends of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2016), the late Pacific historian Tracey Banivanua Mar charts the ‘sometimes parallel, sometimes intersecting, paths and border crossings of anti-colonial and Indigenous political movements that have helped to define and shape the postcolonial, or rather still decolonising, Pacific’.

Drawing on Tracey’s insights into decolonisation and trans-Indigenous connections—including connections between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, South Sea Islanders, Māori and Pacific Islanders—we seek to reflect on the connections between Pacific peoples and places, past and present. We do so from within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, within which our own relationships, connections, mobilities and immobilities have been profoundly reconfigured. But we also remain attentive to the deep histories of connection and trans-Pacific mobility which wove together the region long before this present crisis, and which will continue long after it has passed.

The questions we hope to explore together, include:

• How have our research practices, relations and methodologies been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic? In what ways have we, or might we, continue to enact ethical and decolonial forms of trans-Pacific connection amid this context?
• In what ways and, and through which practices might we continue to understand and enact the Pacific as a space of connection and relation, even within this contemporary moment?
• What are the practices of movement, activism, creativity, power, and environmental interconnectedness that traverse the region?
• How does decolonisation continue to be practiced by Pacific peoples, as Tracey powerfully described it, as an ‘ongoing, ever contingent process of uncolonising…worked from the inside out’?

Above all, we hope this symposium will be a practical enactment of the kinds of relationship, solidarity and community that Tracey so powerfully celebrated in her work.

Format

The symposium will be held across two days, from 8-9 April 2021. All sessions will be accessible via Zoom, but we will also have a number of geographical hubs within which participants can gather in person (COVID restrictions allowing), and from which they will be able to connect to other hubs and individual participants across the region. This will include a primary hub, in Melbourne, at the Footscray Community Arts Centre, and we hope to also have hubs in Canberra, Sydney, and at Waikato University in Hamilton, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Details about the hubs will be confirmed in the coming weeks.

Cost

This event is free for all current AAPS members, but registration is required. Please register via Eventbrite, here.

For more information, contact Victoria Stead at [email protected].

Symposium convenors: Victoria Stead (Deakin University), Kalissa Alexeyeff (University of Melbourne) and Kim Kruger (Victoria University)