2021 AAPS Postgraduate and Early Career Researchers’ Symposium
The program from the 2021 Symposium is available HERE
Following the cancellation of the 2020 AAPS Conference due to the COVID-19 pandemic, AAPS held a two-day symposium in April 2021 focused on the work of postgraduate and early career scholars. We did this in recognition of the particular challenges faced by these scholars throughout the pandemic, and in the hope of building a space of community and connection in this period of turmoil.
Tracey Banivanua Mar. Photograph by Kat Ellinghaus, 2007.
Symposium Theme: Decolonisation and the Trans-Pacific
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.
We ask:
- 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’
Symposium convenors: Victoria Stead (Deakin University), Kalissa Alexeyeff (University of Melbourne) and Kim Kruger (Victoria University)
AAPS gratefully acknowledges the support of the Footscray Community Arts Centre, Deakin University, Moondani Balluk and Victoria University, La Trobe University, and the University of Melbourne.