The 2020 conference of the Australian Association for Pacific Studies (AAPS) will be held across two venues - the Footscray Community Arts Centre (FCAC) & the Melbourne Museum - April 14-14
The 2020 conference of the Australian Association for Pacific Studies is being organised by the Melbourne Pacific Studies Network, in partnership with the Melbourne Museum and Footscray Community Arts Centre, and with the support of Deakin University, the University of Melbourne, La Trobe University, and Victoria University.
Thematically, the conference will take as its focus the work of the late Pacific historian Tracey Banivanua Mar, and specifically her ground-breaking book Decolonisation and the Pacific: Indigenous Globalisation and the Ends of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2016). This is a book that, as Tracey wrote, ‘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’. The conference aims to embody and respond to 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. Taking inspiration from Tracey’s work, we seek to reflect on the connections between Pacific peoples and places, past and present. What are the practices of movement, activism, creativity, power, and environmental interconnectedness that traverse the region? In what ways have colonial dispossession and displacement produced, as Tracey described, ‘a unique, diasporic and stateless process of daily decolonisation characterised by a global connectivity’? How does decolonisation continue to be practiced by Pacific peoples as an ‘ongoing, ever contingent process of uncolonising … worked from the inside out’?
Confirmed keynote panellists include: Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua (The University of Hawai’i), Craig Santos Perez (University of Hawai‘i), Motarilavoa Hilda Lini (ni-Vanuatu activist, former politician, and Turaga chief), Juliann Anesi (UCLA), Gary Foley (Victoria University), Kim Kruger (Victoria University), Michelle Rooney (ANU), Ronny Kareni (West Papuan musician and activist), Paola Balla (Victoria University), Alice Te Punga Somerville (Waikato University), Romaine Moreton (Director, Binung Boorigan), Torika Bolatagici (Deakin University), Hokulani Aikau (University of Hawai‘i), Katerina Teaiwa (ANU), Talei Luscia (ANU), Tony Birch (Victoria University), James Bhagwan (Fiji Council of Churches)
Conference convenors: Kalissa Alexeyeff (University of Melbourne), Victoria Stead (Deakin University) and Kim Kruger (Victoria University)
More information on the conference website http://pacificstudies.org.au/
Email: pacificstudies2020@gmail.com