Pacific Islander Studies Collection
Collection Editors:
Dr Moeata Keil, Seuta’afili Dr Patrick Thomsen
Keil and Patrick’s Vision for the Collection
As custodians of the world’s greatest ocean – our Moana/Oceania – Pacific stories are some of the world’s grandest. Despite this, Pacific voices have often been marginalized and misrepresented across epistemes, as a result of (neo)colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, globalization and many other axes of oppression that have accompanied Euro-American hegemony. Our Pacific, however, is a diverse, mobile, innovative collection of spaces and places, spanning thousands of years of settlement and migration, crafting rich cultural traditions of storytelling as a central technology of knowledge transfer for many generations.
This collection welcomes contributions that explore the diverse and evolving experiences of Pacific peoples and cultures, spanning across time, multiple spaces, and places, both within the Pacific, in the diaspora and beyond. We also encourage contributions that examine diverse dynamics of connections (as well as disconnections) in terms of how Pacific peoples navigate a sense of belonging to land, culture and community. We also invite critical reflections on (de)colonization, (de)coloniality, and (de)colonialism that consider how these frameworks shape contemporary Pacific experiences. In centering indigenous Pacific knowledge traditions and their relevance to the contemporary world, contributors are encouraged to spotlight current challenges faced by Pacific peoples across the globe.
The Pacific Islander Studies Collection seeks to amplify the voices, stories, perspectives, and experiences of diverse Pacific peoples located in, on the edges of, and beyond our ocean – who all represent Pacific lived places and experiences. This includes, but not limited to, researchers, academics, educators, practitioners, community activists, artists, and knowledge holders in all their forms.
As Collection Editors, our role is to enable and provide confidence for authors to contribute in a way that honors the multiple communities, cultures and genealogies they represent and are embedded within. We will support contributors administratively (deadline-reminder and progress checks), and on-request, provide comments on manuscripts in a way that centers your voice while providing respectful and collaborative editorial feedback when needed. Most importantly, our job is to work with authors to have their manuscript published.
About the Collection Editors:
Dr Moeata Keil (she/them) is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology, School of Social Sciences at Waipapa Taumata Rau/University of Auckland. Moeata is a Samoan intersectional feminist scholar and researcher. Her research calls attention to the importance of theorising from the margins. Her current research explores how Pacific mothers, fathers and extended family members navigate family life following separation, including family court systems and child support obligations. Her research highlights the significance of understanding family within broader networks of relationships than the couple and parent-child dyad, and calls for the state, law and policy to better recognise culturally-informed family norms and practices. She is also working on a project that examines Samoan women’s reproductive health, with a focus on how Pacific cultural factors shape Samoan women’s understanding of reproductive justice and aspirations for family life. 
Seutaʻafili Dr Patrick Thomsen (he/them) is a Senior Lecturer/Senior Research Fellow in Global Studies at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Patrick is a proud faʻafafine and queer Samoan scholar, educator, and researcher, having received his doctorate from the University of Washington in Seattle. As an interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and multidisciplinary scholar, his research interests straddle the lines between queer and LGBT+ Studies, intersectionality, critical race theory, Pacific knowledges, transnationalism, and Korean studies. His research program currently takes in 3 main areas, Pacific Rainbow LGBTQIA+ MVPFAFF+ Wellbeing and human rights; Pacific transnationalism with a specific focus on New Zealand as a site for settler-colonial citizenship identity making; and researching the role and potential of Pacific pedagogies to enhance cultural safety for Pacific students in New Zealand universities. Call for Proposals:
Ready to get started? Please fill out this form to contact Patrick and Moeata with any questions, or download our proposal guidelines to begin the process immediately.
