Winner of the 2024 Tracey Banivanua Mar PhD Prize and one highly commended awardee announced

The Tracey Banivanua Mar PhD prize is named after a deeply influential figure in Pacific Studies. Tracey Banivanua Mar was a Pacific historian and a dear friend to many in the Australian Association for Pacific Studies (AAPS). AAPS awards this prize annually to the most outstanding PhD thesis by an AAPS member working in the field of Pacific Studies. The award is made based on scholarly excellence and alignment with both AAPS and Tracey’s vision for a vibrant, critical, creative and decolonial Pacific Studies. The prize was judged this year by two esteemed AAPS colleagues, Dr John Cox and Emerita Professor Helen Lee. We are delighted to announce that our winner is Dr Marco de Jong and our highly commended is Dr Timaima Tuvuki, who we hope will consider submitting proposals to the AAPS book series with ANU Press. We sincerely congratulate all submissions to the Tracey Banivanua Mar PhD Prize for this year as well, which were of an incredibly high calibre. It has been a pleasure to see all of the creative, rigorous and vital work that is being done at the forefront of Pacific Studies.

The winner is Dr Marco de Jong, “Kotahi te Moana, Only One Ocean: Pacific Environmentalism, 1970–1995″

Professor Katerina Teaiwa and winner Dr Marco de Jong at the AAPS Epeli Hau’ofa Annual Memorial Lecture 2024 at the Australian Museum. 

Dr Marco de Jong’s outstanding thesis, Kotahi te Moana, Only One Ocean: Pacific Environmentalism, 1970–1995, completed at Oxford University, richly develops the idea of ‘Pacific environmentalism’ to provide a new perspective on the early days of regional concerns with the environment and how these were linked to the global environmental movement and international organisations such as the UN. The thesis is a valuable contribution to Pacific History and broader Pacific Studies, revealing the emergence of the Pacific environmentalism that today is stronger than ever in the face of the unprecedented impacts of climate change and the ongoing effects of nuclear testing and resource extraction. It focuses on the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP), an intergovernmental regional organisation that enabled Pacific people to work collectively and draw on traditional knowledge in their attempts to address a wide range of threats captured by the term ‘ecological imperialism’.

Based on oral history and archival work undertaken across the Pacific, Dr de Jong’s beautifully written thesis carefully avoids essentialising Pacific environmentalism and recognises differences across the region, changes over time, and the dangers of imposing stereotypes. A scholar with ties to Papa Puleia in Sāmoa, Dr de Jong also addresses the future of Pacific history as a discipline, calling for more attention to be paid to Indigenous voices and drawing attention to the work of scholars like Tracey Banivanua Mar and Damon Salesa in both tracing colonial struggles and decolonising their own methodologies.

Dr Marco de Jong is a Pacific historian and lecturer at the AUT Law School. He was raised in Tāmaki Makaurau with ties to Papa Puleia in Sāmoa. His work details the history of regional politics and environmental governance in the Pacific Islands with a particular focus on Indigenous knowledge, nature conservation, anti-nuclearism, and climate change. His firm belief is that there is power in stories which demonstrate Pacific peoples’ commitment to environmental stewardship in perpetuity. Prior to taking up his current role, Marco completed a doctorate at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and worked in civil society organisations advocating for an independent, nuclear free, and Pacific-led foreign policy for Aotearoa.

 

The highly commended awardee is Dr Timaima Tuvuki, “Vatu-Dei: Indigenous-Fijian psychological resilience of iTaukei children and families in Koro”

Professor Katerina Teaiwa and Dr Timaima Tuvuki’s supervisor, Associate Professor Litea Meo-Sewabu accepting her award on her behalf at the AAPS Epeli Hau’ofa Annual Memorial Lecture 2024 at the Australian Museum. 

Dr Timaima Tuvuki’s thesis, Vatu-Dei: Indigenous-Fijian psychological resilience of iTaukei children and families in Koro, is highly commended for its important and original contribution to the decolonisation of Pacific Studies. Focusing on responses to tropical cyclone Winston in Fiji, the thesis reveals the psychological resilience of iTaukei children and their families through a culturally appropriate research design including the Vanua research framework and talanoa methodology. Through her innovative research Dr Tuvuki develops the Vatu-Dei Indigenous-Fijian Psychological Resilience Framework, which has potential to be used in a range of settings including Pacific disaster response and recovery and is a valuable addition to Indigenous psychology.

Dr Timaima Tuvuki is an Assistant Lecturer in Social Work at the University of the South Pacific, Fiji. She is from Bua with maternal links to Rewa. She has been in academia for the last sixteen years, teaching in Psychology and Pacific Studies. Tima has work experience in Aotearoa in Psychology and Social Work. Her work philosophy is working towards the wellbeing of indigenous young people and their families. Therefore, Tima’s research interests include children’s wellbeing, coping, and psychological resilience post-disasters, indigenous Pacific knowledge, Violence against children and interventions, and the impact of labour mobility on children.

Congratulations to all the winners and to their supervisors. Tracey would have loved all these theses and we wish she could have been here to read them.

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